History learning based on the construction of narratives about the past¹

Abstract

This research analyses the constitution of the historical thought of young students ages 12-14 from elementary schools in Brazil and Portugal, concerning facts articulated with the national histories of both countries. The events chosen for this research are focused on elements related to substantive content and meta-history in the teaching of the history of Brazil and the history of Portugal. We analyze, in this article, the way Brazilian and Portuguese students have answered to the challenge of thinking the history of Brazil without the Portuguese presence. Our work is based on the idea that, to build historical learning, it is important that students are capable to understand historical diversities from the human past reconstituted by historiography. This implies the capacity to produce knowledge understanding that the knowledge about the past is accomplished through historical evidence. Among the results we have found, it is the traditional way to teach History that still prevails, mainly in Brazilian schools: the lack of use of temporal markers by Brazilian students. Regarding the analysis of the narratives, we could notice, in most of the young students, an understanding of the past as something static, but we have also found narratives establishing relations between the present, past, and future, considering the possibility of changing the course of facts.

History Education; Historical thought; Historical narrative

Resumo

Esta investigação analisa a constituição do pensamento histórico de jovens estudantes entre 12 e 14 anos do ensino fundamental no Brasil e em Portugal, com relação aos fatos que se articulam nas histórias nacionais dos dois países. Os eventos escolhidos para o estudo em questão concentram-se em elementos relacionados ao conteúdo substantivo e à meta-história, no ensino de história do Brasil e história de Portugal. Analisamos, neste artigo, a forma como os alunos brasileiros e portugueses responderam ao desafio de pensar a história do Brasil sem a presença portuguesa. Nosso trabalho se fundamenta na ideia de que, para a constituição de aprendizagens históricas, é importante que os alunos sejam capazes de compreender as diversidades históricas do passado humano reconstituído pela historiografia. Isso implica na capacidade de produzir conhecimentos a partir da consciência de que o conhecimento sobre o passado é realizado perante a evidência histórica. Entre os resultados que encontramos está a forma tradicional de ensinar história que ainda vigora, principalmente nas escolas brasileiras: a falta de utilização de marcadores temporais pelos alunos brasileiros. Com relação à análise das narrativas, pudemos perceber, na maioria dos jovens, um entendimento do passado como estático, mas também encontramos narrativas que estabelecem uma relação entre presente, passado e futuro ao perspectivar a possibilidade de mudança do curso dos fatos.

Educação histórica; Pensamento histórico; Narrativa histórica

Introduction

Our work is based on the idea that, to build historical learning, it is important that students are capable to understand historical diversities from the human past reconstituted by historiography. This implies in the capacity to produce knowledge based on the awareness that understanding the past is accomplished through historical evidence. This research has as its theoretical and methodological supports the presuppositions from the researches in history education, in the sense that the way individuals mobilize the historical knowledge and build their historical consciousness gives meaning to history and to themselves.

In this study, we discuss the constitution of historical thoughts of young students attending elementary schools in Brazil and in Portugal concerning the events articulated in the national histories of both countries4. Considering Collingwood’s affirmative (1978) that historical thought is the activity of imagination including present as an evidence of its past, questions directly related to the events discussed in history teaching about Brazil’s “discovery” have been presented to young Portuguese and Brazilian students.

In one specific question, the possibility that Portuguese people were not Brazil’s “discoverers” was considered. From that, we asked students what could have happened to Brazil.

The nature of the research instrument we drafted took into consideration questions related to the ways of learning history in basic school and, therefore, we based on Fosnot’s argument (1998a, p. 52) that

Imbalance facilitates learning. One must offer stimulating and open investigations in realistic and meaningful contexts that allow students to explore and create a big number of possibilities, both affirmatives, and contradictories.

Fosnot (1998b) also says that learning is viewed as a self-regulatory process, which faces the conflict between personal world models, already existing, and new discrepant insights. Besides, it constructs new representations and models of reality, just as a human meaning-making venture with culturally developed tools and symbols.

