EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITIES: A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF UNCONVENTIONAL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES IN BOARDING SCHOOLS, COLONIES, ORPHANAGES AND SCHOOL-RESIDENCES

Abstract

This article seeks to compose a historical overview of the pedagogical and institutional organization of what we are calling "unconventional educational communities", that is, institutions that have merged school practice with the housing of educators and students, where children and adults live and cohabit in the space where they learn and educate, They form "boarding schools", "colonies", "orphanages", "school-residences" that are organized by their members collectively managing the institution and proposing important transformations in the educational processes with considerable degrees of autonomy and pedagogical creativity.

We start from the institutions coordinated by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel and Liev Tolstoi, then we discuss the anarchist educational communities coordinated by Paul Robin and Sébatien Faure, the democratic orphanages coordinated by Janusz Korczak, the educational socialist colonies of Anton Semionovich Makarenko, the self-managed boarding school of Homer Lane, and the CIEPs in the state of Rio de Janeiro. We also mention some more recent and still existing cases, such as the Summerhill School, the "Krishnamurti schools" and the Escola SESC de Ensino Médio.

We used as a method the analysis of historiographic texts and cited some reports for more contemporary cases.

We were able to conclude that the format of "boarding-schools" and orphanages with the inclusion of school practices were paradigmatic institutional models between the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and that nowadays the few cases in these formats are maintained by institutions run by religious organizations. However, we bring in our text some examples of rupture to the conventional pedagogical paradigm that occurred in some contemporary educational communities.