School patrimonialization: the implementation of memory spaces in educational institutions of Sergipe (2005–2018) ^{1 2 3 4}

Abstract

Considering the challenge of inserting school patrimony in debates within the field of patrimony and its preservation, this study seeks to analyze school memory spaces created in Sergipe between 2005 and 2018. More specifically, a dialogue with the concept of school “patrimonialization” is established, in addition to a discussion about the need to value the singularities and specificities of school subjects. Given this end, the sources include five collections safeguarded in public and private institutions, which consist of documents and objects that reveal educational practices from different historical periods, teaching levels, and public assisted. In this sense, this research highlights the materialization of these projects and the role of the community in relation to the paths taken by the group of subjects who contributed to the construction of their archives, with distinct choices and aims

Keywords
School archive; School memory space; School patrimony; History of Education

Resumo

A partir do desafio de inserir o patrimônio escolar no debate do campo do patrimônio e sua preservação, busca-se analisar os espaços de memória escolar criados em Sergipe entre os anos de 2005 e 2018. Dialogamos, de maneira mais específica, com a concepção de “patrimonialização” da escola e a necessidade de valorizar as singularidades e especificidades dos sujeitos escolares. Trata-se de cinco acervos salvaguardados em instituições públicas e privadas, que contam com documentos e objetos que revelam práticas educativas de distintos períodos históricos, níveis de ensino e públicos atendidos. Destacamos como tais projetos foram materializados e o papel da comunidade nos caminhos trilhados pelo grupo de sujeitos que participou da constituição de seus acervos, com escolhas e finalidades distintas.

Palavras-chave
Arquivo escolar; Espaço de memória escolar; Patrimônio escolar; História da Educação

Introduction

This text aims to analyze the school memory spaces created in Sergipe from 2005 to 2018, namely: Sergipense Athenaeum Education and Memory Center (CEMAS); Sacred Heart of Jesus Archdiocesan College Memorial; Laboratory School Memory Center (CEMDAP); College of Pure and Applied Sciences Memorial (CCPA), and Federal Institute of Sergipe Memorial (MIFS). The analysis focuses, above all, on its safeguarded collections and school patrimonialization practices. We dialogue more specifically with the concept of “patrimonialization” of the school and the need to value the singularities and specificities of school subjects, their stories, and memories.

By understanding the school as a social institution that integrates the patrimony of a country, we agree with Gonçalves (2009) about the multiple possibilities that the term “patrimony” enables, including the understanding of social and cultural life and its existence “in a way, it builds, forms people.” Abreu (2015, p. 67) clarifies, “In the formation of modern nations, the notion of heritage was associated with the idea of collective and public good, expressing a type of society as a collective of individuals and a collective individual.”

According to Article 216 of the Federal Constitution of the Brazilian Republic (1988), the following constitute Brazilian cultural heritage: assets of material and immaterial nature, which refer to the identity, action, and memory of the different groups forming Brazilian society, among others. The legislation gained momentum with Decree 3,551 of August 4, 2000, establishing the inventory and registration of intangible or unattainable cultural heritage.

Would the school, its material, and immaterial assets be part of Brazilian cultural patrimony? Souza (2013, p. 212) sought to answer this question as follows:

It is necessary to recognize that one of the main justifications for the preservation of cultural heritage is its relevance for constructing the identity of subjects and their relationships with time and space and for constructing memory. The justifications for preserving school heritage tend to reiterate the importance of preserving the school’s memory, referring to its links with the formation of childhood and youth and the space for transmitting culture and processes of constructing subjectivities and identities.

Thus, the notion of patrimony and its intertwining with the school and its agents are understood as possibly contributing directly to its preservation as a social institution that seeks to materialize the purpose of formal education proclaimed by the Law on Brazilian Education Guidelines and Bases (Brasil, 1996), namely, the development of the student, their preparation for the exercise of citizenship and their qualification for work. The school and its patrimony are fundamental for the training of individuals and the promotion of citizenship.

Chuva (2012) notes that the expansion of the field of Brazilian cultural patrimony has included a range of social agents, cultural goods, and practices that can become patrimony, which causes consequences pertinent to both material goods and their protection regarding intangible assets and safeguard policies. For the author,

The values identified in cultural assets, aiming at their patrimonialization, are attributed by men and, therefore, are not permanent or intrinsic to objects or assets of any nature. Therefore, the patrimonialization processes of any cultural property of any nature must highlight the meanings and meanings attributed to the property by the related groups. However, the instruments related to its protection or safeguarding may vary and be improved according to the nature and type of cultural property.

(Chuva, 2012, p. 163, emphasis added)

Therefore, school patrimonialization processes also need to present the meanings and signification of patrimonializing this or that collection, this or that school, as well as justifying the choice of the safeguarding instruments themselves, without losing sight of disputes in the field of patrimony and even the interests involved in such practices.