One of the most important questions to be demonstrated in this study, concerning mainly Brazilian students, is the fact that the current pedagogical approaches have been criticized because they do not develop, in students, a critical thinking that allows them to make reasoned decisions about historical answers.

In many cases, in Brazil and Portugal, the development of the history subject in basic education is done through the work with substantive content. In taught history, overall, there is no space for students to issue opinions, make decisions, choose paths or formulate a hypothesis. The students, in most pedagogical investigations inside classrooms, are only allowed to repeat what was learned, reproduce texts from books or from the teacher’s class.

According to the teacher from one of the colleges in Brazil where the research was carried out, when the students are asked to issue opinions or present free narratives about any theme, they have many troubles and prefer to write that they do not know or do not remember the suggested questions.

This way, through collection and study of empirical data, we have tried to understand the students’ constructed notions about history through the process of learning in formal schooling. It is our interest to understand how students’ historical ideas are formed. First, because the only things one can change are the things that one knows, and second, to promote situations of history teaching that develop historical consciousness, situations that do not value only the little-considered reproduction of curricular themes. Therefore, historical consciousness is understood as an attitude of orientation from each person in their time, supported by history knowledge. According to Rüsen (2001, p. 66):

Historical consciousness is constituted by means of the general and elementary operation of practical life, that is, the narrative, which mankind orients its acting and suffering over time. Through historical narrative, representations of the continuity of temporal evolution of mankind and their world are formulated, which are established by memory and are inserted in the orientation frame of practical life as a way of determination of sense.

The ideas have been collected through the construction of narratives by students, understanding the narrative as an expression – under any form – of historical comprehension and the meanings that are given to them.

Theoretical framework

The researches in history education aim to understand the relations that students and teachers establish with concepts and historical categories, substantive or second-order ideas. We understand substantive concepts like history contents, such as industrialization, renaissance, revolution. Regarding the second-order concepts, they are the ones involved in any contents learned, such as temporal notions like continuity, progress, development, evolution, time, in short, the ones referred to the nature of history (LEE, 2001).

For Rüsen (2001), meta-history – the second-order concepts- represents a reflection on the nature of history based on history as something that occurred in the past. History is a way to deal with the past, to give it meaning, aiming to guide people in the present, in the temporal dimension of their lives. We can also assert that meta-history contemplates the mental principles that constitute historical thinking. History education has special interest in the way the work with sources, the teaching strategies, the didactic materials, the historical objects, among others, collaborate to the formation of historical thinking and historical consciousness of students and teachers.

Understanding the relations established by students and teachers with the historical concepts and categories has been the aim of various researches in the area of history education. These studies want to understand the ideas of children and young in the perspective that it is possible to build historical ideas gradually more sophisticated by students concerning the nature of historical knowledge (like, for example, in the researches of BARTON, 2001; WERTSCH, 2002; BARCA, 2011, 2007; SCHMIDT, 2008; GAGO, 2007; GEVAERD, 2009; ALVES, 2011).

Methodological framework

Trying to understand the messages presented in the narrative of Brazilian and Portuguese students about the relations between past, present, and future, we have tried to identify both the epistemological and substantive concepts existing in their narratives about the history of Brazil in relation with the history of Portugal. When they present some transversal homogeneity to most of the specific narratives, they indicate collective identities in a determined sense.

With this purpose, we performed a study whit an essentially qualitative nature (with additional quantitative approach) with Portuguese and Brazilian students, and the data were collected in Brazil and Portugal with students from the same scholar year.

Qualitative investigation methodologies form the set of guidelines that have been orienting the scientific researches performed in the field of history education. The research focus is delimited by questions related to historical cognition and metacognition, according to Maria Auxiliadora Schmidt (2009). From the point of view of situated historical cognition, the historical explanation is a fundamental part of the historical narrative, a process that is inherent to the nature of the own historical knowledge. Therefore, situated historical cognition accepts as learning premises the own narrative nature of the science of history.

