THE PLACES OF THE BOOK IN GEOGRAPHY: APPROACHES IN THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BOOK AND IN THE HISTORY OF SCHOOL GEOGRAPHY

Abstract

The text analyzed approaches that geography developed involving the book, with the goal of producing geographical knowledge and to comprehend the field itself. Therefore, how had this science studied the book, in general, and the geography textbook, in particular, to produce, reproduce and disseminate knowledge? In this way, we did a critical analyzes about theoretic-methodological aspects of two approaches: “geography of the book” and “history of school geography”, since they have been dedicated to the study of this object and/ or using it as a documentary source. Hence, we looked to present and discuss theoretical and methodological aspects of both approaches. In the first one, there was an emphasis on considering space as one of the agents related to the production, distribution and consumption of books. In the second, the methods aimed to analyze the contents and curriculums, which have neglected a geographic examination of the school discipline’s historical pathway. We sought to highlight the potential of approaches that value the material dimension of the book, as a physical, concrete object, materialized in space and that arrange a system of actions and objects. In the end, we emphasized some possible ways to the history of school geography field taking into account the recognition of the material and historical dimension of the textbook and its analysis, from a geographical perspective.