PEDAGOGICAL MUSEUMS IN ACADEMIC LITERATURE: AN ANALYSIS OF BRAZILIAN THESES AND DISSERTATIONS
Pedagogical museums; academic production; teacher education; school material culture; Mathematics Education.
This dissertation investigates the contributions of Brazilian academic productions (master’s theses and doctoral dissertations) that address pedagogical museums, with emphasis on their purposes, theoretical-methodological approaches, and formative potential within the educational context, particularly regarding teacher education and possible articulations with the field of Mathematics Education. It is based on the understanding that pedagogical museums constitute spaces for mediating memory, school material culture, and pedagogical practice, configuring themselves as historical and formative devices within educational policies. The research is characterized as a qualitative and interpretative bibliographic study, combining bibliometric analysis and thematic analysis procedures. The corpus consisted of Brazilian master’s theses and doctoral dissertations selected according to previously established criteria, with the aim of mapping and systematizing the scientific production on the subject. Data analysis was grounded in the assumptions of content analysis and reflexive thematic analysis, enabling the identification of patterns of meaning, conceptual recurrences, and structuring themes within the studies examined. The analysis of the 21 selected theses and dissertations demonstrates the predominance of investigations focused on institutional historicity and musealization processes, whereas only a minority explicitly articulate pedagogical museums with teacher education. A predominance of approaches centered on school memory, material culture, and musealization processes is observed, to the detriment of more in-depth analyses of the formative potential of these institutions in both initial and continuing teacher education. Conceptual fragmentation between school museums and pedagogical museums is also identified, indicating the need for greater theoretical precision. It is concluded that, although recognized as educational spaces, pedagogical museums still require further investigation into their formative dimension and their articulation with pedagogical practices, especially within the field of Mathematics Education, highlighting gaps and possibilities for advancing knowledge in this field.