1 Introduction

The second half of the 1940s was characterized by debates about secondary education in Brazil. In the post-war political-social context and after Getúlio Vargas' dictatorship, those debates challenged the pedagogical traditionalism and the need for methodological renewal for secondary education along the lines of the Escola Nova and in contrast to the Capanema Reform. From the 1950s onwards, this pressure resulted in the integration of secondary education into the national education agenda and the first attempts at school renewal appeared (^{DALLABRIDA, 2017}).

The pioneer of this educational renovation was Luis Contier in 1951, who, contrary to the legislation in effect, began to take the first steps in applying active methods and pedagogical innovation (^{VIEIRA, 2015}). While the public school appropriated the Nouvelles classes' curricula, the Catholic private schools implemented their process of pedagogical renewal adopting the perspective of Pierre Faure's Personalized and Community Teaching, which was a kind of “[...] DYI teaching methods filtered by the Jesuit Catholicism of Pierre Faure” (^{DALLABRIDA, 2018}, p. 299) and proposed a set of educational practices to develop the student's awareness, responsibility, autonomy, and social and Christian education (DALLABRIDA; UNGLAUB; COSTA, 2020; ^{SCHREIBER, 2016}).

The experience carried out by Luis Contier, the circulation and dissemination of new practices in Catholic pedagogical meetings and magazines contributed to the strengthening of the pedagogical renewal movement so that the late 1950s was marked by the organization, officialization, and authorization of experimental classes in Brazilian secondary education (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}). In 1959, the new classes were authorized by the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC), but only on an experimental basis, and were known as “experimental classes” (^{VIEIRA, 2015}), and formally began to be implemented in some secondary schools, both public and private (mostly Catholic), especially in the state of São Paulo (^{DALLABRIDA, 2017}).

These experimental classes became a new school tradition when they were inserted in the first version of the Law of Directives and Bases of National Education (LDBEN) in 1961, when they became regular classes, and no longer existed on an experimental basis in courses or schools' programs with their own curricula, methods, and duration (BRASIL, 1961). The experimental classes were important initiatives in the history of Brazilian education, which is why we will focus our study on the investigation of the appropriation of Personalized and Community Pedagogy, which shaped school culture in the experimental classes of Colégio Santa Cruz, from 1959 to 1962, through the memories and interpretations of former student Henrique Lindberg Neto. This focus was chosen because Colégio Santa Cruz was a pioneer in Catholic educational renewal (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}) and the temporal delimitation because 1959 was the year that some Brazilian Catholic schools tentatively began to transform school culture in secondary education, based on Pierre Faure's pedagogical project (^{DALLABRIDA, 2018}).

Colégio Santa Cruz was founded in 1952 by the Congregation of the Fathers of the Holy Cross and directed by Father Lionel Corbeil. Seven years later, the first experimental class in a day boarding (full-time) regime for male students started, under the tutelage of the French teacher and Father Yvon Lafrance. Pursuing an all-encompassing education that brought together body, mind, and spirit, the school adopted Pierre Faure's Personalized and Community Education model, using the "philosophy of life" and training autonomous, responsible and pro-active students. To start the experiment, the school chose to draw among the 60 candidates registered for the 1959 academic year to fill the 30 vacancies of the experimental group, Lindberg Neto was among those chosen (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}). The empirical research of this work uses as the main source the interview given by Henrique Lindberg Neto to Norberto Dallabrida, on October 13, 2016, as an integral part of the institutional research “[...] school culture in experimental secondary classes in the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (the 1950s to 1960s)” (^{LINDBERG NETO, interview, 2016}).

Based on this source, we look for evidence of the renovating practices in the classroom and the process of appropriation of Personalized Teaching in the secondary classes of Colégio Santa Cruz in the period from 1959 to 1962. To this end, and having Le Goff's study (2003) as a reference, we rely on reflections on memory and the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Oral History as we understand memory as subjective and partial and also seek forgotten narratives to produce new meanings. To understand the practices, requirements, and pedagogical appropriations of Colégio Santa Cruz, we adopted ^{Chartier's perspective (1990}, 1992). He argues that cultural practices are appropriated by different groups and in different ways and that, therefore, social sharing happens creatively, generating different and opposing uses, operating through adjustments, combinations and resistances according to their aptitudes and expectations.

This work is organized into two parts to understand the distinction between the requirements and what was practiced during this experience. The first part shows how the reorganization of school space and time was carried out at Colégio Santa Cruz from the beginning of its experimental class. The second part approaches the school research as a new teaching proposal through directed study and the use of worksheets.

