[...] This is an eighth-grade class, we are at the end of the school year, it is a public school in a very poor region of the city, and all indicators show that most of the students will not go on to high school. […] Bearing this in mind, the student teacher, who is highly articulated and concerned with planning her lessons, thought of dedicating this final moment of the school year to try to “give meaning” to what had been learned in History. […] A large world map was placed on the wall, with the political division of some countries drawn on kraft paper, and the shapes of selected countries or regions in bright colors. A group of students had participated in this activity in previous classes, putting names on countries and regions. […] Once the map was displayed, pairs of students placed papers with two types of information on some countries and regions. One type consisted of clippings from recent newspaper headlines, usually about conflicts, wars, and similar issues that took place in that country or region. […] Other pairs of students had written, on small pieces of paper, historical information studied about these countries or regions over the years in History classes. In the two cases - current newspaper articles and information from the past -, they also pasted illustrations. For example, in Egypt (one of the countries selected), they placed both an illustration of the pyramids and a current photo of the city of Cairo. […] The collage activity was concluded, and the student teacher led the discussion based on a question. […] She said: “let’s see how what you learned in History class helps you understand what is happening in these countries today”. This question is a variation of what I had heard from other student teachers, who, after concluding a study topic, asked: “how does this help us understand life today in this region”? Despite the efforts and good intentions of the pre-service teacher, the activity did not achieve the results she expected. Some modalities of conclusions stood out. The first was something like “today is like this because some situations happened in the past”, which was declared with certain fatalism. […] Then, the students established a direct connection between exploitation in the past and poverty in the present, which, while somewhat correct, presents a matrix of historical explanation that is quite mechanistic. In addition, because of a lack of knowledge of African History, many students also concluded that Africa had always been poor and that it is now even poorer. However, the case of Egypt created some divergences. They said that Egypt had been wealthy in the past, but today was a dictatorship and a poor country. They could not go farther due to a lack of historical elements. In the region of Latin America, the tone was the same. […] In Europe, the confusion was even greater: there were photos of palaces and beautiful medieval illustrations beside current pictures of Paris, London, and Berlin. Europe had always been rich and now continued to be rich. Thus, an activity that involved that level of information gathering gave way to a fairly weak debate, which frustrated the student teacher, but led to interesting reflections. |