A Federação Nacional das APAES e seu periódico (1963-1973): estratégias, mensagens e representações dos apaeanos em (re)vista

Abstract

This doctoral research in education addresses the printed Mensagem da Apae as source and object. It is a periodical created and edited, since January of 1963, by the Federação Nacional das Apaes (Fenapaes), and has not yet been extinguished. It is intended to investigate, for the moment, only the initial phase of this publication (1963-1973), since it is an emblematic period, evidencing the articulations of the apaeanos agents before the National Center for Special Education was created in 1973 (Cenesp), the first organ of the federal government directed specifically to this educational modality, as well as by the own material, historical and textual characteristics of the institutional periodical. The central problem of this research is: What were the representations and strategies disseminated and/or adopted by the Mensagem da Apae (1963-1973), through its editorial project, to fulfill the mission of being a Fenapaes spokesperson and, thus, to address the problematic of the exceptional, (con)forming a certain representation of these subjects, their education and the apaeana federated identity itself? In order to answer this and other underlying questions, it is a general objective to analyze and understand such representations and strategies (pro)posed, (re)produced and/or assumed by the press of the Fenapaes in the period considered. For the development of the thesis, elaborated as a historical research, it adopts the theoretical-methodological reference of the New Cultural History, resorting to the editions of Mensagem da Apae as the sources of the investigation, from the perspective of an archeology of the printed matter. The concepts of representation and strategy, respectively developed by Chartier and Certeau, are used as cores in conducting the analyzes. The results indicate that Mensagem da Apae was, from the outset, the instrument that institutionalized a space and a time around which Fenapaes’ efforts, orientations and initiatives were converged, in relation to what it denominated as the “problematic of the exceptional”, made their fighting flag. The edition of the periodical was, above all, a practice in which the apaeanos (re)elaborated the tensions that made up the field of exceptionality in Brazil, in the conjuncture addressed, undertaking, according to their wishes and purposes, a strategic and readable rationalization of such problematic, on the basis of which they delimited their spaces of power and knowledge. In this way, they have impacted the special education of the exceptional and the political debates on this theme, forging a certain way of conceiving and reading the exceptionality in our country, that is, that linked, above all, to philanthropy, therapy and Christian benevolence. It is hoped, therefore, to expand the scope of research on the historical-educational heritage of Special Education in Brazil, an area that still needs to be thematized in Brazilian educational historiography, especially the investigative possibilities opened by the sources of the periodical press.