Artigo:

"Many researchers and authors assert that design education in Brazil originated with the establishment of the Industrial Design degree program at ESDI in Rio de Janeiro. However, they often overlook the possibility of earlier courses existing at other educational levels within the country. This perspective was reinforced in 1988 by 25 higher education institutions offering Industrial Design programs, who participated in the ""Design Teaching in the 1990s"" workshop and subsequently presented the Canasvieiras Charter. The Canasvieiras Charter aimed to foster improvements in design education in Brazil through the creation of the Brazilian Association for Design Education (ABED) and to propose a revision of the terminology used to describe design activities. The goal was to establish ""Design"" as an official term, along with its derivatives, Industrial Design and Graphic Design. To achieve these objectives, the charter outlined 32 proposals, two of which addressed design education at the secondary level. The first proposal stipulated that the terms Design, Industrial Design, Visual Communication, Product Design, and Product Project should be restricted to tertiary education. The rationale behind this restriction was to avoid confusion regarding qualifications and ensure that secondary education programs did not falsely represent themselves as providing professional-level design training. The fourth proposal suggested that recommendations be sent to the Ministry of Education (MEC) to encourage the development and enhancement of technical courses at the secondary level. These courses would aim to equip students with the skills necessary for representing and detailing design projects under the guidance of designers. It was emphasized that these secondary-level courses would not qualify students to independently develop design projects. In contrast to the 1988 Canasvieiras Letter and the prevailing argument in studies on design education in Brazil, this paper seeks to analyze the teaching of graphic design in vocational technical schools, focusing on the Technical Course in Graphic Arts at the Industrial College of Graphic Arts of São Paulo, founded by Senai in partnership with the Union and the City Hall in 1971. The central question to be addressed is whether the qualification in visual graphic production offered to students of the technical course in graphic arts was characterized by practical design activities or was limited to replicating existing projects created by other designers. The research is currently in its final stages, involving data collection, the search for primary sources to support the central research question, data analysis, and dissertation writing. The research methods employed to achieve the proposed objectives include the analysis of books, academic articles, and documentary materials gathered from the Senai-SP archives and the technical archive of the Senai Theobaldo de Nigris School. These sources are complemented by interviews with former teachers and students at the school. The primary challenges encountered in the research have been locating the necessary documentation to answer the central question and identifying former students who attended the school during its early years."