It is also necessary to note that the expansion of the concept of cultural patrimony brings with it, on the one hand, the questioning about a possible process of “trivialization” by those who assume that everything can become patrimony or “desacralization” of patrimony, for those who see this expansion as democratizing. On the other hand, understanding that the expansion of the understanding of cultural patrimony as another result of globalization, in terms of having aspects of its culture recognized, directly contributes to the insertion of a country or social group in specific communities, including political and economic benefits (Fonseca, 2009).

When compiling a history with a synthesis of patrimonialization processes in the West, Abreu (2015) establishes three milestones: the first covering the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century, with the reconstruction of the past, history, or the search and appreciation of art; the second, with the creation of UNESCO in the 1940s and the anthropological concept of culture; and the third, from the late 1980s, with the predominance of international forums, with emphasis on UNESCO, which highlighted the preservation of the notion of singularity or local specificity, what the researcher calls “patrimonialization of differences.”

Still, according to the aforementioned author, in addition to the policies that oppose material culture to immaterial culture, the complexity of the new configuration, set in motion by policies for the patrimonialization of cultures in different parts of the world, must work with the concept of “patrimonialization,” to, thus, “understand their processes through detailed surveys in case studies[, which] can be a good way to discover new horizons” (Abreu, 2015, p. 93). It is worth clarifying that, in the patrimonialization process,

New meanings are juxtaposed and integrated into a good that, in the commercial sphere, was just another object to be consumed, used, and discarded. Patrimonialization gives this artifact a new life and a new value. From patrimonialization, it must be preserved and exposed to the public eye, i.e., it becomes a public asset and legacy of a collective of individuals. This is a complex operation that involves several specially trained agents with the purpose of unique value construction. Patrimonialized assets are considered sacred to a culture or an organized social group.

(Abreu, 2015, p. 67-68, emphasis added)

From dialogue with this perspective, Silva (2018) demonstrates the decentralization of cultural patrimonialization processes from the State to communities and social actors who demand policies aimed at patrimony with a focus on schools, understanding them as active agents in the safeguarding process. of local and regional memories and cultures. After a deep theoretical reflection, the author discusses the experiences of schools in two Brazilian municipalities regarding cultural patrimonialization, presenting the leading role of school actors in safeguarding their memories and patrimony.

The Sociology of Education, with a dialogue between schools and the city’s heritage, concludes that “If school education in Brazil was produced by the principles of homogenization and national unity, it is, currently, tensioned by new configurations in the field of heritage and by the educational and political dilemmas of a democratic society” (Silva, 2018, p. 16).

The stated assertions dialogue directly with the area of History of Education within the scope of theoretical-methodological changes, which caused the influx of research to revolve around the specificities of schools and their subjects, their culture, their printed materials, their subjects, their professors and students, focusing on various aspects of the so-called school culture. Therefore, researchers and subjects from educational institutions have worked in different parts of the country to safeguard their collections, value their stories, and build identities based on specific aspects experienced by different generations of members of the educational process in Brazil.

As Souza (2013, p. 204) already points out, “inserting school heritage into this public, political and specialized debate in the field of preservation, establishing dialogues and recognizing approaches is a challenge to be faced and an urgent need.” By accepting this challenge, we will investigate some issues within the scope of school heritage, followed by the investigation of school memory spaces in Sergipe.

Safeguarded school patrimony: multiple issues

Organizing and safeguarding in collections the so-called cultural, historical, and educational patrimony, here represented by the material culture of the school, more than an accumulation of objects and documents crystallized in time and space constitutes, in the present time, as a marked epistemological change by the rise of the memorial dimension of school life. This undertaking is characterized as a driving force to combat oblivion due to preservationist practices that involve researchers in the History of Education in Brazil with commitment and seriousness.

(Cunha, 2015, p. 293)

“Organize” and “safeguard” are important verbs for those who venture into working with physical and virtual collections from different schools in different times and spaces. Preserved cultural patrimony, recognized by the producing community and endorsed by experts in the field, gives meaning to masses of paper and a series of objects, practices, and knowledge that leave the day-to-day routine of school work to become archival documents, museum objects, and artifacts from memory centers.

As Huyssen (2000, p. 15) pointed out, “There is no doubt that the world is being musealizado [transformed into a piece of a collection] and that we all play our roles in this process.” Professors, students, managers, and other subjects of the educational process, both in primary education and higher education, have acted in this process of “musealization of the world” by building educational spaces of memory, making choices, building memories, and defining what is exposed and what will be kept, how these stories will be told, what work will be proposed and how educational agents can be visualized or made impossible in the construction and maintenance of these spaces.

The work with school collections has gone beyond the school’s and its subjects’ bureaucratic function, especially from the permanent archive and objects that have lost their function in teaching and learning. It reached universities with researchers and groups interested in “patrimonializing” educational practices from specific historical periods and making them stand the test of time. Thus, exploring school collections has become a practice in the area of History of Education from different perspectives, including the analysis of school heritage⁵. Below are what some experts in the field wrote.

