Yesterday and today: (extra)ordinary records in an area of agrarian reform in Brazil

Abstract

This paper aims to present two potential instruments that will address the lack of knowledge in regard to the context of students’ reality from teaching professionals in a specific school, these being: a local historiography (record of yesterday), based on oral history; and a reality inventory (record of today), elaborated from the assumptions of action research. Moreover, the objective is to argue the potential they have so as to avoid, on the part of school professionals, the mistake of not knowing the reality of the context of students. To achieve this, we present a brief description of the experiences we have had with these instruments in an area of ​​agrarian reform with the Landless Workers Movement (MST), in southern Brazil. The study concludes with certain characteristics that are involved in the process of creating these instruments in order to achieve their potential, that is the support of local leaders, collaboration with the community, and the connection with the research.

Introduction

Since 2017, the Common National Curriculum Base has been applied in Brazil, based on the Law of Guidelines and Bases of Education, 1996. The document, which has a normative character, defines a single curriculum, throughout the country for Basic Education, from Pre-primary Education to Secondary Education.

Several criticisms have been made in regard to this document, in particular, that it does not promote an open debate with teachers and researchers in Education. Furthermore, the approved model seems to favor “a form of regulation based on evaluation, according to private management models” (Macedo, 2014: 1535). Moreover, the unification of the curriculum in a continent sized country like Brazil can disregard important cultural, social, and economic differences between regions of the country and between the most diverse lifestyles.

Even so, the document assumes that in the curriculum there is “a diversified part, required by the regional and local characteristics of society, culture, economy and students” (Brasil, 2013). The big problem is that a curriculum already full of thematic units, areas of knowledge and pre-established skills leaves little time available for anything beyond these.

In any case, this part known as “diversified” opens a debate about the possibilities where teachers must consider the local characteristics of students in their classes. In this sense, D’Ambrosio (2008) said that the lack of knowledge of the environment and culture of students by teachers can be a big mistake in education, as teachers use their own reality as a reference to plan and carry out pedagogical practices.

This paper proposes to present two potential instruments that can help avoid such misunderstandings, these being: a local historiography and a reality inventory, both looking at predetermined communities and schools. Respectively, they represent records of yesterday and today of a school community, these can be something ordinary, normal and routine, which when looked at in more detail, become extraordinary and alive. In addition, we argue about the potential they have in avoiding on the part of school professionals the mistake of not knowing the reality of the context of students.

The experiences we have lived with these instruments and which we have reported here took place in an area of ​​agrarian reform with the Landless Workers Movement (MST) ¹ , in southern Brazil.

In general terms, the idea was to conduct interviews with people who participated in important moments in the school, such as its creation, and to elaborate a narrative that allows people who are part of the school space to know the history of yesterday, even if they have not experienced it. The experience we report on refers to the historiography of the construction of the Maria Aparecida Rosignol Franciosi Itinerant School ² , at the Eli Vive Camp, in the municipality of Londrina, state of Paraná, Brazil.

The second instrument is the reality inventory which was developed based on action research. It is a document that synthesizes diverse and important information about the community in which the schools are located, such as natural resources, economic activities, political organization, cultural and religious aspects, characteristics of the schools and others. In this case, the experience took place in two schools located in the Eli Vive Settlement ³ , in the municipality of Londrina: Trabalho e Saber Municipal Rural School and Egídio Domingos Brunetto Municipal Rural School.

Next, we present both instruments in detail and show some important characteristics in the process of elaborating these instruments so that the potential to avoid this lack of knowledge on the part of teachers is achieved, these characteristics include: the support of local leaders, collaboration with the community and connection to the research.

Research context

This research is part of the Rural Education initiative, a movement that emerged in Brazil in the late 1990s, with the objective of rethinking educational policies aimed at rural populations.

In this context, the MST has an important role, and since its foundation in 1984, it has led a large part of the struggle for a more equal distribution of land in the country. This has been achieved with occupations and squatting on lands, requiring the State to expropriate and subsequently distribute these lands. As Caldart (2012: 32) states, this way of acting “changes with the social structure of a country marked by large estates, related to slavery.”

However, the actions of the MST are not limited to land occupations. In general terms, agrarian reform should be a way of substantially altering the distribution of land in the country while questioning the legitimacy of private property in the face of social inequalities. Martins (1999: 100) emphasizes “that the struggle for land, from which the struggle for agrarian reform derives, is also a struggle for inclusion, for active, productive, participatory and creative social insertion into society, it is a struggle for dignity and respect.” In this sense, there is also the struggle for quality education for rural populations.

Since the advent of the Rural Education movement in Brazil, educational and curricular proposals have been built from this perspective, with the MST being a key protagonist. Herein we highlight the proposals of the MST of the state of Paraná (in southern Brazil) ⁴ .

Schooling was one of the many difficulties faced by Landless workers due to the traveling conditions they find themselves in. Sapelli (2013) points out that the education of children, teenagers and young people from families in encampments was carried out in urban or rural schools in the region, sometimes far from the camps, which implied long and difficult journeys for students and their families to the schools and also the experience of discriminatory practices, due to the fact of being Landless and of belonging to the MST.

Starting in 2003, the MST of Paraná sought together with the state government to formalize the creation of itinerant schools, located in areas of agrarian reform camps ⁵ . The idea is that these schools accompany the camps where they are located, even if they migrate to other locations (hence the itinerancy). In 2004, itinerant schools were recognized as “pedagogical experiences” for 2 years, then for another three, being definitively approved in 2008.

In 2009, the MST of Paraná, with the participation of Basic Education educators and teachers from some universities, prepared notebooks to record experiences lived in their schools. Through this action, there was a perception of the need for some changes in order to improve what was already being done, mainly in relation to planning pedagogical activities based on reality issues and including the autonomy of students with self-management processes. Thus, in 2010, the Movement began to re-elaborate its pedagogical proposals, starting their implementation in 2013, with what was known as the Study Plan for Itinerant Schools of Paraná (MST, 2013).

This research was conducted between 2018 and 2020 ⁶ , in a location of agrarian reform where the Eli Vive I and Eli Vive II Settlements are currently located—herein both referred to as the Eli Vive Settlement—in the municipality of Londrina, state of Paraná, Brazil.

In the Eli Vive Camp (where the Eli Vive I Settlement is currently located) between 2009 and 2016 the Maria Aparecida Rosignol Franciosi Itinerant School operated, and after the settlement was formalized in 2016, ceased to be itinerant and was divided into two schools (one of them, the Trabalho e Saber Municipal Rural School, offering education for children from 5 to 10 years old, and another, the Maria Aparecida Rosignol Franciosi State Rural School, for children and young people aged 11–17 years). Later, a third school was inaugurated (Egídio Domingos Brunetto Municipal Rural School, for children from 5 to 10 years old) in the Eli Vive II Settlement.

A record of yesterday

We present the first potential instrument for connecting the pedagogical work with the local reality: a historiography of the community and the school.

In general, when we refer to land worker communities (which is the case of the research reported here) or peripheral ones, there is little historiographical record about their origins and constitutions. When these records do exist, they rarely contemplate from the perspective of “from below” (Sharpe, 2001), and do not consider social, land, and economic conflicts. The oral history methodology presents itself as an important strategy to fill this gap.

Oral history originates from the “context of valuing the present time,” it presents itself as a research tool that makes it possible to find the “counter-history,” a “history of the excluded,” and where the experiences of groups historically relegated to erasure in the context of conventional historiography are preserved through the narrative of memories of the experiences lived in these contexts (Santhiago and Magalhães, 2015: 22).

Memory is the object that permeates the interview developed through oral history and which is constituted in the “the past-present relation” (Popular Memory Group, 1998: 79). The narrators’ memories and the impression registered by the memory of the way they perceived events is what is interesting to oral history.

Portelli (1998: 67) highlights that oral history differs from traditional historiography by saying “less about events than about their meaning”: “Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did”. Based on several interviews, oral history replaces the impartiality traditionally claimed by historians with a multiplicity of the narrators’ biases. “The confrontation of their different partialities – confrontation as ‘conflict’, and confrontation as ‘search for unity’ – is one of the things which make oral history interesting” (Portelli, 1998: 73).

Thus, Garnica (2015: 45) emphasizes that

it is possible to see which futures were projected, which memory-related strategies were triggered by each of the deponents when creating their pasts; it is possible, in short, to bring subjectivity back into historiographic practices and, in a broader field, into scientific practices.

