School newspapers as loci for the interconnection of practices, memories and cultures (Santa Catarina, 1940s)

Abstract

School newspapers, saved from the ravages of time, are records of school memories, of its practices and subjects. Student-penned, teacher-supervised school newspaper Anjo da Guarada, published from 1942 to 1951 at Padre Anchieta, a school group based on Florianópolis (capital city of the Brazilian southern state of Santa Catarina), is one such school memory record. This paper presents  the newspaper and its context of production and reflect on how the school’s cultures and practices interconnected with historical and political dimensions in the handwritten and beautifully illustrated pages of the school newspaper. This document is viewed as capable of informing school-culture singularities, albeit under control. Its texts, notes and images are traces of the relations between the Catholic Church and the state of Santa Catarina in child education, where readings of the past and expectations for the future are noticeable in the midst of the political nationalization project afoot since the first decades of the 20th century, intensified in the late 1930s with Estado Novo and echoed in the following decades.