Educational Journals and Worldwide Circulation of Pedagogical Knowledge: Brazil and Portugal (1921?1935)

This article focuses on the circulation of educational models between Portugal and Brazil (from 1920 to 1935), within a broader context of an intensive international transfer of "ways of thinking" about education. It describes and analyses the results from research on two educational journals, one Portuguese (Revista Escolar) the other from the Brazilian State of Sao Paulo (Education). Central to this text is the notion that educational journals constitute important vehicles for the production and regulation of knowledge as well as for the formation of specialized fields in education. Thus, the article gives particular attention to the selective mobilization of foreign educational models (countries, authors and educational organizations), within a framework of analysis committed to the articulation of the processes of diffusion and reception of educational knowledge. The article presents the characteristics of both journals, in the face of those (geo-political and intellectual) international references, and compares the relations of affiliation and affinity with foreign models displayed by each journal. The analysis shows: (i) the centrality of authors and organizations associated with the New Education in the promotion of knowledge that proposes to mediate scientific production and pedagogical practice; (ii) the existence of differences regarding the foreign countries that are taken as models for education improvement at a national scale; (iii) the presence of different spaces for the (worldwide) circulation of pedagogical models (the New Education circuit and the Latin-American circuit); (iv) the scarce referencing of the other "who speaks the same language." Results are discussed by taking into consideration their relationships with the structuration of pedagogical discourses and organisations, in both national and international spheres.