In previous writing, Souza (2013) defends the expression “school heritage” in dialogue with consolidated perspectives on cultural heritage in Brazil to refer to both the building and the need to protect the documentary, museological, bibliographical collection, and even the forms of doing and practicing teaching. Possamai (2012, p. 117) highlights that the interface between the history of education and history allows us to think “that the heritage of the history of education is a historical and social construction and not a determined set of cultural assets naturalized as the heritage of a collective.” Thus, it is up to this field of study to “propose problems regarding these cultural assets from the perspective of historical knowledge.”

Cunha and Campos (2020, p. 4) understand that “Cultural Heritage and Education, also called Educational Historical-Heritage, encompass both the material and immaterial production of the school as a means to understand and assist in the processes of reflection on History in the present.” On the other hand, Gil and Almeida (2013, p. 122) call education heritage the “set of written, oral, visual documents, objects and intangible practices of school institutions, considered as such by the school actors responsible for this attribution of value and construction of meanings for such cultural goods.”

For Mogarro, Gonçalves, Casimiro, and Oliveira (2010), educational heritage encompasses school architecture, from the school building itself, the surrounding space and its functionality, equipment, everyday materials, and teaching materials, to scientific instruments for teaching various sciences, tables, measuring boxes, abacuses, audiovisual media, student work, school notebooks, among others. This heritage also includes paper-based materials related to objects, such as publisher catalogs and teaching manuals, which incorporate teaching materials into the teaching and learning processes, as well as archival documents relating to the day-to-day activities of the educational institution, such as requirements from teachers, purchase notes, receipts, old inventories and the literature itself, articulated with the theme. This context also includes the educational press, which publicizes these objects and provides guidance on using them in schools.

Felgueiras (2005) deals with educational heritage and includes buildings in its definition, which includes everything from the canteen to the medical office, as well as administrative activities, furniture, teaching and student materials, decorative and symbolic elements, practices of teaching, the students’ tactics, the games and songs at recess, the memories of daily school life, the memories of teachers and students. In addition, she states that: “if pedagogical ideas and theories can be known through writings, the routines of daily school life and the experiences of being a child, student and teacher will have to be investigated through memories and materials associated with them” (Felgueiras, 2005, p. 92).

In the words of Agustín Escolano Benito:

[...] in the case of the school’s heritage, the fund of archaeological material, in which various strata can be observed, through strategic excavations, preserves keys and meanings that are at the hard core of the culture of education, in identity and its tradition that is, finally, the result transmitted by the history carried out in training institutions. [...] In contact with these remains and the reading, we make of the traces and indicative signs that demand our attention, which are precisely the basis on which heritage education is sustained

(Benito, 2017, p. 274).

In this sense, the creation of memory spaces to store these “remains,” as the researcher emphasizes, is directly related to what Nora (1993, p. 13) wrote: “[...] it is necessary to create archives, organize celebrations, keep anniversaries, pronounce eulogies, notarize minutes because these operations are not natural.” These operations build memories fundamental to the history of a place, a group, a people, and even their identity.

In a dialogue with Pierre Nora, we understand school memory spaces as places, physical or virtual, present inside or outside the school, but which store and make available, for consultation and/or visitation, documents and objects that deal with the school’s memory, its ordinary subjects and actions. These include memory centers, memorials, school museums, and school archives, which go beyond the bureaucratic function of the school’s permanent archive and fulfill a social role of preserving, valuing, and disseminating the memory of the educational institution and its different subjects. The process of recognizing the meaning of the school memory space by the community and creating spaces to safeguard and make these cultural assets available is called school patrimonialization.

Given the above, in this text, we will focus on school memory spaces in Sergipe, focusing on the school patrimony safeguarded there. Four are constituted in a physical space, and one is eminently virtual, although it has a technical reserve that subsidizes the team’s work. Below are school patrimony practices.

Safeguarding school patrimony in Sergipe

From north to south of Brazil, experiences with different purposes and methods abound, united by the search for and safeguarding of school objects and documents in archives, museums, memory centers, and memorials. Andreas Huyssen deals with obsessions with memory and states that “one of the most surprising cultural and political phenomena of recent years is the emergence of memory as one of the central cultural and political concerns of Western societies” (Huyssen, 2000, p. 9).

The concern with school memories was materialized in different memory centers and memorials in the state of Sergipe. After investigating with the State Secretariat for Education, Sports, and Culture, research groups in the History of Education area of the two universities in the state, the annals of congresses in the area, and websites of private institutions in Aracaju, the capital of Sergipe, we identified five school memory spaces.

We used as sources a questionnaire with some of their managers, consultation of information available on the world wide web, and photographs taken during in loco visits, in addition to a review of the literature regarding the history of these schools and their memory spaces to analyze the constitution and collections of such spaces. Below is a descriptive table of such areas.