The questions performed in this study allowed us to highlight some elements from the perspective of the students’ historical cognition, the reach of the previous knowledge and the way they make decisions about a content that needs to be rewritten in the light of their knowledge, in this case, about the arrival of Portuguese people in Brazil.

Participants

To begin our investigation, we have applied a questionnaire to 570 students in total, 450 from two schools in Londrina, Paraná, Brazil, and 120 students from two schools in the region of Grande Porto, Portugal.⁵

In Brazil, the research instrument has been applied in classrooms from 6th to 9th year, ages 12-15, in two schools. These schools are in the same area in Londrina, in different neighborhoods. We will call them School 1 and School 2, to avoid identification of subjects and places. School 1 is in an outskirt area with a lower middle-class population (mainly children of workers and service providers). School 2 is in the designated expanded center and has a lower-middle-class and middle-class population (children of traders, salesmen, teachers and independent professionals). The choice of the Brazilian schools was made considering the cultural aspects of the students and the link between the teachers and projects in the State University of Londrina.

The choice of the Portuguese schools was made thinking about the perspective of a diverse cultural context. In this case, the participants of the research were students from 6th and 9th year, with ages from 12-14. Even with heterogeneous classrooms, these schools have a similar population to the ones from Brazil (children from public employees and workers). We will call the Portuguese schools 3 and 4.

In the case of Brazilian students, in 6th year they were studying Ancient Greece and had not studied the content from the history of Brazil yet. The students from 9th year were studying Bourgeois Revolutions, and the history of Brazil had been approached in 6th and 7th years. Concerning the Portuguese students, in 6th year they had studied the history of Portugal and the Portuguese navigations, and students from 9th year, just like Brazilians, had already seen this content in some point of their school life.

Instruments and application procedures

Having Chapman’s studies (2009) in mind, we elaborated a research instrument in which we could understand the students’ conceptual progression through the possibility of them thinking the variation of historical perspectives. The questions written in Chart 1 were part of the main study. Only the last question was not part of the study applied in Portugal.

Chart 1
– Questions made for the students

1) If the Portuguese people had not arrived Brazil in 1500, what would be different and would be the same in the history of Brazil?

2) Which one is the most important subject that you have ever studied about the history of Portugal/Brazil? Which period from the history of Portugal/Brazil do you like to study the most? Who is the greatest hero/heroine from Portuguese/Brazilian history? Explain.

3) Imagine that you are on the internet talking to people from various countries and you need to tell the history of Brazil that you know for a friend. Write a narrative telling this story to your friend.

*4) Complete the phrase telling the history of Brazil until the present days: In 1500, Portuguese people aboard three caravels, led by Pedro Álvares Cabral, reached the coast of what we call Brazil today.

• * Question asked only for Brazilian students. Source: study data.

Our interest regarding the construction of the research instrument has two sets of problems of epistemological nature. The first one concerning the substantive contents which relate to the possibility that the students notice history is not determined. We have considered the development of this content in classroom in a way that, when studying the substantive contents about the period, the students could establish relations between the great navigations and the possibility that other countries could have reached the continent, having in mind Koselleck’s (2006) and Hawthorn’s (1991) assumptions about possible anteriority and posteriority regarding the event giving meanings to the past.

Secondly, we have considered, inside the students’ argumentative choices, the questions related to meta-history and to the form of explanation that students would find to justify a non-historical event. Regarding this issue (question 1), we asked which elements would students use to explain the non-event, which elements would result from this non-event and which consequences would this fact cause historically. In the following questions, students would have necessarily to make historiographical choices and select substantive contents to compose their narratives.

According to Mattozzi (1998, p. 24), we should become aware that thought history may not have any effectiveness, or its effectiveness may be opposed by the counter-histories that circulate outside the school. We believe the school can interfere with this process in a powerful way, having as its methodological support in history teaching the development of children’s cognitive capacities to think historically.

