Research on education: necessary dialogues between Didactics, History and Anthropology

The production of research on constitutive processes of the school experience in its multiple dimensions imposes the necessity of permanent debate about the investigation approaches, their limits and possibilities. Research about teaching, particularly, have been stimulating the debate on presuppositions and strategies for the performance of empirical works, based on the dialogue with the social sciences. The presence of ethnographical approaches, although with different perspectives, evidences the contribution of anthropology to educational research, through the incorporation of several elements to the ways of producing knowledge about the school and the classroom. It is necessary to recognize the transformations produced by Brazilian educational research through the incorporation of the concept of culture; at the same time, it is necessary to point out the difficulties in overcoming the a-historical character of such concept. The recent debates indicate the possibilities of establishing closer relationships between education and historical anthropology, integrating the temporal dimension into the ethnographical research which study current schooling processes, including those characterized particularly as didactical situations.