From remembrance and memory: A recovery of the work of female teachers in primary schools

Abstract

With this article we aim to characterize the work of female teachers during the educational cycle of primary school, as it remains in the memory of who their students were in an approximate period from 1974 to 1993. It is derived from the project “Social history and life stories. Education of women in Guanajuato”, which objective is to contribute to the visibility of women, starting from their foray into school and, if it is the case, in different careers in which they opened the way, such as teaching. We assume that being a teacher was both a professional and a life choice for these women. The research is nourished with the stories of teachers, memories of their primary school teachers. The narrations are grouped around two moments in the history of recent education: from 1974 and from 1993, the Educational Technology and the National Agreement for the Modernization of Basic Education, as soon as they were put into effect, respectively. We chose that the rapporteurs be active teachers, because the exercise of remembering and recovering memory about their teachers acquires a meaning that it would not have if we did it with a different population. We aspire to know whether didactic-pedagogical and educational practices in the time horizon between reforms had an effect on the daily life inside the classrooms, or if, on the contrary, the uses and customs prevailed over the proposals of educational policy, following basic concepts of cultural history. The findings indicate that the teachers’ teachings focus on the programmatic content, but are not limited to this subset: their educational work takes place in certain cultural spaces where their task transcends to shape the destinies of their students.