In this research, based on the oral history of the record of yesterday, seven interviews were conducted with educators who worked between 2009 and 2016 at the Maria Aparecida Rosignol Franciosi Itinerant School. The interviews were audio-recorded and then transcribed, transforming the sound recording into a written text. From this it was possible to conduct textualization, which “[...] transforms the interview from ‘spoken language’ into a ‘written language’ text, a text that will have the structure, format, and degree of conceptual and technical elaboration that can be provided by the author” (Vianna, 2014: 76). These texts were the historiographic sources that allowed us to systematize the understandings about the education experienced and practiced in this specific context.

Subsequently, a historiography is presented, drawn from the seven interviews and other historical sources, such as official documents, news and journalistic reports and academic research. We chose to use italics to indicate excerpts from the narratives formed from the interviews with the seven collaborators, indicating in the footnotes the name of the author of the excerpt from the textualization ⁷ (these were prepared from the transcript of the interview, with the agreement of the person interviewed).

The text was prepared based on our interpretations of the seven textualizations along with the other sources used. Due to the limitation of space in this paper, only small excerpts from the textualizations will be presented and these can be read in full in Paião (2019).

A historiography: the Maria Aparecida Rosignol Franciosi Itinerant School ⁸

The history of the Maria Aparecida Rosignol Franciosi Itinerant School begins before the realization of its first class, on 23 March 2009, at the Eli Vive Camp. This “before” comprises the entire trajectory experienced by the MST families in their struggle for agrarian reform and allows us to observe the stories of the meetings of educators that took place after the occupation and organization of the Eli Vive Camp. The initial phase of the occupation in 2009 was remembered in the narratives as a period of cultivating the land and of friendly relationships, in sharp contrast to the memories of the first occupation carried out in the same area in 1991 in which there was the “violence of the latifundium” (Caldart, 2001: 208), “with the help of the farmers and the armed militias, they hurt people” ⁹ .

In 1991, the MST conducted the first occupation of the Guairacá farm, this occupation was ended by means of an eviction marked by violence. The memories of this eviction recall the blood that has already been spilled on these lands and for these lands, the confrontation that left people injured, as well as the persecution of MST leaders. Eighteen years passed before the Guairacá and Pininga farms were appropriated by the State to fulfill their full social function.

On 18 February 2009, two public hearings were held in which the purchase of properties for agrarian reform purposes was discussed, as provided for in the Federal Constitution of Brazil. In the case of the Guairacá and Pininga farms, in 2009, as the community remembers, the owner agreed to expropriate the land for the purposes of agrarian reform and settlement of families. With the expropriation of the land compensation is paid to the owner at market value. The bare land receives compensation in Agrarian Debt Bonds and improvements, such as buildings, fences, pasture lands, stables, are paid in cash.

For this occupation, in 2009 the local organization of the MST requested that five educators assume the responsibilities of organizing a school in the Camp. Experienced in camp life, the families knew that there would not be places for all their children in urban schools, they recognized that, even if there were, it would be difficult for children to travel so many kilometers a day to study, and they feared the estrangement and discrimination to which children could be subjected. Thus, as part of the discussion on access to land, the discussion on access to education was held, because the MST “understands that school is also a means of conquering land” ¹⁰ , since education, conceived from the perspective of the Landless worker, enables a greater understanding of the society in which they live and, therefore, can sustain the demand for agrarian reform.

On 19 February 2009, the first occupation of an area on the edge of a dam was organized. An educator who participated in this moment, after discovering the land, returned to another camp, 85 km away, where she previously lived and worked as a teacher. At the request of the coordinator of the MST Paraná, she made her permanent move to the Eli Vive Camp to collaborate in the process of creating and organizing the Itinerant School as an educator and coordinator. In the weeks that followed, other people from various regions of the state arrived at the Camp, including several educators.

Itinerant educators found themselves on the occupied land, which had no modern building structure nor lighting, but there were necessities and dreams to be conquered and a history to be built. Away from the historical structures of urban schools and from all their pedagogical, financial, and social apparatus historically conquered and constructed, these itinerant MST educators created the community school. Navigating with their understandings and materials acquired in other work experiences, they set out to create the school, first by undertaking a study at the Camp to survey the number of school-age children that would attend Primary Education, second by defining the place for the school, and third by organizing the collective action for the construction of desks and blackboards.

In the first days of the occupation classes took place under the trees and in the stable built on the location. When observing the difficulty imposed by the hill and by the structure of the stable itself, in August 2009 the Camp’s community discussed and decided to build a school in another area. Using donated bamboo, they built a structure with four classrooms and an office with canvas “walls.” In the following months, new educators arrived “with the task of working at the school” ¹¹ .