Table 1
Institutions and school “places of memories” in Sergipe⁶

School “Place of Memory”	Year of creation	Educational institution/foundation
Sergipense Athenaeum Education and Memory Center (CEMAS)	2005	Sergipense Athenaeum/1870
Sacred Heart of Jesus Archdiocesan College Memorial	2005	Sacred Heart of Jesus Archdiocesan College /19607
Laboratory School Memory Center (CEMDAP)	2014	Laboratory School of the Federal University of Sergipe/1959
College of Pure and Applied Sciences Memorial (CCPA)	2016	College of Pure and Applied Sciences (CCPA)/1976
Federal Institute of Sergipe Memorial (MIFS)	2018	Federal Institute of Sergipe/1909

A first observation concerns the period in which these spaces were created, precisely the basis for the research’s time frame. CEMAS and the Archdiocesan College Memorial were inaugurated in 2005. In 2018, MIFS was established as a virtual space. Thus, the first two decades of the 21st century marked the installation of school memory spaces that dialogue directly with Huyssen’s (2000) assertions about the “will to memory.”

A second observation concerns the names of school memory places: “memory center” and “memorial.” For Camargo and Goulart (2015, p. 19), memory center is a recent denomination in Brazil, in which the archive, library, and museum entities have affinities such as the “common mission of making accessible the information contained in the respective collections” for future reference. Axt (2012, p. 66) understood a memorial as “a proposal to deal with memory without necessarily linking it to a collection, be it object, artistic, documentary, imagery,” adding that it is also responsible for providing services to the community, “developing within it a forum for reflection on the institution being worked on, anchored in the theoretical and methodological tools of historical research” (AXT, 2012, p. 65).

While the memory center has a concept that a diverse group of experts widely discusses, the memorial is a nomenclature more used by different institutions than debated theoretically, as it is an element that requires greater problematization and verticalization of analysis. In the case of memory institutions in Sergipe, it is clear that memory centers have a greater emphasis on research, with a broad dialogue between primary education and higher education; in the context of memorials, the work finds more resonance with the current school community and former students of the institution.

The school memory spaces in Sergipe are noted for having opted for the design of a memory center or memorial to aggregate archives and collections that relate to the life of the institution and some of its subjects, enabling the making of its collections available for future consultation. Two memory centers are in public schools, one federal and one state. In contrast, there are three memorials, part of a federal institution and two private institutions, one of which is confessional. The pioneering school memory spaces in Sergipe were created in 2005, one to celebrate the 135^th anniversary of Sergipense Athenaeum and the other, the 45^th anniversary of Archdiocesan College. Below are some aspects of their history.

Sergipense Athenaeum⁸ was created on October 24, 1870, and is a public institution that has operated uninterruptedly until today. Faithful to its initial function of offering secondary education, the school crossed the barrier of centuries, forming generations of people from Sergipe, operating in four buildings in the central region of Aracaju and different denominations.

For several years, the school had a predominantly male student body, with Silvia de Oliveira Ribeiro, the first female student to complete the 6-year secondary course, in 1912. The faculty was under the exclusive control of male professors for more than seven decades until the inauguration of female professor Maria Thetis Nunes. Sergipense Athenaeum was also the venue for different student groups and newspapers, some of which became a hotbed for the State’s political authorities.

Given the briefly presented institution’s history, CEMAS was created in 2005 based on studies developed for Alves’ dissertation (2005) in dialogue with the school community. CEMAS’s main objective is to preserve written or unwritten traces and historical testimony, in addition to creating information necessary to safeguard cultural patrimony and maintain the permanent exhibition of the educational and social memory of Sergipense Athenaeum.

Following archival principles, the collection is located in a single Archival Fund called Sergipense Athenaeum, subdivided into ten series and two subseries, distributed in 233 archive boxes containing more than 100,000 pages in different conservation states. All the material already organized is arranged in two catalogs from the period 1848 to 1950, two from 1950 to 1970, and one with the sources of the Student Literary Arcadia of Sergipense Athenaeum, which identifies the documents of this student association, subdivided into series.

For the existence of CEMAS, the Technical Cooperation Agreement was signed between the Federal University of Sergipe and the State Secretariat for Education, Sports, and Culture, whose objective is to institutionalize the execution of different research, teaching, and extension activities involving professors and students from the institutions. Since 2018, the center has been part of the political-pedagogical proposal of Sergipense Athenaeum, approved by the State Education Council. These are significant milestones for the school patrimony process, outlined in the partnership between the school and the university. When dialoguing with Abreu and Silva (2016, p. 9), it is clear that “patrimony assets must be preserved, maintained, displayed and – last but not least – understood.” CEMAS seeks to achieve this purpose: the understanding of different audiences about what is safeguarded there regarding the educational patrimony of a public school in Sergipe. Below are some images of CEMAS.

Figure 1
Partial view of CEMAS

Figure 2
Partial view of the CEMAS collection

The images expose the space, with furniture and objects used by different school subjects in different temporalities; they are “heritage assets” (Abreu, 2015, p. 68) by a group of researchers in dialogue with the school community. In addition to school furniture and artifacts, it is a search to “patrimonialize” an educational memory considered crucial for understanding the past with its reverberations in the present. As Cunha (2015, p. 295) states, “School objects and documents previously treated for their usefulness are increasingly valued for their ability to refer to something else – sign value – and for an understanding of the set of activities practiced within the school.”

