Symbols of school excellence: history and memory of the public school inscribed in trophies

Abstract

This text explores the possibilities of using school artifacts as documents to investigate the history of the education institutions considering these objects as communications vectors and conductors of values and significances built and sedimented in the school practices. As such, starting from the activities of archive organization and cataloguing of a set of trophies obtained by a public primary school in the interior of São Paulo state, the text discusses the potentials of these objects as sources of research considering its materials, as regards to the writings found in them, to the recurrent symbols, to the type of the production material, up to the events in which they were obtained and to the year they were obtained. The text goes on to discuss the semantic dimension of the trophies as symbols of education excellence, the relation they maintain with the institution memory and the limits of these objects as source of information.