Teaching: a family tradition

This paper gathers the results of prosopographical study developed within the course Research Practice Researching Culture in School, under the guidance of professor Maria Helena Camara Bastos in the doctoral program in Education at PUCRS. Prosopographical studies are frequent in the analysis of family clusters in different areas, such as Politics, Economy and Medicine, but they are not common in the area of teaching, the aim of this paper. A method that combines both brief biographical data and prosopography - as presented by Sandra Maria do Amaral (2005) was used for a case study of the Guadagnin family. Nine of the seventeen children of Luiz and Elisa Guadagnin chose teaching as their occupation, followed by 28 grandchildren. This was the corpus for the search of common characteristics in the group. Photographs, school records, and oral reports by the study. Conclusions point out that the professional life of the family intertwines with the history of education in the Italian immigration culture itself, by revealing common school practices in a given time. Furthermore, the study signals to the social prestige associated to the profession of teaching as one of the reasons of the choice by the descendents of the Guadagnin family.