With the acquisition of donated and found materials, the community decided to dismantle the bamboo school and build a second structure with wood and canvas, in which it was possible to include a kitchen and the campsite took on the role of collaborating with the preparation of the children’s food.

In the beginning when classes were held in the stable there was no way to prepare food for the children. They took their own food to class and at mealtimes shared with others what their family had prepared. With the school at the center of the community and with the acquisition of materials, it was possible to prepare food for the children. This involved a lot of collective work in which the community helped with food donations, food was donated by the government and by charitable people who also collaborated in the preparation.

At the beginning of the activities, the enrollments of the children were registered and stored in the data base of their previous itinerant schools. Over time enrollments were all linked to a base school and later enrollments in itinerant schools throughout the state began to be linked just to the Iraci Salete Strozak State School.

When it was officially created at the end of 2010, it was necessary to choose the name that would be given to the school. The community chose the names of the Camp and the school so as to pay homage to the landless workers and fighters who had worked together in the struggle for land.

In 2010 the community moved the camp and school close to the road and the orchard to facilitate access, considering that at that time there was an increase in the number of families camped there, a group of new educators also arrived.

With the objective of conquering the right to offer all stages of Basic Education in the Itinerant School, at the end of 2010 the community organized a mobilization to demand this right. “Fathers and mothers went to Curitiba ¹² to ask for these classes” ¹³ . During the mobilization they spent sleepless nights due to the delay in opening negotiations by the government. After these mobilizations, conversations and meetings, at the beginning of 2011 the community won the right of its Itinerant School to offer all stages of Basic Education, including Adult Education. During this period, approximately five hundred families were at the camp and the school, and since then the school could meet the demand for the education of approximately 450 children, young people, and adults in the Eli Vive community.

Once again, due to the increase in the number of children and the structural demands on the size of the school, the community organized itself and moved the Itinerant School to another location. The chosen place this time, was thought by the entire community to be the dream location for the school of the settlement, which is the place that the school currently occupies ¹⁴ .

In early 2011 “as there were 10 brigades ¹⁵ , each brigade built a room” ¹⁶ . For the construction of this fourth structure, the community dismantled the old wooden houses that existed in the area and that were the homes of the employees of the former Guairacá farm. It is worth noting that the salaried laborers who worked on the farms at the time of the occupation were also housed together with the MST families. In 2012, the community built six more rooms (six wooden chalets) to accommodate all the demand.

According to Camini and Ribeiro (2011: 145),

[...] it can be said that the Itinerant School is an accumulated experience, close to the frontier of a new school, regarding: the form of the school, the curriculum, the evaluation process, the educational times, the training of educators, the decentralization of the classroom, the school’s relationship with the life in its surroundings.

These are elements, among others, that highlight the experience of this Itinerant School as an extraordinary school, which, to a certain extent, contrasts with or differs from the school based on the capitalist model ¹⁷ : the collectivity present in the difficulties, demands, and achievements; constantly observing, planning and creating the school in and of the community; the recognition of the school as a space for everyone to coexist, as a space for teaching and meetings, for fraternization, for resistance, in which the dialog about the current situation of life in the camp and the intention to form the community from struggle are the foundations that guide the educational work and daily school life.

“When I was not an educator, I was with the community” ¹⁸ : such was the relationship between community and school. The Itinerant School was part of the community, a place of collective coexistence and shared responsibility. The community was to the school, as the school was to the community.

This element, of “rootedness in a collectivity” (Caldart, 2001: 221), is a condition having a life in the itinerancy, as all needs are met and all achievements reached through the collective work of a community that helps each other. The daily life in a camp is made up of joint actions, of people who dialog, decide, and work together in the direction and projects of the community.

The education of the MST’s landless begins with their roots in a collectivity that does not deny their past but projects a future that they themselves will be able to help build. Knowing that they are no longer free in the world is the first condition for a person to open up to this new life experience. This is usually the feeling that reduces fear in an occupation, or that makes one face hunger in a camp (Caldart, 2001: 221).

The camp community and collective of educators caring for each other, taking care of children and their education created the story of this Itinerant School and also with this process constituted the collective identity of the Eli Vive community, the result of a joining of people coming from “various camps, with different cultures, knowledge, people from all over Paraná” ¹⁹ .

