Clio y Asociados (Feb 2010)
Los Profesores de Historia y el papel de la lectura en sus clases
Abstract
Reading is an essential tool in teaching and learning history. The problems that students face in the comprehension of historical papers are well known, and thus –among other reasons– it is necessary to include reading as a part of the subject. The contributions of Psycholinguistic investigations allowed modifying the conceptions about reading from two different points of view: it went from a deciphering process of the written letters, to a construction of meaning. At the same time, it has ceased to be conceptualized as a set of skills, to be interpreted from a theory of global understanding. Currently, reading is characterized as a process of meaning construction. It has been left in evidence that the previous knowledge on the subject esta-blishes one of the decisive factors of the particular interpretations made by the reader (Smith, 1983; Goodman, 1982). Setting up meaning of a history textbook, implies building concepts, create and recreate representations about facts, and reorganize the previous knowledge adding new information (Aisenberg, 2003). This project introduces advances of an investigation that seeks building knowledge about the current concepts from the teachers about the role of reading in teaching and learning history. The questions that guide this research are: What representations do the High School teachers have on the role of reading in teaching and lear-ning history? When using textbooks, which are the underlying concepts to the educational techniques? This is about an exploratory study, approached from a qualitative logic investi-gation. In the analysis of the fist interviews done, we found ideas, perceptions and references to practices that fitted traditional conceptions of teaching history, and others influenced by the new theoretical developments on the subject, widespread in the last years in training institutes and the bibliography about the reading techniques in educational contexts. So far, there has been built two basic styles of conceiving the relation between reading and history by the teachers: an internal and external relation. In association with each, it is possible to find differences in the conceptions about reading, in the interpretation of reading difficulties and students’ learning, and the teaching techniques used in history classes.
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