The use of historical sources as a practice for the training of primary education teachers at the University of Barcelona

Abstract

The teaching experience described and analyzed in this article was completed with 52 students attending the Bachelor of Science in Education at the University of Barcelona. The teachers apply a programming based on theoretical and practical learning of the historical method and the analysis and interpretation of primary sources to the Classroom of History Didactics. Students were able to experience the relationship between the substantial contents of historical knowledge and the procedural and metacognitive ones, practicing on three aspects of the heuristic analysis: description, classification and evaluation of the criteria of authenticity of the sources; contextualization; approval of the variability of possible narratives. Then, the teachers designed a didactic path that affected the conception of future teachers and their understanding of history as a discipline and as matter.

Keywords

• primary sources
• initial formation teaching
• primary education
• didactics of history
• historical thinking