Mattozzi (1998, p. 29) also states that school must form cognitive personalities capable of submitting to (historiographical) exam the logic of the construction of the discourses about past. It is from the development of the structures of thought about the world in a historical perspective that we enable students, since primary grades, a historical formation that escapes from the concern about only the school contents in curriculums. This historical thought is closely related to the complexity of historical temporality.

In this article, we have chosen to discuss the analysis of the answers to the first question given to both Portuguese and Brazilian students from 6th year. We have analyzed how Brazilian and Portuguese students have answered to the challenge of thinking the history of Brazil without the Portuguese presence in the Discovery. We have also intended to, in this specific case, understand which mental operations students move around a hypothetical question about the past.

Assuming, as stated by Dray (1980), that the causes of an event are not objective and immutable facts waiting to be discovered, but arise from the suppositions of historical judgment, from interpretation and from the historian’s point of view, our objective was, therefore, to map the relation established by the student from elementary school between the possible causes and consequences of a specific historic event, based on the question: if the Portuguese people had not arrived Brazil in 1500, what would be different and would be the same in the history of Brazil?

Therefore, we can state that the narrative suggestion, by not focusing the analysis in an event that have really happened, led the students to use knowledge beyond the ones conditioned and embodied in the didactic material. Our study considered investigations performed in the area of history education, which have been suggesting that students give meanings to the historical contents using concepts given by their experience in the current reality.

Another relation concerns history’s contribution to education and the formation of thinking, which is not in the mechanized knowledge or in the simple comprehension of situations from the past (lessons to follow or avoid), but in a reflection exercise gradually objective and critical, about different actions, reasons, motives and interests of the various historical agents (LEE, 2008).

Data analysis

For an inductive data analysis concerning the question raised, we have considered the students’ answers regarding the substantive content presented, and another regarding a second-order thought. About the substantive concepts, we can cluster the answers of the Brazilian and Portuguese students as shown in the charts 2 and 3.

Chart 2
Substantive concepts presented by Brazilian students.

Maintenance of Brazil in a state of untouchable nature.

Continuity of the people as native Brazilian Indians.

Absence of technology.

Change in the way of teaching history: dialogue between past and present.

Change in language and absence of country.

• Source: Study data.

Chart 3
Substantive concepts presented by Portuguese students.

Maintenance of Brazil as before the arrival of Portuguese people.

What would happen to Portugal?

Other countries would have discovered Brazil: dialogue with historiography.

No Brazil existence on the map.

The cultural development question.

Current influences.

• Source: Study data.

Among the metahistorical ideas suggested in the substantive answers, those that were in relation to notions of change or permanence stand out and they were grouped into three categories: 1) stop in time; 2) stop in time with consequences to the present; and 3) other possible scenarios.

Category 1: the answers that consider an absence of changing and technology point, in the level of meta-historical or second-order notions, to an idea of permanence or of continuity in case of non-occurrence of the consubstantiated event by the arrival of Cabral to Brazil. There is in these answers an idea of standstill of Brazil’s history, with an untouched time of nature and lack of (advanced) technology. For some, this stop in time would simply mean a better quality for the people who lived here. Sample responses from Brazilian students:

It would not be the same, because there would be many trees, native people and if no one would discover it, it would be a greener (natural) country.

If the Portuguese people had not come to Brazil, we would not be white, we would live in the forest, instead of houses, the air would be a little cleaner.

Almost everything would be different if the Portuguese people had not come to Brazil, it would not have technology, cities and people like us, and the native people would live better without our arrival.

For other students, this stop in time is clothed with an ambivalent sense of the quality of life:

Yes, it would be different. Because if the Portuguese people had not arrived here we would still live with thongs and in the middle of the bush. Gold and silver would be found very easily, and we would know how to deal with the most well-known diseases in Brazil. There would be wars between one tribe and another.