Within this perspective, some of these pieces of furniture are used for the daily functioning of the memory space, providing new life and dynamics to artifacts previously planned for teaching and learning activities. The center has a significant collection of trophies, laboratory materials, and uniforms. On the other hand, the archives and their shelves store documents that deal with the histories of a sesquicentennial public educational institution. Above all, they are administrative documents, including records of students belonging to Literary Arcadia.

The collection safeguarded at CEMAS, throughout its operation in different spaces of the school, has also carried out a series of research in the areas of human sciences and for private research by people who want to know more about family members and their passage. by Sergipense Athenaeum. Another target audience is former students looking for remnants of their school days, classmates, and teachers. The collection also includes contemporary school work, linking teaching and research activities.

The memory space of the Sergipense Athenaeum Center of Excellence corroborates Camargo and Goulart’s assertions (2015, p. 29), which state that “memory centers are a mix of archive, library, and museum,” constituting a new institutional space that “reflects the profound changes that have occurred in the contemporary world.” In this sense, we consider that “[...] memory and museumization are needed, together, to build protection against obsolescence and disappearance” (Huyssen, 2000, p. 28). CEMAS fulfills these prerogatives doubly by uniting different documentary typologies in a single space and, at the same time, serving different purposes, from research to classes and extension activities, so that, gradually, it has gained a place of preservation of the institutional memory, choosing what should be preserved, exposed and disseminated to the school community. In other words, what has protected and patrimonialized in the battles against its “disappearance.”

The Sacred Heart of Jesus Archdiocesan College Memorial was created in the same year as CEMAS. The school’s history⁹ is closely related to the creation of the Little Prince Educational Establishment in 1959, intended to provide financial support to the “Sacred Heart of Jesus Episcopal Seminary,” established in 1913. After the educational institution’s first successful results, the idea of creating a high school that would operate in the old “seminary” building was also considered.

Thus, the Diocesan Gymnasium began its activities on March 1, 1960. In 1962, in addition to the high school, it began offering classical and scientific courses, completing the entire secondary education. Three years later, with the change of Diocese to Archdiocese of Aracaju, the institution was renamed Sacred Heart of Jesus Archdiocesan College.

The first decades of the school’s history were marked by an increase in enrollment and the expansion of physical space with significant structural reforms. With a large building occupying the space where the Sacred Heart of Jesus Episcopal Seminary previously operated on Rua Dom José Tomás, the school stood out in the São José neighborhood in Aracaju. It expanded its operations to another unit in the southern region of the capital. The sixty-year-old school was sold in 2020, with only the south unit being maintained.

In celebration of the institution’s 45^th anniversary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus Archdiocesan College Memorial was created on March 1, 2005. According to its presentation document, the school memory space has a significant collection, divided as follows: photographs (more than 3,500 images); school museum; objects; recognition; sound; image; and publications with magazines and bulletins, including two school periodicals, Revista Arqui 2003-2009 and Retrospectiva Arqui 1998-2009.

The Memorial has more than 10,000 documents in the time frame, which ranges from the school’s first years of operation to more recent periods, such as class diaries from the 1990s, in addition to documents from the seminary, such as the Registration Book of the Diocesan Seminary (an institution whose physical space was later occupied by the Archdiocesan), which dates back to 1913. Among the documents, we can highlight student bulletins, school notebooks, school calendars, monthly payment booklets, a significant set of photo albums, and a series of reports duly organized and bound. There are objects such as trophies, medals, plaques, student cards, chalk erasers, stamps, and electronic devices used in classes in the second half of the 20^th century, such as computers, television, projection devices, video and audio machines, and projection slides, among others. The school also houses murals, including paintings by Sergipe artist Rosa Faria (1917-1987) and a significant collection of trophies.

The safeguarded collection concerns an identity constructed by the school. These objects were part of the formation of different generations in different geographic spaces and were selected to compose a school memory space. It is necessary to remember that “individuality, so affirmed in the contemporary world, is fed by a common patrimony that conditions us in several aspects and shares, to a varying degree, a set of referents” (Felgueiras, 2005, p. 89). This set includes the school, its knowledge, practices, and artifacts. Below are images of the Memorial.

Figure 3
Inauguration plaque of the Archdiocesan College Memorial

Figure 4
Trophies and bound documentation from the Archdiocesan College Memorial

From the inauguration plaque of the school memory space to the shelf with a series of books, bound yearbooks, bulletins, and log books, among other school documents, it is possible to visualize aspects of the school patrimony, which are safeguarded there. These are objects and documents selected for exhibition in a private school, which shows itself to society through the remains of the past preserved and exposed there. The narrative created exalts the achievements and conveys the message of the history of an educational institution permeated by Catholic rites, highlighting some church figures who went there.

The Laboratory School¹⁰ was created in 1959 and linked to the Catholic School of Philosophy of Sergipe, which began its activities in 1951. It was aimed at being an internship field for higher education institutions, focused on teacher training and secondary and normal education. In 1968, with the incorporation of the Faculty of Philosophy to create the Federal University of Sergipe, the College of Application was also federalized. Throughout its first decades, the school occupied a space next to the college building in the São José neighborhood in the center of Aracaju. While it began operating on the university campus in 1981, only in 1995 it gained its own space for basic education-specific educational activities.

