The formation of the young people’s social consciousness in the horizon of history education

Abstract

The youngsters’ social consciousness while oriented toward the human development requires a special attention to constructing their historical consciousness grounded on challenging epistemological reflections (Rüsen’s and other authors’). Such a concern has inspired several inquiries in the history educaton field, namely the Historical Consciousness – Theory and Practices Project in which a set of qualitative studies has been exploring the narratives about the contemporary world given by Portuguese-speaking youngsters. In this Project a proposal to account for the national and the world history in the last hundred years was presented to the young participants. In the first phase of those studies the participants were a group of preservice trainees from three Portuguese universities; in subsequent phases, the participants were youngsters attending the final years of compulsory schooling, from several regions in Portugal, Brazil, and Mozambique. The inductive analysis suggested that the youngsters reveal a relatively well-grounded national identity, showing no signs of xenofobia. However, the world accounts given by Portuguese and Mozambican youngsters appear much less substantiated than the national ones, contrary to those of the Brazilians, who account for the history of their country and the world at the same level, interrelating them. In the accounts written by Portuguese and Brazilian students only a few individual characters appear, just a few ‘villains’ emerging. But, if the youngsters in Brazil and Mozambique show to be keen to intervene in their time, in Portugal and till 2010, they conveyed the idea of mere spectators of history, only recently appearing to move from that attitude. These and other results from data analysis may constitute valuable clues to the teaching work if it is perspectivated as a positive intervention for the formation of the young people’s historical and social consciousness.