2 New school spaces and times

School time and space were produced in different ways throughout history to structure a type of education that met the social demands of each period. In the 18th century, the school sought to establish itself as an institution with its own culture through the construction of school buildings and the definition of learning times. In the 19th and 20th centuries, educational debates linked the schooling of knowledge to social times and spaces, indicating that programs and curricula were closely connected to the organization of time and space and the development of pedagogical methods (^{FARIA FILHO; VIDAL, 2000}).

Time and space are historical constructs and are aligned with the schooling process. In addition, they make it possible to question the school about its production, changes, and permanences contributing to “[...] discover infinite ways of living and, within life, infinite possibilities of making up the school and its subjects” (^{FARIA FILHO; VIDAL, 2000}, p. 21). In this sense, the different paths taken by the school permeate the different ways of elaborating and managing school time and space.

Thus, [school time and space] are always personal and institutional, individual and collective, and the attempt to delimit, control them, materializing them in years/grades, timetables, clocks, bells, or in classrooms specific areas, patios, individual or double desks, must be understood as a movement that had or proposed multiple trajectories of institutionalization of the school. (^{FARIA FILHO; VIDAL, 2000}, p. 21).

When analyzing the Brazilian conjuncture during the Capanema Reform, we can observe strategies of power and control in the organization of time and space. The school space is limited to the classroom, the students placed in rows, the vertical transmission of the verbalized content by the central figure of the teacher, and the delimitation of class schedules with specific time and order are characteristics prioritized from the perspective of the school's governing body and teachers rather than pedagogic (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}). On the other hand, the Escola Nova movement sought to distance itself from these traditional conceptions and undertake a renewal in this spatiotemporal organization. Its ideals were to provide constant activity to students and establish a new relationship between teacher and student, leaving the student at the center of the teaching and learning process, which would imply a change in the configuration of the classroom space. School space and time were now understood as educational agents and began to be used in new ways. New spaces, such as libraries and museums, were valued as spaces for learning and experimentation.

Thus, when starting the experimental classes, Colégio Santa Cruz sought to introduce these new conceptions of space and time, focusing on school innovation and research work guided by worksheets, allowing time to be flexible according to rhythm and capacities of each student, leading to a personalized division of time within the day and semester. The school was full time, so bi-weekly units were organized for each subject, in which the student worked individually in the mornings, with moments of socialization in the afternoons. The school year was divided into two semesters of eight fortnights each, totaling 16 fortnights (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}). Likewise, it demanded a new spatial arrangement of the classrooms and other socialization spaces in the school. Lighter furniture began to be used that would allow easy reconfiguration of the room, and specific classrooms were created for crafts and fine arts, natural sciences, and music (^{DALLABRIDA, 2018}).

Space is a social construction and, as such, it isn't neutral, thus carries its marks, symbols, and traces of the social relations of those who inhabit it. The apprehension of the lived-in space is an element that influences the formation of the personality and mentality of individuals and groups. Space can reveal memories of the subjects' practices that conditioned a certain space and that, in turn, were conditioned by it, because “Space communicates; opens or closes, but always shows, to those who know how to read, the use of it by humans” (^{VIÑAO FRAGO, 1996}, p. 64). The construction of the Colégio Santa Cruz physical space is related to the conditions of its own development, but also to do with the appropriation of the new pedagogical ideology that was simmering in the 1950s and 1960s and also to the changes undertaken in the Brazilian educational system, more precisely in São Paulo. The city, the birthplace of Brazilian industrialization, was experiencing a rise of new elites who sought their affirmation and social dominance through culture and intellectual distinction. Colégio Santa Cruz, with its advanced proposal of humanistic innovation and in contrast to traditional schools, had a modern and well-kept construction, with green spaces and sports courts, making it one of the first schools to implement school renovations in secondary education, meeting the expectations of the new São Paulo upper class (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}).

These architectural and spatial characteristics contributed to the construction of the school culture of Colégio Santa Cruz. This culture can be seen in the overview written by Nádia Cunha and Jayme ^{Abreu, in 1963}, of the experience that came off the experimental secondary classes and published in the Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos (^{ABREU; CUNHA, 1963}). This publication points out Colégio Santa Cruz as a highlight in the state of São Paulo in terms of physical structure, with modern, sober, and functional architecture, as well as didactic instruments and professional awareness. These advances in school architecture implemented at Colégio Santa Cruz were in line with Pierre Faure's renewing pedagogical model, which tried to establish an active school focused on the integrality of the person, to allow students to become active agents, the spatiotemporal dimension should be flexible so they could build their knowledge, developing their creativity and autonomy through individual study and research projects (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}). Classrooms should have easy-to-move furniture, cabinets with open shelves for easy organization of materials, documents, and books for study, thus making a didactic and active use of the school space and its surroundings (^{VIEIRA, 2015}). This aspect of the spatial structure at Colégio Santa Cruz is portrayed in the speeches of Lindberg Neto (interview, 2016, p. 8):

[...] another interesting thing is that we had many classes that weren't classes, they were studies [...] we had rooms with sliding doors, neighboring rooms with sliding doors, the room could double in size, and then one of them was a room for our class and the other for the year below, and then they opened it and we all studied together.

In addition to the innovation in the architecture of the classrooms and the use of spaces, there was also a complete adaptation of the classroom furniture to facilitate group work, the exhibition of written productions, and the interaction between students and between students and teachers:

[...] we did research, we sat at tables together, it wasn't individual, we sat at tables, there were no desks, we sat at tables in chairs around the table, but each one did their work. Because each monograph we did was an individual monograph, each of us did it. [...] we worked together because the room was not traditional, there were no desks, there were little tables, there is a photograph of our room [...]. (^{LINDBERG NETO, interview, 2016}, p. 11).

When reporting the work carried out in these spaces, Lindberg Neto describes it as “extraordinary” and “incredible”, highlighting the fact that there are no lectures and the fact that they researched to prepare their monographs using the worksheets they received. For this task, the students had books and other materials available on the classroom shelf and in the vast collection of the school's central library, as the former student recalls: “[...] the room had a shelf, on that shelf, there were a lot of history books, geography books, a lot of things, and then we researched” (^{LINDBERG NETO, interview, 2016}).

These spatial renovations required by Pierre Faure's active pedagogy required the creation of ambient rooms, which was adopted by Colégio Santa Cruz. The school implemented three ambient rooms: a visual arts and crafts room; natural sciences room, with separate areas for Biology, Physics, and Chemistry; and a projection and music room, used for History, Geography, and film clubs (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}). Through practical activities and moments of socialization, students built their knowledge, as Lindberg Neto recalls (2016, interview, p. 8): “[...] science classes, in general, were practical classes; we did frog dissection”. In addition to creating the ambient rooms, the school also invested in spaces dedicated to sports, given the importance of sports practices in the curriculum of experimental classes, which required the structuring of these spaces, changing the school architecture, and allowing students to expand their repertoire of environments available for different types of learning.

In addition to the new uses given to the traditional educational spaces of the school and the creation of new spaces, more adequate to the most modern concepts of education, the community space was also explored by the teachers. The school's surroundings, for example, became a natural laboratory for carrying out practical activities, such as a vegetable garden, milking cows that grazed close to the land, and hunting butterflies. There are also signs of field trips to cultural and artistic spaces, as the former student says: “[...] Father Lafrance liked art, I remember it very well, one day we went to the Bienal in Ibirapuera, we went to visit it [...]” (^{LINDBERG NETO, interview, 2016}, p. 6), which corroborates the idea of expanding the concept of learning space in this school. Another innovative aspect that provided the opportunity for students to learn in new spaces was the incentive of exchange activities in foreign institutions, for which students were well prepared in the domain of foreign languages, such as French and English.

The experience reports at Colégio Santa Cruz carried out by Father José describe the success of the experience through the organization of the school space and the organization of time (^{PRADO, 2016}). School times, as well as spaces, teach, internalize and represent knowledge and social behaviors and, therefore, are not impartial either. Experimental secondary classes have imposed a new rhythm to the school culture. In Pierre Faure's Personalized and Community Pedagogy, flexibility in time and students' autonomy in controlling their study time break with the imposed and rigid function of time control of traditional schools (^{VIEIRA, 2015}). For Pierre Faure, the student needed moments of silence and internalization, so time was a very important aspect for the understanding and assimilation of the content. His time organization strategy proposed flexibility in the practices scheduled for the day and not division by subjects, so the rhythm of each student should be respected by the teacher and the program (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}). Its pedagogical model was applied full-time, in which the mornings were used for mental and physical work and the afternoon period for artistic and manual activities. These temporal marks resurface in Lindberg Neto's memory (interview, 2016, p. 17): “[...] we were semi-boarders, we came in at 8am and left at 5pm”.

The organization of time was divided into fortnightly periods through study sheets, so students would learn to understand their time, program themselves, and organize their individual work (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}). Colégio Santa Cruz adhered to this proposal and, from the beginning of the experimental classes, practiced the rational planning of time, respecting the work rhythm and the resting time of teachers and students.

When organizing the school year, they provisioned holidays and fortnightly strategies for rest; this way, students and teachers would have two free afternoons per fortnight, as well as, every month and a half of classes, they were scheduled 'long weekends' and vacations during July. (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}, p. 40).

This new configuration of time gave a new rhythm to the school culture of the experimental secondary classes. “We were given worksheets of what we should study, during I think it was fifteen days” (^{LINDBERG NETO, interview, 2016}, p. 3). However, through the account of Lindberg's everyday experiences (interview, 2016, p. 17), it can be seen that there were differences between what was prescribed and what was practiced: “It was semi-boarding school and there was one day a week, which was Wednesday when we didn't have afternoon classes. Every week we had afternoon classes, except on Wednesdays”.

The practice of organizing content into worksheets and treating time as an important organizational topic and active work fostered the autonomy and freedom of students responsibly. When the former student recalls his experiences, it's clear that the students became self-taught and that this system worked well. Such freedom, controlled and always guided by the teachers, was used as a self-discipline strategy building new relationships between students and teachers and integrated into the school space and time, giving rise to a specific school culture.

3 Research as a learning principle

Personalized and community teaching advocated the concept of learning personalization without giving up collaborative work, focusing on preparing for life in society. Those objectives were accomplished using specific work instruments, such as work plans outlined by the students; the worksheets, the main element for Faure’s Personalized Pedagogy, which constituted the “[...] set of subjective, goal, direction, progression of stages, and working tools” (^{KLEIN, 1998}, p. 53), and also by a vast collection of learning material, which allowed the realization of these plans by students through research. This process was organized by didactic moments, composed of stages of independent work, group work, sharing, synthesis, and personal notes, in no fixed order and flexible according to students' needs. From this perspective, the teacher assumed the role of learning organizer and the students took a leading role in the construction of knowledge (^{DALLABRIDA, 2018}).

By entering the movement of pedagogical renewal and setting up its first experimental classes, Colégio Santa Cruz undertook significant changes in its educational practices. When analyzing the educational experiment carried out in this school, based on the report of Father Yvon de Lafrance (1963), ^{Schreiber (2016}) highlights that teaching in the experimental classes at Colégio Santa Cruz valued individual, active work and focused on professional life, inspired by Faure's pedagogy, and adopted research-based activities, directed study, and worksheets as main methodological strategies. However, for Schreiber (2016), the appropriation of Personalized Pedagogy carried out in this school did not take place integrally or immediately, but it was a slow, creative, and adapted appropriation, especially concerning the worksheets. According to the author, Lafrance disagreed that students chose the subjects, as they could stagnate in what they wanted, and he believed that they could exercise freedom in another way. As such, the pedagogical practice of Colégio Santa Cruz was characterized by the active methodology, the construction of autonomy and freedom, and the appreciation of the student's personal work and the practice concentrated its strategies on worksheets and research; access to the class and college library; longer individual work time; and organization of seminars (LAFRANCE, 1963 apud^{SCHREIBER, 2016}).

The school practices proposed by Pierre Faure's Personalized and Community Pedagogy appropriated inspirations from the Dalton Plan study program, Maria Montessori's ideas of self-discipline, and Robert Dottrens's card system (^{SCHREIBER, 2016}). In conjunction with these practices, ^{Schreiber (2016}, p. 57) identified at Colégio Santa Cruz the use of directed study, an educational proposal that was put into practice by educators:

In this proposal, teachers should, during the school period, analyze the progress of each student according to their worksheet, making adaptations if necessary and making corrections, both in individual and group activities. Then, the knowledge acquired was assessed and, if necessary, a series of specific exercises were recommended for the student and, at the same time, the teacher guided students with deficits in the subject with greater attention.

This innovative methodology for monitoring and guiding the students' training path by the teacher highlights the personalized nature of teaching, the active role of the student, and the teacher's tutorial and technical aspect, in short, "[...] it was up to the students to find out, through from the teacher’s guidance, what they were looking for” (^{PRADO, 2016}apud^{SCHREIBER, 2016}, p. 51).

The research and textual production point to the development of individual capabilities, which were always be guided by the teachers, who sought to balance the contents and activities, encouraging the student to go beyond what was thought in their initial work plan (LAFRANCE, 1963 apud^{SCHREIBER, 2016}). Lindberg Neto (interview, 2016, p. 5) enthusiastically recalls the motivation he had for literature:

And then we read a lot, everyone participated in literature, we read a lot, then we wrote an essay about what we had read and we also wrote short stories, and then these short stories, I don't know if all, or the best, and then that was given to writers who were invited to appreciate our work, to read what we had written, and then there were sessions where they would go there and comment on the work we had done, I remember Lygia Fagundes Telles very well. She was one of the people who did it.