With more than half a century of existence and a prominent role in the Sergipe educational scene, the Laboratory School of the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS) has become a reference school, whether for its faculty and students or its innovative projects and ability for dialogue with higher education, as is typical of its purpose. The school trained different generations and created a significant collection of documents and artifacts.

The collection was organized at the Research, Documentation, and Memory Center of the UFS Laboratory School (CEMDAP). The idea arose from a research project developed between 2013 and 2015. In 2016, the General Council of the Laboratory School approved the proposal to create the center. Four years later, CEMDAP was transferred to a new, larger physical space, making it possible to separate the room for research and study from another for the storage and treatment of the collection.

From 1959 to 1990, the permanent documentation was initially identified and gathered using different documents, including legislation, letters, memoranda, photographs, school newspapers, and trophies. CEMDAP also guards the school’s permanent documentation. Original documents come in different formats and techniques, such as books, notebooks, and single or bound sheets, and are supported by paper and emulsified paper in the case of photographs. Below are some images of CEMDAP.

Figure 5
Partial view of the CEMDAP research room

Figure 6
Partial view of the collection safeguarded at CEMDAP

CEMDAP has gradually expanded its physical space with research and extension activities. Work with the collection has resulted in dissertations, theses, and publications in the area. The team aims to face other challenges, including building the collection inventory, which has received a series of donations, especially from former school employees.

In turn, the College of Pure and Applied Sciences (CCPA)¹¹ was officially founded in 1976 in the center of Aracaju (SE) when it incorporated the former primary school of Alfredo Montes Educational Establishment. In its first year of operation, it had 270 students. Five years later, a thousand students were enrolled, which led to the construction of a new building in the city’s south zone. The institution moved to the new facilities in the mid-1980s. The institution has operated uninterruptedly until contemporary times, offering early childhood and primary and secondary education.

The CCPA Memorial was created in 2016 to celebrate the institution’s 40^th anniversary. It is an open physical space focused on the school’s memory, featuring a time capsule, a bust in honor of the founder, and a series of trophies. Below are some images of the Memorial.

Figure 7
Physical space of the CCPA Memorial

Figure 8
Objects from the CCPA Memorial collection

Figure 8 shows a small part of the Memorial’s collection of documents and objects. Most artifacts belonging to the school’s founder and owner, Marcos Pinheiro Monteiro (1941-2010), also a chemistry teacher, are safeguarded there, including materials used in his classes.

From an institutional perspective, the collection includes notebooks with lists of students enrolled in the first years of operation by grade and class; uniforms and identification of the institution’s logo in different historical periods; flags; former students’ folders; and a significant set of student newspapers produced by the institution under the name CCPArte.

It is a space created to legitimize the memory of its founder shortly after his death, joining the school’s celebration. In this context, the intention was to link the institution’s history with aspects of its creator’s life, all in the same space, dialoguing with Vidal and Paulilo (2020, p. 13) when questioning: “Which memory wishes, archives, institutions and people, in the multiple temporalities of life and history, forge when they create collections?” In this case, it is a desire to safeguard school memory more related to a subject than to the multiple voices that effectively give vivacity to the educational institution.

The last school “place of memory” assessed by this research is the Federal Institute of Sergipe Memorial (MIFS)¹². The IFS was born from the union of two almost century-old schools: the School of Apprentices and Craftsmen, created in Aracaju in 1909 and inaugurated in 1911, and Saint Mauritius Patronage, founded in 1924, in São Cristóvão, beginning activities the following year. Among so many differences, they had the primary purpose of training labor.

Decades later, after several changes in nomenclature and purposes, the institutions were called the Federal Center for Technological Education (CEFET-SE) and the Federal Agrotechnical School of São Cristóvão. In 2008, the union of the two educational institutions created the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Sergipe.

In turn, the IFS Memorial was institutionalized following the publication of Ordinance No. 1,685 on June 15, 2018. Two years before the inauguration, work was already underway to create the “place of memory,” which acts in the collection of pieces to compose the collection and the production of the digital Memorial.

The Memorial does not have a physical space for exhibiting the collection. Instead, it has a technical reserve that preserves 20 laboratory pieces, 23 pieces of furniture, 21 pieces of visual arts, six audio files, 24 pieces of classroom equipment, 30 pieces, including trophies and medals, 19 medical instruments, and 11 graphic pieces. Furthermore, the memorial hot site is linked to the IFS page on the World Wide Web.

According to the MIFS management team, one objective is for the memorial hot site to provide information about the school. Hence, the digital collection of ongoing research continually increases the amount of material to be preserved through photographs, newspapers, and academic publications.

Below are some images of the Memorial:

Figure 9
Print screen of the IFS Memorial Logo

Figure 10
Print screen of a part of the IFS Memorial photographic collection

MIFS is the only school memory space in Sergipe in an exclusively virtual context, with part of its collection available, both photographic and written documents and interviews, which can be viewed in the images previously displayed. There is also a brief history of the institution and some publications about the school and its collection, such as newspapers that are part of the UFS Repository, with information about the institution in different historical periods.

