Between Conservatism and Modernization in Teacher Training for Children’s Physical Education (1976-1983)

MANSI, ANA DANIELA; GALAK, EDUARDO

Mylán

Congreso; International Standing Conference for the History of Education; 2022

The aim is to analyze educational technologies used as a didactic resource in the teacher training of children’s Physical Education in the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina. For this, two series of photographic slides were used by the teaching staff in charge of the subject Physical Education for Children (Educación Física Infantil) at the National Institute of Physical Education “Dr. Enrique Romero Brest”, one of the main teacher training establishments in the City of Buenos Aires. In addition, they were used in various spaces for teacher education and training, which were instances of socialization of specific knowledge. They were courses proposed and financed by different official institutions, such as the National Directorate of Physical Education, Sports and Recreation, and the National Union of Educators of Preschool. At the same time, in the historical period studied, the subjects destined for childhood as objects of study gain curricular space in the professional training of Physical Education, resignifying their meanings and discourses. It is also significant to point out that this historical period is marked in Argentina by a civicmilitary dictatorship, in which the state assumes a paternalistic role that bends democratizing positions. Consequently, teacher training institutions were plagued by authoritarianism and technocratic education projects.Through this work, we will question Physical Education teacher training through the analysis of photographic slides. The material is made up of a series imported from Germany and another generated by the Argentine teachers themselves, which includes about fifty images that are characterized by addressing pedagogical issues that are associated with physical culture, childhood, and teaching methods. In this sense, images become an instrument and a valid tool to discover aspects of the portrayed world and its various representations. For their study, we subject them to constant criticism, questions, and reflections (Triquell, 2015), from which it is possible to reconstruct, in addition to what can be seen, the conditions of production, conservation, and the meanings they have for the institutions that reserve and preserve them. Precisely, according to Inés Dussel (2010), photographs in the educational field support both a didactic and a cultural argument. That is, the image is used as both a source and an object. For this reason, for the current study, we ask: what place did educational technologies occupy in the teacher training of children’s Physical Education in the 70s and 80s? What visual discourses did these series of photographs build? How was Physical Education for children taught through static images? What role did these educational technologies play in the modernization of higher education in the field of children’s physical education?