Lições de identidade presentes em livros didáticos de séries iniciais∗ Identity lessons in early grades of elementary school textbooks

While men technologies spread throughout the country, the role that textbooks play in classrooms is unquestionable. Further than a tool widely used by teachers (men and women) in their educational practices, textbooks are cultural artefacts producing knowledge. Multiple cultural pedagogies are present and circulate in them, teaching lessons that go much beyond the curricular content, encouraging students (men or women) to be in particular subject positions. From these observations, the present paper is devoted to analysing the current, active and cultural pedagogies in textbooks, most specifi cally the so-called gauchismo pedagogy, a term that was coined to designate how people learn to be a “Gaucho” (someone from Rio Grande do Sul state) in different social and cultural situations. The study has investigated how the gauchismo pedagogy is present in early grades of elementary school history textbooks, from 1960 to 2005, its recurrences and ruptures. Data points to a prevailing way to understand the Gaucho identity, particularly relating it to the symbolic and mythic Gaucho. This prevailing representation is a strong cultural pedagogy, producing knowledge, which teaches how to be a Gaucho, encouraging students to be in subject positions and identifying with this pedagogy.