ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Teacher Maria Ceres Rodrigues Murad studied Pedagogy at the Federal University of Maranhão, Brazil (1979) where she qualified in Educational Orientation.

She specialised in Social Psychology and completed a Masters in Primary Education (1996) with a dissertation entitled “Partner Parents in the Process of Learning to Read”. 

She also completed a doctorate at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil (PUC) in 2007, with the thesis “Opera as a mediator in the process of learning and development of low-income children in Year 1: a Vygotskian perspective”.

She taught Education Psychology at the Federal University of Maranhão, Brazil for 15 years. She was Pedagogical Director of Dom Bosco School, São Luís, Maranhão, Brazil where she started in 1974 as teaching assistant, developing projects dedicated to the education of children, with particular interest in reading and writing. Currently, she still runs projects in the school and is Academic Director of UNDB, a college that is part of the same institution.

During her years at the school, she developed projects in the Department of Arts and Written Language, through which she carried out a number of initiatives exploring the interdisciplinary aspects of visual arts, language and IT. 
She published the textbooks Pedra da Memória (Stone of Memory) in 1989, and Terra, Cultura e Tempo Futuro (Earth, Culture and Future Time) in 2000 in 3 volumes, in collaboration with Raíssa Murad. Both books are in the field of History and Geography for Primary School.

In 2000 she published the article “Parents as Reading Tutors for First Graders” on the journal School Psychology International (London, England) in collaboration with Professor Keith Topping from the Department of Psychology of the University of Dundee in Scotland. The article examines Teacher Ceres’ experience at the Dom Bosco School in working in partnership with parents to develop reading skills in children in the early stages of literacy.

Her vast experience in working with children and her research on literacy resulted on the Project Opera for All, introduced by her in 1997 at the Dom Bosco School, in which she uses operas to teach reading and writing, incorporating dance, music, theatre and literature related to the pieces. 
On this work, she wrote the books Turandot for children and Trabalhando ópera com crianças (Working with opera with children) for teachers, illustrated with pictures of the shows performed at the school by six-year-olds. Both books were published by Ediouro.


In 2010 she published (by SENAC) the book Ópera na escola – uma experiência de Aprendizagem (Opera in School – a Learning Experience), which was the result of an initiative carried out at the Áurea Faria Charity, in the community of Divinéia, São Luís, Brazil, based in Ceres’ PhD thesis, and including the guidelines on how to put the project in practice.