Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Teaching History from Documents in the Family Archives: A Social Experiment with Brazilian Children

2005; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.18546/herj.05.2.07

1472-9474

María Auxiliadora Schmidt, Tânia Braga Garcia,

Brazilian cultural history and politics

The current work presents results of a second phase of the research that took place in the period from 2003 to 2004, bringing together teachers and children from the 3 rd . grade of Primary Sate Schools in the city of Campina Grande do Sul, Parana State, Brazil. The research was carried out as part of the activities of the project 'Recreating the History of Campina Grande do Sul'. Developed from the co-operation between the Federal University of Parana and the city's Town Hall. In the first phase the project had as its principal aim the promotion research, identification, and analysis of documents in the family archives and to produce supporting educational material for use in the classroom. In this phase we have taken as our reference point the renovation of the concept of written local history (Ossana) and of documents (Le Goff), as well as the concept of documents in the family archive (Artieres), as fundamental to the work with teachers and children, obtaining interesting results in the renewal of History teaching methods, as well as producing a teaching manual about the history of the city, which was completed collectively. In the second phase we took as a reference point the studies of the students' previous knowledge (Barca) to explore the material previously produced, with the aim of analyzing the relation between the students and the historical evidence (Lee, Ashby) and its importance in the construction of an historic narrative (Cooper).