La enseñanza de historia en educación básica: conocimiento docente, libros y didáctica en Zacatecas

Abstract

Since History Teaching is a recent field of investigation in Mexico, the focus of the new didactic models and the object of study of History remains being in the historical alphabetization, the generation of historical thinking and awareness, and in the public uses of History. In this manner, the scholar history books available represent a public and political use of the historical events.

This document is the review of the history books used in the third grade of elementary school (Zacatecas. Study of the state I live in, edited in 2011), and in the third grade of secondary school (Mexico’s history, edited in 2010), to demonstrate that in spite of teachers’ agitation caused by the educative reforms of 2006-2011, the pedagogic practices developed in the classrooms still reproduce old paradigms of history teaching-learning process: they work around a curricular compartmental map based on an immovable historical knowledge, nourished by speeches of homeland and nationalism.

Although these scholar texts do posses pedagogic novelty as they reunite community, entity, democracy and cultural heritage –and are based in principles of patrimony, present and past time–, historical knowledge accounted in blocs as “wisdom knowledge”, often fail in becoming specialized knowledge, this is, they do not impact in achieving significant knowledge.

This work is the result of the thorough analysis of several assays written by history teachers participating in a diplomat on history teaching, and of the revision of some fragments of the History books of elementary school (third grade of elementary and of secondary school), using a situational methodological frame.