The side tabs begin the presentation of the Memorial itself and end with events, a space in which it is possible to view some of the actions carried out with students and professors, such as exhibitions on different themes related to the school’s history, its objects, and even testimonies from former students and teachers. Images point to collection dissemination practices and an effective dialogue between the Memorial and the school community or with students from other educational institutions.

The school memory spaces analyzed in this research, each in its way, processed school patrimonialization practices. On the one hand, there are memory centers and memorials of sesquicentennial, centenary, and sixty-year-old public schools; on the other, private and confessional institutions safeguard aspects of their patrimony. It is also worth noting the case of MIFS, whose collection has the primary purpose of its virtual exhibition. Paying attention to what Huyssen (2000, p. 37) says about “used pasts” and “dispensable pasts,” we must observe the memories that such spaces selected when they were constituted, as well as the changes and interests negotiated in the conceptions and narratives forged to patrimonialize aspects of their past.

The patrimonialized collections comprise, above all, documents and objects, with emphasis on artifacts that appear in different schools, such as trophies. Other furniture and objects, already used in the teaching-learning process, are often exposed, with the aim of “illustrating” school stories, as Cabral (2020) pointed out when concluding his analyses of CEMAS and CEMDAP, highlighting the actions of a long and permanent process of preserving educational historical patrimony, also related to the initiatives of researchers and teachers uncomfortable with the situation of school collections.

There is a crucial difference between the exhibition of the collection of private institutions and dealing with documents from public institutions, which also contain work focused on research, mainly those from memory centers. In the case of CEMAS, there is a series of guides with the documents stored there, in addition to the availability of a small part of the collection in digital media. CEMDAP also has tools for consulting the material and a physical structure planned to produce knowledge from the school. In both school memory spaces, there is a dialogue between the school and the university in the design, maintenance, and management of school patrimony.

Challenging conclusions

As crucial as mapping the experiences already carried out and ongoing for the recognition of initiatives spread across the country is the organization and strengthening of cooperation networks and scientific societies integrated into the forums of education historians.

(Souza, 2013, p. 214)

The mapping of school “places of memory” in Sergipe and the analysis of their constitution, purposes, and safeguarded collection are initial steps in the search for maintaining these spaces and even expanding them. The urgent need to form a network that enables the exchange of experiences and puts into dialogue the challenges and solutions found by institutions in each community, given their unique characteristics, is imperative for advances in the area.

Among so many different experiences, tortuous and winding paths, and dilemmas regarding the very conceptualization of school heritage, there is a certain consensus regarding the need to create public policies for the area (Cunha, 2015; Menezes, 2011; Silva & Orlando, 2019; Souza, 2013), which endorses Abreu’s (2015, p. 72) understanding in the sense that “a new characteristic of current patrimonialization processes, especially those linked to cultural assets from traditional societies, is that social groups linked to these assets are the ones that must demand patrimonialization, or at least endorse the demands for patrimonialization.”

When thinking with Abreu (2015), it is understood that in the process of “patrimonialization of differences,” researchers and the school community have carried out different school patrimonialization practices. Such practices were evidenced through the implementation analysis and work with collecting five school memory spaces in Sergipe. From the memory centers of public, state, and federal schools to the memorials of private institutions, this study highlights how such projects materialized and the role of the community in the paths taken by the group of subjects in the constitution of their collections, with diverse choices and purposes. Ibarra (2016) addresses heritage education in the case of Chile and concludes that the school community has begun to contribute to the identification, recognition, registration, and even management of its heritage, which, little by little, constitutes both a right and an opportunity. These aspects can be located in the school memory spaces studied to a certain extent.

Truly challenging is the daily maintenance of the physical and virtual spaces of school memory analyzed. These are essential materials for cleaning and storing collections, in addition to teams that do not have professionals working specifically with these collections. In the case of private institutions, the work with the Memorial adds to other activities already carried out by the employees involved. The IFS has archivists who have the Memorial among their priority functions.

Otherwise, the Memory Centers at Sergipense Athenaeum and Laboratory School have scholarship holders from different levels of education, in a close dialogue between higher education and primary education in their day-to-day practices. The work with scholarship holders is hampered with each contract termination, with the need for new training and a lack of continuity of actions. In other words, school memory spaces lack professionals with specific training and exclusive dedication to dealing with the collections.

These professionals are also essential for opening up and serving internal and external audiences, with actions being publicized on institutional websites, social networks, or even in the mainstream media, meaning that the work carried out with school assets can be seen by different subjects beyond the school walls. Many tasks, immense demands that, in memory centers, receive support from undergraduate and postgraduate students, led by a university professor, and, in memorials, are carried out by a small group of employees, who take turns in various functions within the school, including the memory space.

