New School and autobiographic narrative. Analysis of Gerarda Scolamieri’s career, an Argentine teacher

Abstract

In this paper, a biographic reconstruction of Gerarda Scolamieri (1889-1961), Argentinian female teacher, is carried out through the triangulation of sources and a discursive analysis of her printed work. Aspects of her work itinerary and features of her didactic perspective are explored from her initiatives as headmistress of a state school. Based on the analysis of her book Life and spirit of a school (Vida y Espiritu de una escuela, 1946), we identified mentions, evocations and absences, forms of self-representation, and the deployment of innovative proposals. By the middle of the 20th century, other female teachers had adopted the same types of records. In that way, we take the category of pedagogical memory to place Scolamieri’s written work in a larger series of self-referential narratives. This article is supported by previous studies on the New School (Escuela Nueva) in Argentina that have contributed to defining the features of a pedagogical current and contributions from gender studies that allowed to highlight subjects and relationships that had been little explored before. In this writing strategy, we identified the possibility of disseminating the pedagogic work of an Argentinean principal where it was possible to detect adhesion connections and tension with educational policies promoted by the school governance and ways of appropriation of pedagogical discourses.