The concern with the issue of school culture has arisen in the context of a turn taken by the works in the history of education and of an ever so fruitful confluence with the discipline of History, be it for the practice of gathering, organization and expansion of the documental mass of data to be used in the analyses, be it by the acceptance of legitimacy protocols from the historiographic narrative. The article represents a synthesis of the investigations that have been conducted by researchers, and intends to apprehend how school culture has been taken on board by the field of History of Brazilian Education as a category of analysis and as a topic of study. To such purpose, the paper is composed of three parts. The first part deals with the most commonly used definitions of school culture. Works by Dominique Julia, André Chervel, Jean-Claude Forquin and António Viñao Frago are focused here in an attempt to establish similarities and differences between the ideas of the various authors. The dissemination of these texts in Brazil is also discussed in this first part. The second part of the article, without any intention of representing a complete bibliographic review or a comprehensive listing of titles and authors, draws attention to some of the dimensions of the Brazilian education reality, which the researchers have been trying to understand with the aid of the notion of school culture. Finally, the article points out some of the challenges that have to be faced in carrying on these studies and in strengthening the theoretical-methodological foundations of the studies that use the general framework discussed here.
School culture; History of Education; School practices