Cartography in Textbooks Published Between 1824 and 2002 in Brazil - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 78

second half of the seventies and for the eighties and nineties, respectively. As in this
period, the Federal Government, through the Law of Directives and Bases of
Education, No. 5692/71, decentralised the establishment of curricular proposals,
we tried to get information about cartographic contents from these documents
because we believe that S˜o Paulo has become a national reference; and lastly, the
document “Geografia”, for the fifth to the eighth grade, or the third and fourth cycles
of Primary Education from the “Par ˆ metros Curriculares Nacionais” (PCNs),
established and published by the Ministry of Education, in 1998 (Brazilian Depart-
ment of Elementary Education).
Based on the criteria of selection already mentioned, for this study we consulted 13
(thirteen) official curricular programmes and 37 (thirty-seven) teaching materials,
among compendia and textbooks.
After selecting the materials, the next step comprised of recording the data and
information extracted that would be the basis for our analysis. After trying some
resources, like making photocopies of topics, we concluded that the best way to
store the pages of the topics, in order to subsequently analyze them, would be by
means of digital photography. Therefore, we photographed the pages of the official
programmes and the minutes of the Teachers Council of Col´gio Pedro II, as well as
the compendia and textbooks that had some concepts (especially the ones of public
use or model exercise) linked to Cartography. Altogether, we accumulated around
5,730 images in JPG format.
The criteria to choose the Cartographic contents present in the curricula and
textbooks were based on the analysis of the Simielli ( 1993 , 1996 , 2008 ), Almeida
et al. ( 1997 ), Almeida ( 2003 ) and Le Sann ( 2005 ) studies, which helped us to
compile a set of notions, concepts and cartographic subjects. As far as we under-
stand, these contents were historically established as Cartography contents to be
taught in Geography classes in Brazil. The Tables 6.1 , 6.2 and 6.3 bring the contents
extracted from the above-mentioned studies.
Based on the contents indicated in the mentioned tables (Tables 6.1 , 6.2 , 6.3 ), we
drew up a cluster of notions, concepts and subjects, divided in some large thematic
groups in order to consider a universe of School Cartography contents developed in
the Brazilian secondary education. In the Table 6.4 are presented the groups created
with their respective contents.
Based on this last table, we started reading the official programmes and the pages
of the selected textbooks, trying to identify the presence of the chosen cartographic
contents.

Table 6.1 Cartographic
contents proposed by Maria
Elena Simielli ( 1993 )

Shapes Proportion

Symbols Measurements

Legend Scale

Oblique view Grids/tables

Vertical view Coordinates

Representation in the plane Maps (interpretation)

Generalisation Aerial photographs

Laterality Scale model

Direction/orientation Localisation