Cartography in Textbooks Published Between 1824 and 2002 in Brazil - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 77

with the formulation of the syllabus for every subject taught in secondary schools in
the whole country. Consequently, the access to the above-mentioned documents
was essential for the development of this work.
In relation to the criteria for selecting the textbooks used as source of informa-
tion for the research, we used as major parameters: the works of authors mentioned
in the researches of Issler ( 1973 ), Colesanti ( 1984 ), Vechia and Lorenz ( 1998 ),
Gasparello ( 2002 , 2006 ) and Vechia ( 2007 ), which, according to those specialists,
stood out in the Brazilian educational circle until the third quarter of the twentieth
century; and, with relation to the most recent textbooks, published from the
seventies on, we opted for the ones that, according to information provided by the
person in charge of the collection in the visited publishers, stood out in terms of
adoption, both in private and governmental purchases in the last four decades.
In the event of textbooks of a same author that were republished during a long
period of time—works called “editorial success”—we selected editions for the first
year of secondary education, with intervals of some years between them, intending
to verify developments carried out by the author in the way that the contents of
Cartography were worked. Actually, in several cases, there was not a possibility to
perform a sequential analysis of the editions due to shortages of some of them in the
consulted collections, even in the own collections of the publishers. This fact
referred us to a matter already mentioned by Bittencourt ( 1993 ) related to a
characteristic of textbooks. As they are products that are quickly consumed, almost
in a disposable way, in accordance with the changes in the curricular and market
context, these publications create a paradox. Even if the titles have a great circula-
tion—that is since the beginning of the twentieth century—they are badly preserved
by the society in general, including the very publishers which produce and com-
mercialize them in the whole country, because, in accordance with we could
observe, few of them invest in the organization and conservation of their own
collection of works already published.
Regarding the consulted curricular programmes, our main sources were the
following documents: the topic “Programa de ensino da escola secund ´ ria brasileira:
1850-1951”, under the authorship of Professors Aricl ˆ Vechia e Karl Michael
Lorenz, from Universidade Federal do Paran ´ , in which the old official programmes
fromCol´gio Pedro II were consulted, all of them drawn up and published during the
period of Empire in Brazil; the dissertation “O ensino de Geografia atrav´s do livro
did´tico no per´odo de 1890 a 1971”, under the authorship of Professor Marlene
Teresinha de Muno Colesanti, published under orientation of Professor L´via de
Oliveira, in 1984, in which we looked up for the programmes of curricular reforms
occurred during the First Republic and the New Republic in Brazil; the documents
“Guias Curriculares Propostos para as Mat´rias do N´cleo Comum do Ensino de 1o
Grau”, drawn up by the Centre of Human Resources and Educational Researches
“Professor Laerte Ramos de Carvalho” (CERHUPE), published in 1975, and the
“Proposta Curricular para o Ensino de Geografia/1o Grau”, drawn up by the Coordi-
nation Office of Studies and Pedagogic Principles, first edition published in 1988,
both institutions part of the Education Department of S˜o Paulo State, where we
consulted the curricular programmes of Social Science and Geography, for the