It is difficult to find something that has not been changed, the only thing that I think would be our diverse fauna and flora would have more trees and plants would also have some extinct animals, but none of us would have been born. In short, if it were not for Pedro Álvares Cabral to have missed the trip, Brazil would perhaps be a great jungle.

It was not going to have technology or firearm, it would have more trees, it would not have buildings, none of what we have now would exist.

Other students still seem to attribute a negative sense to this stop situation, as in: “Brazil would not have this current technology and we would not have big cities.”

For the Brazilian students, just like for the Portuguese ones there is a thought that associates the non-discovery by Cabral with a sense of standstill of time in Brazil. For some, this standstill of time does not display a valuable load: “Maintenance of the forests, of the native paople”; “It would remain the same it was, that is, indigenous”; “It would remain the same – animals and plants and they would stay darker, because they were native people”.

For several Portuguese students, like for some Brazilian students, the absence of the discovery would have positive consequences: “It would remain as at the beginning, it would still have more naïve people because they would not have been explored so brutally”. “It would remain the same with a less painful history, the native people would have more freedom because they would not be exploited by the Portuguese people”.

Category 2: if most of the students in Brazil or in Portugal have fixed themselves in a simple absence of change because no significant event occurred (as if there could not be other factors leading to other consequences), some students presented a thought linked to the emergence of the conceptualization of change. This emergence of the idea of change is indicated by the mental construction of an alternative scenario in relation to present situations: past and present dialogue or changes in the way of teaching history.

Some answers from Brazilian students:

Yes, the history of Brazil would be different because the native people would be in most Brazilian stories, but they are not, because the Portuguese discovered Brazil, because they are from Portugal.

It would be different, but we would not study about it, because they would not be in the books, etc.

Yes, it would be different, people would not discover Brazil, Paraná would be nothing, the gold mines, nobody would discover the woods would only have native people and we would not have other states and we would not know another language.

Yes, different, Brazil would not be a country anymore.

Some answers from Portuguese students:

If the Portuguese people had not arrived in Brazil, the language would be very different because Brazil would have been colonized by other countries like England.

If Portugal had not arrived in Brazil in 1500 the Brazilians did not speak the same language, because we had not colonized their country. The rest of Brazil’s history would be different because its language and probably its culture would be different.

Category 3: a few students conceived the change and came up with alternative scenarios to the existing history, such as the response of a Portuguese student who problematizes consequences for his own country:

If the Portuguese people had not come to Brazil, Portugal would not have known gold, the native people, and much more. [...] And if Portugal had not known Brazil the king would not have been able to take shelter and maybe now in 2013 Portugal would be a French country.

In the answer above, the narrative turns to Portuguese history giving a meaning not to what would happen to Brazil, but to what would happen to Portugal, which is more significant for this student. We note in the narrative a possibility of alternative dialogues between the past, the present, and the future. As stated by Rüsen (2010), the historical consciousness is a complex combination that contains the apprehension of the past regulated by the need to understand the present and presume the future. In this way, the student focuses on going beyond a fixed past, establishing scenarios of explanatory relations with the present and the future, in the level of logical (but not real) possibilities.

In some narratives, we can perceive a more advanced dialogue with historiography in terms of the perspective of change and relation with evidence of the present, in a dynamic interaction between times. Some Portuguese students point out that other countries might have discovered Brazil, but do not indicate a specific country, only suggest in an open narrative that if it were not for the Portuguese, it could be another people:

It could be another country to find Brazil.

I think Brazil would be dominated by another country and would achieve independence.

Later, Brazil would be discovered, so Brazil would appear on the map.

If the Portuguese people had not come to Brazil, Brazil had been discovered by another country, that country might not even belong to the European Union. I think that if we had not arrived in Brazil in 1500 Brazil would have been occupied by some other people.

Beyond the senses of change, we need in our analysis to take into account the tensioned webs of identity formation of these young people, which is complex, consisting of a network of belonging, in which the feelings and ideas linked to a people are integrated in a relationship of consensus, tension or, sometimes, conflict. As Rüsen (1993) states, the identity (ies) is (are) fed by historical knowledge, but also result from practical interests.