Each structure, each change of location, each improvement conducted in this Itinerant School was only possible through the collective work of the camp families. The self-organization and collective work of the camp community are the pillars for the existence of the itinerant school, and its recognition as an “educational space, with pedagogical and political significance for the whole of the social movement to which it is linked” (Camini, 2009: 13).

The dimension of the collectivity is what makes the itinerant school possible. It is the collectivity of social practice, the sharing of difficulties, dreams, the recognition of education as a need to understand the world in which one lives and to be the subject of one’s own history, being capable of emancipated citizenship. It is a school made by and for everyone. Its walls, roofs and furniture are the realization of a planned and collective work of the camp community.

Educators are invited and chosen by the community. But, by becoming educators of the Itinerant School, they do not conduct school education alone, they do not become the only ones responsible for it, the community shares this responsive and responsible attitude. Due to their isolation in where they live and in facing the difficulties arising from the state’s negligence regarding the guarantee of the right to quality socially relevant school education for Landless children, that is, in the itinerancy, community and collective, these educators need to teach in a different way, which as a result of the collectivity means a school made by many hands.

“Now, after the settlement, it’s not like that anymore, it’s already changed a lot, the community has disappeared from the school, there is little community participation due to the meetings which are once or twice a year, but that community participation that there was when it was a camp there is no more, because of the distance, because inside the camp people could participate in the parties, in the organization, it’s just this, they were present, now it’s not so much. A message I just wanted to pass on” ²⁰ .

The school structures built in 2011 and 2012 by the camp community, through their collective work, are still used today. Despite the establishment of the school in 2016 with the municipalization of the Pre-primary and Primary Education resulting from the regulation of the Eli Vive I and Eli Vive II Settlements, in 2013, the state of Paraná (responsible for Secondary Education) and the municipality of Londrina had not yet taken measures to invest and offer effective support for the valorization of this public and free institution, a result of the conquest of the families of the community of the settlements. The now settled community continues to support and collaborate with the school, although with a more distant and less active relationship, perhaps because of the distance between the school and the settlement’s plots of land, but also because of the change in the relationship between the school and the community, possibly caused by the admission of educators from outside the MST.

A record of today ²¹

The second potential instrument for connecting pedagogical work with the local reality is the reality inventory, which, according to Hammel et al. (2015: 74), “consists of [a] precise and detailed ethnographic diagnosis of the reality in which schools and their construction are located.” It was first developed as part of the constitutive process of the curriculum of the MST itinerant schools in Paraná.

For Sachs (2019), the potentiality of the reality inventory in schools involved with ​​agrarian reform is twofold: as an activity, focusing on professionals who prepare the inventory together; and as a product, for those who can use it in their pedagogical practices.

On the one hand, as an activity, the construction of the inventory requires and enables the involvement of those who do it with the entire community: school students, parents and guardians, school staff and other residents. [...] On the other hand, I also highlight the potential of the reality inventory as a product. [...] The problems of teacher turnover, curricula (poorly) adapted from urban curricula, lack of knowledge—of students and especially teachers—about the history of the school and its surroundings, the struggles involved in the occupation of the area and the protagonism of subjects so close to schools but so far from the curricula can somehow be faced with the reality inventory.

For this, it is necessary that what was produced is made available to future teachers and school employees (Sachs, 2019: 44-45, author’s highlights).

In 2016, a methodological guide was created for the construction of the reality inventory for rural schools (Caldart et al., 2016). The guide proposes a division into seven thematic blocks, namely: Block 1: natural resources: acknowledging/knowing biodiversity; Block 2: people/families that make up the school community: constitution of characteristics, social, economic and cultural aspects; Block 3: production: production systems and use of technologies; Block 4: ways of working and their organization; Block 5: social struggles, forms of insertion and political organization of families; Block 6: school: physical structure, forms of work organization and curricular aspects; and Block 7: what children and young people do when they are not at school.

According to the guidelines (Caldart et al., 2016), it is necessary to have in the reality inventory at least the basic data in each block, being the responsibility of the team in charge of the preparation to measure the amount of information according to reality that presents itself. For the collection of data from an inventory, a variety of strategies can be used: questionnaires, photographic records, videos, and interviews, among others.

