"O que tem o dom do ensino, busque aperfeiçoá-lo”: circulação de sujeitos, modelos e práticas pedagógicas na preparação dos professores protestantes das Escolas Dominicais (1915-1949)

Abstract

The Sunday School incorporated a considerable part of the Protestant agenda, with a view to a project of civilisation that sought to compete with the Catholic Church and attain hegemony in the field of religion, particularly in Brazil, by working through interdenominational cooperation. The Sunday School teacher training project included travel to attend congresses, Protestant teacher training classes to prepare the churches’ lay teachers and use of the press as an educational setting. In that light, this study interprets the subjects in terms of their changing physical locations and ideas, as well as the teacher training-related models and pedagogical practices that circulated in the Protestant milieu from 1915 to 1949. The congresses examined are the III Convenção Nacional de Escolas Dominicais (1915) and the 11th World Sunday School Convention (1932), both hosted in Rio de Janeiro city (at the time, Brazil’s Federal District). These two events were attended by visitors from Brazil and abroad, who pondered issues in the study of pedagogical methods and models in the churches. In order to take part in the III Convenção, 250 North American travellers launched out aboard the vessel Krooland, in a crossing marked by specific geopolitical conditions. They disembarked in Rio de Janeiro, a capital city striving to civilise and embody republican values. At the 11th Convention, in 1932, it is possible to identify subjects –among them, Hugh Clarence Tucker, Erasmo de Carvalho Braga, Alexander Telford, Eduardo Moreira and Henriqueta Rosa Fernandes Braga – whoplayed a very specific role in the teacher-training project. The exception was Margaret Slattery, did not take part in the event, but was of the same generation as these intellectuals. In the teacher training classes, lay teachers received initial training guided by two handbooks that constituted specific examples of educational practices and texts framed by interpretations directed to a specific readership. Meanwhile, the fixed Sunday School sections in the Protestant press, which also targeted the churches’ teachers, talked about models for classes and pedagogical aspects of their work in church settings. Representations of the ideal teacher were made present in the press through authorised, symbolic discourse, as were aspects of the political, educational, economic, cultural and religious conjunctures of the period that set the tone for conducting the teacher training project in Brazil. The onset of decline in the Protestant civilising project was related to events in Brazil and the world, which influenced the Protestant labour of cooperation, leading to a weakening of the teacher training project, which earlier had been more systematic and organic. By the late 1940s, training was directed more to the individual teacher, in view of the new norms that had come to govern the field of religion and education in Brazil.