Among the factors that mark the messages presented by the Portuguese and Brazilian students there is the form of constitution of the taught history, still focused, even in the 21st century, on the formation of a national identity markedly from the 19th century. In the meta-historical question, an idea shared by many students is that the past is true and unchangeable. Thus, if it had occurred otherwise, hypothetically, a history would not be possible, as time would be paralyzed (category 1 in the analysis).

What draws attention in the answers of several students is both the static character of history, that if it were not so it would not be another way, as the perspective, in some cases, that if it were not so it would be otherwise without any mediation of doubt or assumptions about the future. However, in some narratives, we can perceive the relationship of change and dialogue with the present, regarding the idea that something different could happen in Brazil, and other countries would dominate it. The verbal time follows a hypothetical prediction of the future that would depend on several factors to be fulfilled. In this sense, history is still to be made or performed and it is up to those who comment only to infer possible futures from the question proposed.

In the analysis, we perceive the use of temporal markers by Portuguese students, such as centuries, years, periods, because there is a concern in locating the narratives temporarily. This is not shown by the Brazilian students, who do not establish temporal relations for historical narrative constructions.

In the case of Brazil, this can be credited to the way of teaching history in Brazilian schools in the late twentieth century, which contrasted a so-called modern and thematic history with a traditional history marked by facts, dates, and places. This counterpoint, which made negative the use of dates, eventually removed from many of the classrooms - both in primary and university education - the concern with the issue of the temporal location of historical themes. The teacher could not worry about demanding dates, names, and places of students. If so, it would be traditional, in the sense of outdated.

The idea of a non-event giving a provisional meaning to the definitive historical knowledge caused perplexity in the students’ historical conclusions. In a way, it provoked in them a challenging course, without indicative information maps, be it the textbook or the teacher’s speech, around the historical possibilities that a change of events would cause to the historical fact placed.

Preliminary reflections on the study

We suggested the students responded to an argument for the idea of a time course that did not happen, making them think from a hypothetical question, without necessarily having concrete evidence as a parameter. The answers that we obtained in many cases have not progressed around an interpretation and discussion of historical arguments, but they have been linked to a static and immutable idea of historical truth. In this bias, our study approaches Chapman’s reflections (2009, p. 162), when he argues in his analysis that there were limitations in the conceptualization of the participants’ historical interpretation, who seemed, in several tasks, to not dominate the necessary tools to give history a meaning.

The assimilated events are predetermined, and thus, as they did not occur in the way students know, they could not occur in other ways. The textbook, on the other hand, is sustained as a vehicle of broadcasting a true story.

If, as Barca (2011) affirms, the understanding of the past is related to the development of historical thought (second-order ideas) combined with the need to promote a coherent (substantive) framework of the past, that gives young people a consistent temporal orientation for their lives, the scenario we find shows that the history teaching in the schools we made our research is not yet structured for this challenge.

Another point of reflection that we can infer is the idea of a founding myth that expresses itself in the arrival of the Portuguese people to Brazil and, as Chaui (2000, p. 9) states, such myth is “that one who does not cease to find new means to express himself, new languages, new values and ideas, in such a way that, the more he seems to be something else, the more he is the repetition of himself”. We are analyzing the narratives from issues proposed by the historiography that articulates the founding myth, nature, the historical fact. In this case, history in Brazilian schools does not cease to reiterate this myth every year in classrooms throughout the country. It is as if Brazil has always been waiting for Pedro Álvares Cabral.

We can also affirm, on the themes that form the mythical past of the nation, according to Vesentini (1984, p. 76), that:

[…] “they resist criticism and continue to reproduce themselves. They are organized as small ‘nodes’, central points around which a whole set of themes is referred to through this network of relationships, articulating various themes of a node, each of them becomes a definer and a periodizer”.