Still, reflecting on actions that enable dialogue between memory spaces and the school community is necessary within the scope of challenges. This is another “Achilles heel” since there is already an overlap of work to create and maintain such spaces. When new tasks are added, such as temporary or permanent exhibitions or activities with collections aimed explicitly at some regions of contemporary knowledge and even patrimony education, there are, therefore, a series of obstacles to be overcome. Amid the dilemmas, it is clear that integrating memory with the school’s pedagogical activity is crucial in school patrimonialization.

The implementation of public policies aimed at preserving school collections, pari passu with notices from development agencies, and possibilities for financing work in such spaces, added to greater involvement of subjects from state and municipal education departments, are some indications that make it possible to overcome barriers faced by those who venture into dealing with memory in school spaces. In addition to direct action with the school’s day-to-day subjects, it is also necessary to show the relevance of school patrimony in other instances so that the individual work phase, led by one or another interested in the topic, can be overcome, reaching concrete institutionalization, with a collective experience of daily activity in schools.

The expansion and review of the theoretical perspectives that underlie the formation of such spaces and even the problematization of what was safeguarded and their choices are also necessary since we are dealing with a “border area” between Education, History, Archival Science, Librarianship, Museology and – why not? – Anthropology. In other words, these are practices in the area of humanities that have brought into dialogue, in some cases, schools and universities in different processes of school patrimonialization.

Among the challenges for the area, the need to rethink “other spaces/experiences, which constitute the training of subjects, beyond school” (Silva & Orlando, 2019, p. 439) also stands out, apart from the construction of spaces of plural memories that integrate the diversity of the school of the present with its subjects so that there are patrimonialization practices that go beyond documents and objects, but knowledge and practices that concern the set of agents, their identities and belongings, which build the school in its daily practices.

• 2
  References correction and bibliographic normalization services: Larissa Balbi (Tikinet) [e-mail]
• 3
  English version: Henrique Akira (Tikinet) [e-mail]
• 4
  Funding: National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, (Grant/Award Number: ‘164654/2020-8-Post-Doctorate Jr’, 306540/2022-3).
• 5
  There are different nomenclatures for school heritage. Some examples are historical-educational, educational, school, and school cultural heritage. To learn more about the different denominations, read Ferrari and Carminati (2016).
• 6
  According to Lima (2021), three school memory spaces are also being created in the state: the Teacher Training Memory Center at the Rui Barbosa Education Institute in Aracaju (CIERB); the Benjamin Constant Memory Center (CEMBEC), which is part of the Federal Institute of Sergipe on the São Cristóvão campus; and the Dr. Pedro Garcia Moreno Filho Memorial of the Murilo Braga State College in Itabaiana (SE).
• 7
  The Sacred Heart of Jesus Archdiocesan College ended its activities on 11.10.2021 after collecting data for this research. We do not know what happened to the collection since one of the institution’s buildings now houses another private school.
• 8
  We took as a basis the pioneering work of Alves (2005) and the Álbum Atheneu Sergipense, organized by Alves, Oliveira, and Costa (2021), to discuss the school’s history. Some of this research was published as books in the collection Uma casa de educação literária: 150 anos do Atheneu Sergipense, containing ten works about the institution, in addition to the production of videos, podcasts, and calendar, because of the school’s 150^th anniversary. On the other hand, regarding CEMAS, we consulted the studies by Alves (2016). We also visited the memory space several times and had a questionnaire answered via email by the center’s emeritus coordinator, Prof. Dr. Eva Maria Siqueira Alves.
• 9
  Information about the history of the school and its Memorial was extracted from the works of Lima (2013) and Dantas (2010), a face-to-face visit to the space on 10.21.2021, and the report of some of the Memorial’s creators and maintainers.
• 10
  On the history of the Laboratory School, see, among others, Nunes (2008) and Santos (2019). Regarding CEMDAP, we suggest reading Conceição and Nogueira (2018) and Conceição, Monteiro, and Melo (2018), in addition to the various projects developed by the center itself. Such references supported the writings about the school and the memory center. The works mentioned above, added to a questionnaire answered via email by the center manager, Prof. Dr. Joaquim Tavares da Conceição, and a face-to-face visit on 10.27.2021, supported the analyses about CEMDAP.
• 11
  The analyses about the CCPA and its Memorial were developed based on the information on the school’s website, in addition to a face-to-face visit to the institution with a report from the managers of the school memory space on 08.19.2021.
• 12
  Regarding the history of the School of Apprentices and Craftsmen, we consulted the work of Patrício (2003); regarding Saint Mauritius Patronage, the studies by Nery (2006). Santos Neto (2015) traces the educational institution’s history from the School of Apprentices to the Federal Institute of Sergipe. Regarding the IFS Memorial, we analyzed the text by Matos, Silva, Silva, and Kunze (2018), whose works support the writings about the history of the school and the Memorial itself. In addition, a questionnaire was completed and answered via email, and a virtual meeting was held with the MIFS team on 05.28.2021.

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1

Responsible Editor: Silvio Gallo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2221-5160

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  01 July 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  23 Feb 2022
• Reviewed
  30 Aug 2023
• Accepted
  23 Nov 2023