A reality inventory: Trabalho e Saber Municipal Rural School and Egídio Domingos Brunetto Municipal Rural School ²²

This research was conducted at the Eli Vive Settlement, in the city of Londrina, Paraná, with professionals from two rural schools (Trabalho e Saber Municipal Rural School and Egídio Domingos Brunetto Municipal Rural School), which necessitated in 2017 the construction of a reality inventory. This happened more specifically in the last 2 months of a course, when the inventory that had been developed up to 2014 was presented to the group and with which it was possible to analyze what had already been done, what needed to be updated and what had yet to be done.

The group requested that the reality inventory be developed with the necessary time in a collective and organized way. Thus, a course was proposed for professionals from the two municipal schools to develop during 2018 the reality inventory.

Therefore, in 2018 the course began to move in this direction, to make it possible for the group to draw up a new reality inventory, based on an already existing document, which corresponded to the reality of the schools’ environment. This was a demand not only from the course participants, but also from those who were in one way or another involved with the schools in the Eli Vive Settlement.

Fifteen people then took part in the course, including twelve Primary Education teachers, two school principals, a general service worker, and a resident of the Eli Vive Settlement. The course and the ensuing research took on the perspective of action research, which is divided into four stages: exploratory phase, main phase, action phase, and evaluation phase (Thiollent, 1997).

The exploratory phase consists of determining the field of research, the interested parties and their expectations, and establishing a first diagnosis of the situation, most important problems and possible actions. In the case of the research presented here the exploratory phase took place in 2017, during a previous continuing teacher education course, in which the participants presented the need for collective construction of the reality inventory. Due to this, another course was planned for the following year for this very purpose.

In the main phase, there is a clear diagnosis of the reality and the points to be researched together with the participants; researchers thus begin the practice. In the case of our research, this main phase started before the first meeting of the 2018 course. However, it was only after this meeting was it possible to have an overview of the people who would be involved in the course that year and what they knew about the topic to be researched.

The action phase, which is the third stage of the action research, is the time to develop attitudes that can solve the problem or demand raised by the group – in other words, it is the time for practice. The action corresponds to what needs to be done (or transformed) to solve the problem. In the case of our research, the action took place throughout the course, as participants began from the second meeting to search for information to compose the reality inventory.

Finally, in the evaluation phase, the data collected are analyzed and interpreted. In our case, the data produced during the course served to compose the reality inventory of the schools. This evaluation was made first by the research participants in their final moment of socialization, and by us when we organized the information in the final document.

As this research deals with the solution of a collective problem, having as its central points the participative action and collective action, we consider that the research product—in this case, the reality inventory—operates according to the assumptions of action research in a participatory research context.

The course meetings took place in one of the schools between the months of April and November 2018, totaling nine face-to-face meetings. The meetings were pre-scheduled, and some took place on days when there were no students in the school (because these were days dedicated to teacher training); others took place on school days – that is why it was necessary to separate the participants into two groups: thus, on the day when one group was participating in the course, the other group took over teaching these teachers’ classes.

Within the two groups, participants split into six subgroups, with two or three participants each. A division of themes was made between these subgroups based on the blocks present in the methodological guide for the construction of the reality inventory. Participants were organized so that there were representatives from both schools in each large group and in the subgroups. This organization was designed to consider information from the entire community served by the schools. As the Eli Vive I and Eli Vive II Settlements are distant from each other, some specific information could be different between them.

We then presented some information that appeared in the developed reality inventory (Alves & Sachs, 2020) and the process for obtaining the data. We emphasize that as this is a participatory research based on action research the actions, decision-making, and forms for data collection were the choices made by the course participants ²³ .

The main strategy used to obtain data was the sending of questionnaires to be answered by students and their families. We emphasize that this method proved to be flawed at times, especially when the answers were given by children or teenagers. Interviews were conducted with people from the community, some were recorded in audio or video and others were not.

When we later organized the information to prepare the document itself, some additional research needed to be done (bibliographic materials, websites or consultations with residents of the Eli Vive Settlement).

The document begins with the presentation of maps of the settlement, with its location in the country, state, and municipality, containing details of the division of the lots (plots of land) and with the routes of rivers and streams in the area.

Regarding natural resources, the information deals with vegetation, native plants, types of terrain, soil characteristics, climate, and water sources. They are accompanied by photographs, some of which were recorded by the participants, others by the residents, and there are some illustrative ones taken from the internet.

Regarding the people who make up the community, the inventory includes the number of families and their camps and settlements of origin, from various regions of the state of Paraná. There is also a survey about the settlers’ education.