In addition, Vesentini states that the textbook does not create such themes, only reproduces them, and, therefore, the school in Brazil is currently responsible for maintaining this way of learning history.

Another preliminary analysis of our work indicates that the conception of history teaching in effect today in many Brazilian classrooms, speaking here more specifically of the schools analyzed in this study, was generated in Brazil from the end of the 19th century. For example, we think that the award-winning monograph in the competition of the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute (IHGB), “How to write the history of Brazil”, from the German botanist Karl Philipp von Martius, sets milestones for making this history, such as the discovery of Brazil, independence, all based on Portugal, considering that the Brazilian nation should be presented as a result of maritime expansion.

In this sense, as Cercadillo (2004), we understand that a teaching of history centered on the perspective of substantive curricular contents, without discussing several second-order ideas that are inherent to them, blocks more sophisticated conceptualization levels and visualization possibilities of progression of historical thought between students in different contexts of schooling.

In studies conducted in Brazil, we have noticed some worrying issues regarding the teaching and learning of history. One of these questions concerns the difficulty presented by students in the construction of a coherent narrative web about the past (CAINELLI, 2011).

Our data also revealed that students conceive the contents of history and the way they are taught according to traditional history, chronologically and based on important facts. Therefore, “they mistakenly understand that optimizing classroom time means prioritizing the teacher’s reading and explanation of the textbook chapter, following the exercises” (CAIMI, 2006, p.25).

We affirm, then, that in history teaching in basic education, in many cases, the 19th-century Rankean perspective still materializes as historical knowledge, in which “the historical fact is the point of arrival and departure” (MALERBA, 2011) and the taught history is centered on events. Such an understanding of the fact is mainly reflected when we imagine the need to teach history from a particular event located in time and space, which would mean that the event or fact would be materialized concretely. The representation form of history that is established in the textbook used by the teacher and, consequently, in the way the teacher teaches history, translates into what H. White calls prefigured history, that is, the history taught in the classroom has always been pre-formed (MALERBA, 2011).

In this way, we can affirm that the teaching of History in the classroom tends to narrate events as pre-demarcated facts and, as Koselleck argues, the event must be seen as a temporal modality or does not materialize itself. With this, students lose the dimension that “the unity of meaning that forms an event from the incidents is only possible with the minimum of anteriority or posteriority” (KOSELLECK, 1993, p. 142), without concern to create open explanatory relations.

Also, Barton (2001) warns that referring to the United States, educators should begin by helping students to problematize historical knowledge, so they understand the need for evidence, an approach that should be grounded in the contact with the entire historical research process.

We have also noticed that the students questioned in both Portugal and Brazil do not anchor themselves in historical evidence to construct possible statements to the historical situation suggested, but rather in a history already determined and known that, if it does not happen, there is no other to be put in place, because students do not consider the movement of other factors. The past is tamed by a factual history always repeated.

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• 4
  - Study funded by CNPq with post-doctorate scholarship, in 2013. Funding 2014/2016 – Human Sciences public note/CNPq.
• 5
  - Portugal’s school years are like Brazil’s because, in both countries, the time destined to basic education is the same (twelve years), but there are different cycles of study. In Brazil, basic education is divided into three cycles: five years for the “Elementary 1” (Ensino fundamental 1), four years for the “Elementary 2” (Ensino fundamental 2) and three years for high school. In Portugal, the organization is as follows: 1st cycle: 1st year (6-year-olds); 2nd, 3rd and 4th (with Portuguese and Mathematics tests, scoring 25%), 2nd cycle: 5th, 6th year (with Portuguese and Mathematics tests, scoring 25%); 3rd cycle: 7th, 8th and 9th year (with Portuguese and Mathematics tests, scoring 25%); secondary education, which is mandatory: 1st, 11th (with exams for the subjects ending that year) and 12th (with exams for the subjects ending that year). Nowadays, there are 12 mandatory years.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  2018

History

• Received
  05 June 2016
• Accepted
  02 Feb 2017