1 CARTOGRAPHIC LANGUAGE AND PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE: TEACHING LOCAL GEOGRAPHY WITH A MUNICIPAL SCHOOL ATLAS

Abstract: At events on School Cartography in Brazil, local school atlases have been one of the subjects most frequently presented. However, further research is necessary to elucidate how these materials can be used in teachers practices. To this end, a collaborative research was conducted involving fifteen teachers, to investigate the production of knowledge about space based on a local atlas. This article discusses the findings from 4th grade classes (10-year-olds) engaged in school activities about the schools surroundings. We found that, by drawing the route from home to school, the students attempted to graphically shape what they observed and experienced along this route, thus establishing a strong identity between their pictures and the route. The teachers, on the other hand, had expected the pictures to reflect shapes resembling those found on maps. It is interesting to note the different meanings the legends took on in this process. School Cartography emerged quite recently on the Brazilian educational scene, where production in this line of investigation was incipient up to the 1990s. Colloquiums on Cartography for Children, held biennially since 1995, stimulated the increase of publications and brought together a growing number of people interested in the subject. In the opening conference of the 1st Iberian-American Symposium on Cartography for Children (ALMEIDA, 2002), we noted the almost total absence of papers about the importance of cartographic knowledge in teachers education. This is therefore an important field of research, since it involves Licentiate courses and the actions aimed at continued teacher training relevant actions for the inclusion of Cartography teaching in the school curriculum. Moreover, the paper