In regard to housing, the residents build their houses themselves, with most of the houses being made of wood and bricks. Regarding the furniture, practically every house contains beds, tables, chairs and a sofa, most have a stove, television, and radio, some have a refrigerator, and a few families have a microwave, electric oven, iron, blender, and computer.

All lots have access to electricity, but there is poor access to sanitation (there are septic tanks without sewage treatment), water (there is no water supply; families collectively use handmade wells) and means of communication (there is no internet in all areas of the settlement). At the time of the development of the reality inventory, there was no public garbage collection service in the settlement, the food scraps were used to feed animals and as fertilizer for plants, and other garbage, recyclables, and disposables were burned weekly. Due to this finding, the direction of one of the schools made a request to the city hall for solid waste collection, which then started a few days later. The school then became a garbage collection point for residents who lived nearby.

There are no public health units in the Eli Vive Settlement. The population needs to seek assistance in nearby places, such as in the urban area of ​​the district, a few kilometers away from the lots.

Regarding eating habits, most report that they have at least three meals a day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), and the main foods consumed are vegetables, legumes, rice, corn, sweet potatoes, beans, pasta, and meat. The families, heterogeneously, buy and/or produce the food they consume, with preference given to foods without pesticides.

The main cultural activities were presented in the reality inventory, with emphasis on the typical celebrations (birthday party of the settlement, the Sweet Potato Festival, the Corn Festival, the June party and the school graduation). There are no museums, libraries (apart from the school library), or memory centers in the settlement nor nearby. There are religious temples within the settlement, with Catholic and Evangelical Christian churches, which conduct services, masses, festivals, and catechism.

The source of income for many families in the settlement comes from the sale of what they produce, such as milk, eggs, vegetables, potatoes, among others. Fairs are held in the urban area to sell these products, and there is a project called Land Workers Bags ²⁴ , in partnership with a university, in which consumers buy baskets with a variety of products from the settlement. Some families participate in a government program in which family farming products are purchased directly for use in school lunches. Family productions are also intended, in part, for their own consumption. Finally, there are salaried workers in the community, working in public agencies (mainly in schools) or in private companies.

The reality inventory presents information about political organizations in the settlement, with emphasis on the MST, in which there is an internal organization of brigades, basic organizational units and sectors. The basic organizational units are composed of ten families; the brigades are made up of five basic organizational units, that is fifty families; and the sectors (with specific themes, such as education, health, culture, production, etc.) have ten representatives, each responsible for three or five family units. Following MST regulations, the leaders of these groups are always formed by a man and a woman.

Several political actions are organized by MST members, with the residents of the Eli Vive Settlement having the objective of guaranteeing rights, such as education, health, transport, etc. to this land working population. Children and young people periodically participate in the national and regional State Meetings of Landless children and adults of the MST Coordination as well as other meetings.

The inventory details the settlement’s schools, structural conditions, problems they face, number of teachers and other employees, types of contracts, number of students and information on the organization of pedagogical work. There are many photographs to illustrate this theme.

Potentiality

Having presented the two instruments, we now argue about their role in addressing the lack of knowledge of the reality of the context of the students on the part of the education professionals.

A quite common situation in Brazilian rural schools is teacher turnover (INEP, 2007). The reasons are diverse—temporary hiring, low wages, poor working conditions, difficult access to schools, etc.—but all of them are related to the precariousness of public education in the country. In this way, many teachers find themselves teaching year after year in new and unfamiliar spaces, this situation is repeated for the schools as well, which constantly receive new professionals. Thus, the local culture, history and ways of life remain unknown for these teachers.

We understand that the two instruments, when existing and available to professionals, can be the beginning of a path to overcome ignorance: on the one hand, a local historiography as a record of yesterday; on the other, a reality inventory as a record of today. Obviously, other actions aimed at training teachers are important to contribute to this process of getting to know a new environment.

In the specific context in which this research was developed, we experienced some situations that exemplify the potential of these instruments.

A situation happened precisely during the construction of the reality inventory, more specifically during the socialization of the obtained results in the last meeting of the course. When the participants of a subgroup presented the results of a study on the average education level of people in the settlement, another participant in the course, a local resident, commented that this demonstrated the need to offer classes for Adult Education, as many people had not completed Primary and Secondary Education, in addition to some cases being illiterate. Such a finding can culminate in actions by the school itself to meet an existing demand, which until then had been unknown.