The focus of individualized teaching was the non-homogenization of the class, the directed study with constant teacher instigation, considering the ability, interest, and rhythm of each student, allowing the personalization of learning (^{KLEIN, 2014}).

The worksheets became the central point in the teaching strategy used by Lafrance at Colégio Santa Cruz as soon as the experimental class began. These sheets should be prepared by the teachers and indicate the concepts to be studied during the fortnight; the deadline; the number of forms for research; and the fortnightly work verification day, with moments reserved for the presentation of research results, collective evaluation, and mutual learning. The dynamics of the studies carried out through the worksheets is shown through the speech of former student Lindberg Neto (interview, 2016, p. 3-4) when he recalls his history classes:

[...] I remember history well, for example, we received worksheets with what should be studied, for I think it was fifteen days. [...] I think we had a period to study a certain subject. And then there was, for example, let's take the Egyptians, so we had to write a work, an essay on the Egyptians, addressing the geography of Egypt, then the political, religious system, the economy of Egypt [...].

When analyzing Father Lafrance's report and the interview with Father José, a teacher of experimental class at Colégio Santa Cruz, Scheireber (2016, p. 57) describes how worksheets worked in classroom practice:

According to Lafrance (1963), to the Work Sheets to work at the school, they were fixed fortnightly on the board and were filled in by the teachers. According to Professor Fr. José (2016), the worksheets were made manually and delivered to the students. They all had the same guidelines and questions; however, each would fill in in their own time and in the order that best suited them. [...] To provide greater control on the part of the student, they had the list of contents marked in their notebooks for scheduling and daily organization.

After the publication of the biweekly study plan by the teachers for each student, followed a personal effort to reach the established goals, which were transformed into a daily schedule of studies by the students, who did them according to their organization and their time, reflecting the freedom and autonomy that was embedded in this process.

Thus, the experimental classes of Colégio Santa Cruz were organized in a very different way from the regular classes, focusing on the students' personal work, varying between the teachers' exposition of the subject; collective correction of fortnightly assignments; students' oral exposition; and seminars. Although they were also part of the methodology used in the experimental classes, the expositive lectures had a different aspect, as the former student didn't comment on them:

[...] we had the schedules, we did our research and then we wrote a text about it. This text was then read by the teacher and that's when there was something, but they weren't lectures, but then there was a class in which the teacher would comment on everyone's work in front of the class. And I thought this system was fantastic. (^{LINDBERG NETO, interview, 2016}, p. 3-4).

The work directed by the worksheets was transformed into authorial texts to be appreciated by teachers and colleagues in collective moments that seemed to be, at the same time, instructive, evaluative, and redirecting activities. The moments of socialization of the work weren't limited to the discussion in the classroom, but also took place through the exhibition of the work and interaction with intellectuals and artists who were invited to go to the school to comment on the students' works and appreciate them (^{LINDBERG NETO, interview, 2016}).

By analyzing the pedagogical practices of Colégio Santa Cruz from the appropriation of personalized teaching, ^{Schreiber (2016}, p. 56) understands that the school “[...] chose to keep most of Faure's indications, but the particularities of the practice in this experience weren't excluded”, which is evidenced by the primordial use of worksheets and inattention to other procedures of the methodology indicated by Faure, allowing an adaptation of the school culture in the daily life of its practices.

4 Final considerations

This work provided an analysis of the pedagogical renovation that took place at Colégio Santa Cruz when the experimental class was operating from 1959 to 1962. Even though it was reported as an incredible experience by Lindberg Neto, he agrees that it was a system that demanded too much from teachers (^{LINDBERG NETO, interview, 2016}) and that it also required high financial resources, pointing out the graduation of only one experimental class before the end of the experience.

Research as a learning principle is evidenced in Pierre Faure's active pedagogy. The guided study and the worksheets allowed the development of autonomy and responsibility in students, learning and intellectual enrichment that remain for life and that, as signaled by Lindberg Neto, make us reflect on the current difficulty of students to prepare a research.

The new spatial uses and the new temporal configuration of school daily life built important milestones that were remembered and that contributed to the emergence of a “school DNA”, which gave students in the experimental class similar characteristics in behavior, clothing, and communication (^{LINDBERG NETO, interview, 2016}). The new configurations of spaces and school time contributed to the integral formation of students, as they developed self-discipline through controlled freedom made possible by the spaces and times of individual and collective studies.

This study allowed us to understand that, even though it was a short experience, it outlined a new model of student, school, and the relationship between teacher and student, which deserves other interpretations and perspectives, so that active pedagogies, such as Personalized and Community Pedagogy, can bring contributions to the improvement of current teaching, forming more autonomous, self-taught and critical students.