From living in the countryside, to school lessons

Abstract

The daily life of a small rural community reveals the permanence of an ancestral and fruitful praxis, coexisting with modern concepts and practices. The community preserves what it has validated in the realm of experience, while incorporating and consuming, from modern production, what interests it. The daily work in the community, practiced according to customs prior to industrialization, also opens up to the insertion of modern products. Immersed in different temporalities, the rural community is home to a school. The objective of this study was to seek the coexistence of these different temporalities in a rural school, and to seek lessons from the community that could be incorporated by the school. The methodology used – research with daily life – incorporated some guidelines from oral history, narrative research, (auto)biographical research and the regressive-progressive method. The results of the study indicate that, as an heir to modern concepts, the rural school reproduces propositions that make space, time, knowledge, practice and language fragmented and homogeneous – at the same time that the rural school inscribes, in this structure, other modes arising from collective work, slow and cyclical processes, solidarity and shared knowledge.