Another situation occurred later, in 2019, during a teacher training course developed with school professionals. In an experiment with the curriculum proposal of the complex method ²⁵ , two teachers who had just arrived at the school and had not participated in the process of constructing the reality inventory, proposed some classes with the theme of the quality of the water that reaches the settlement’s lots. For this, they presented in detail how water was provided by the company that supplies the city but which, as stated in the inventory (not yet available at the time) does not reach the settlement. They, however, did not know this and explained how the supply worked. Only when this class was studied in the course did the teachers learn of the mistake made.

Knowing the history of the school and the community in which it operates contributes to an understanding of the present and a respect for the past. The schools in the Eli Vive I Settlement, for example, were built with wooden planks, which cause problems in the classrooms, such as leaks when it rains and a lot of dust in the dry season. Through access to local historiography, it can be found out that these constructions were built when there was still a camp, with the collective work of people and without the support of government powers.

Also, the two schools (Trabalho e Saber Municipal Rural School and Maria Aparecida Rosignol Franciosi State Rural School) share space and classrooms. This might seem like a problem as they are different organizations, have many students and always need more space. In a conversation between teachers, we witnessed a complaint about this, in which some of them claimed that separate structures should be built for the schools. However, their stories are united in a single school: the Maria Aparecida Rosignol Franciosi Itinerant School. A teacher, who lives in the settlement, emphasizes in this conversation the importance for the community that the schools are physically close and, in this way, are in constant dialog and union.

Thus, the instruments presented can help teachers discover the place where they are located and, thus consider this in their pedagogical practices. Furthermore, they make it possible for reality to be viewed from other perspectives. Access to a local historiography and a reality inventory can be decentering, in that one is able to notice that what is (and appears to be) ordinary, if seen in more detail, is also extraordinary.

In the case reported here, the schools in the Eli Vive Settlement can be seen simply as rural schools, with nothing special or out of the ordinary. Historiography and the inventory, however, allow for another look; much of what is seen is different from the usual, from the normal. Moreover, this reasoning is valid for any context, for any school.

Conclusions

This paper aimed to present two potential instruments that address the lack of knowledge in regard to the context of students’ reality from teaching professionals in a specific school—a local historiography (record of yesterday) and a reality inventory (record of today)—and argue about this potentiality.

These instruments were developed during the research we conducted from 2018 to 2020 in schools based in an agrarian reform area, and are briefly described in this text. We thus conclude by highlighting some characteristics that are important in the process of elaborating these instruments.

The first characteristic that we believe to be essential in the development of the instruments is the support of local leaders. In our case, the support given by the school principal for the elaboration of the reality inventory was indispensable since the organization of school activities had to be adapted due to the dynamics of the course. Moreover, for the study using oral history, the acceptance of the research by the MST leaders in the settlement was necessary and with that several recommendations of people to be interviewed were made. Without this kind of support, we believe that there are more factors (than there usually are) that make it difficult to implement the proposal.

Another characteristic presupposed by both instruments is the collaboration with the community to enable their development. The methods used may be different from the ones we adopted, however, it is important that there is some form of dialog and listening to people in the community, otherwise the ignorance of the local cultural context can remain.

The historiography we conducted used oral history, in which collaboration with deponents is necessary; the reality inventory, in turn, was drawn up based on several consultations with the community (students, family members, leaders, etc.). Obviously, these instruments can be developed in other ways, through document consultation for example, without community collaboration and involvement; however, we understand that collaboration is essential for the instruments to be legitimized by the community itself.

One last characteristic that we consider important for the development of instruments is being connected to the research. Specifically, in our experiences, we noticed that this connection to the research was fundamental, as it implied a commitment and an organizational capacity allied to relevant theoretical-methodological foundations.

In the case of reported historiography, the bases of research in oral history guided the entire process of elaborating the instrument. In the development of the reality inventory, the research was developed based on action research, starting with the diagnosis of the situation, the actions, and their follow-up, and finishing with an evaluation of the results obtained for the modification of a given social reality. We emphasize that it is not necessary for the development methods to be identical to the aforementioned methods. In fact, regarding historiographical research, as presented by Sharpe (2001), there are other perspectives of “history from below.”

These characteristics (support from local leaders, collaboration with the community and connection to research) can maintain the potential of the two instruments in their role of avoiding the common mistake of not knowing the reality of the context of students on the part of school professionals.

To conclude, future research may report on the use of these instruments in different contexts and the impacts they cause on education.