The weight of the past: curricula and narratives in history teaching on Latin America Dictatorships in São Paulo and Buenos Aires

Author(s)

Juliana Pirola da Conceição Balestra

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Faculdade de Educação
• Defense date: 2015-11-16

Examining board members

Ernesta Zamboni; Luis Fernando Cerri; Ronaldo Cardoso Alves; Maria do Carmo Martins; Eloisa de Mattos Höfling

• Advisor: Ernesta Zamboni

Abstract

This thesis purposes to analyze the weight of the National Security Dictatorships' history upon the curricula and narratives of youngsters, who finished in 2013 the basic/mandatory schooling in public schools, in central areas in the cities of São Paulo and Buenos Aires. The intention was to understand how such weight acts in the present descision making among generations that had not directly experienced this past. In total, 116 young students have participated in the research. In São Paulo they were attending High School's 3rd grade and in Buenos Aires they were attending 5th grade of "Escuela Media". Both cities have been through similar experiences at the same time - The National Security Dictatorship, the State terrorism and the disappearing practice -, but they deal differently with their histories, with distinct approaches on remembering, reparing or forgetting the past, that reflects in the relation that youngsters establish with it. To understand how this past gets to the youngsters, its representations and the attitudes it mobilizes, two dimensions of historic instruction were taken under consideration: the curricular dimension, as it is public practice for education, composed by curricular guidelines, educational law and didactic material; and the narrative dimension, related to historic consciousness and the uses of history on decision making. To analyze the curricular dimension, it was made use of Ivor Goodson's notes on official curricula while prescriptions, that sustain important mystique about State role, of schooling and society in the learning process. The model that represents the past in these curricula, in its turn, was interpreted after the contributions of Serge Moscovici's and Denise Jodelet's studies on social representations, related to the process in which the knowledge about the past is generated, transformed and projected in the social world. The principles elaborated by Jörn Rüsen, about the formation of historic consciousness and its orientation didactic function, were essential to the narrative dimension analysis, reflecting on the uses that are made regarding the past to give meaning to present and to the expectations for the future. The content of these narratives, in its specificity, has also been analized because of mobilized social representations, that had served for youngsters to communicate and to comprehend themselves. The analysis of these dimensions indicates that, even though there are few who take the dictatorship history for decision making at the present, the weight of this past on the youngsters is bigger where it is pressumed as public politics by the historic formation processes, including history teaching, revealing an intrinsic relation between historic instruction and historic consciousness (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 11/07826-6 - The relations between history teaching and the historical consciousness in the teaching history of National Security Dictatorships in São Paulo and Buenos Aires
• Grantee: Juliana Pirola da Conceição
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate