THE TEACHER’S LABOUR IN SCHOOL EXERCISE BOOKS: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. School exercise books are important documentary sources that enable the study of the methodology, teaching strategies and patterns on which each teacher relied for support. They constitute a record of his way of working in a specific space and time - in this case, in the province of Malaga during the period of national-Catholicism. The study focuses on a collection of school exercise books that serve as primary sources, framed in a specific historical and educational context. METHODS. A qualitative study has been carried out in order to establish the emergent categories that have appeared during the process of reviewing the school exercise books. In this way, it was possible to include new variables arising from the documents. This work did not start out from preconceived conceptual categories, but rather identified them as the data was reviewed in order to carry out a descriptive analysis. This analysis allows us to access the knowledge of subjective processes where our main interest is the perspective of the social actors involved. RESULTS. An analysis of school exercise books has allowed us to demonstrate the potential and limitations they have as a source for research in the History of Education, and also to deduce the organization of school times and the intervention of the teacher in the evaluation process. DISCUSSION. From these results, we can conclude that school exercise books are effective assessment tools that allow teachers to continuously evaluate the teaching process and to guide subsequent learning achievements. They also offer students the opportunity to integrate their knowledge in a positive way and allow us to recover the learning processeses associated with different school models.