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Revista Brasileira de Educação

versão impressa ISSN 1413-2478versão On-line ISSN 1809-449X

Rev. Bras. Educ. vol.25  Rio de Janeiro jan./dez 2020  Epub 20-Fev-2020

https://doi.org/10.1590/s1413-24782019250002 

ARTICLE

Teaching history (inter)lacing futures

IUniversidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.


ABSTRACT

This article analyzes writings on subjects related to the introduction to practice and internship in a History undergraduate course, based on a problematization of time and temporality. It assumes that current urgent issues lead to History learning. This strategy results from the preparation of plans and diaries by undergraduates and is sustained in the future as an ethical opening for History classes in its relationship with the world. In this scenario, Pagès’s thought was fundamental as a possibility for planning History classes, based on urgencies of the present and a past that remains and, therefore, persists and survives as an event that distributes its effects since a non-chronological and unstable time.

KEYWORDS: History teaching; planning History classes; present time

RESUMO

O artigo analisa escritos em disciplinas de introdução à prática e estágio em um curso de licenciatura em história, em uma problematização do tempo e da temporalidade. Parte da premissa de que as questões urgentes do presente são condutoras da aprendizagem em história. Tal estratégia, decorrente da produção de planejamentos e de diários dos licenciandos, sustenta-se no tempo futuro como abertura ética da aula de história em sua relação com o mundo. Nesse sentido, foi fundamental o pensamento de Pagès como possibilidade para o planejamento de aulas de história, pautadas nas urgências do presente e de um passado que não passa e que, por isso mesmo, insiste e subsiste na forma de um acontecimento que distribui seus efeitos em um tempo não cronológico e não estabilizado.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: ensino de história; planejamento de aulas de história; tempo presente

RESUMEN

El artículo analiza escritos en materias de introducción a la práctica y pasantía en un curso de licenciatura en historia, a partir de una problematización del tiempo y la temporalidad. Se parte de la premisa de que los problemas apremiantes del presente son propicios para el aprendizaje de la historia. Esta estrategia, resultante de la producción de planes y diarios por los estudiantes de pregrado, se sostiene en el tiempo futuro como la apertura ética de la clase de historia en su relación con el mundo. En este sentido, el pensamiento de Pagès fue fundamental como una posibilidad para la planificación de clases de historia, basadas en las urgencias del presente y un pasado que no pasa y, por lo tanto, insiste y subsiste en la forma de un evento que distribuye sus efectos desde un tiempo no cronológico y no estabilizado.

PALABRAS CLAVE: enseñanza de historia; planes de enseñanza en historia; tiempo presente

IS TEACHING HISTORY TEACHING ABOUT THE PAST?

Few teachers or researchers in History teaching would leave the present out of their professional thoughts and actions. This has become so obvious that almost no one thinks about it. From a certain perspective, it involves incorporating the role of History teachers and their commitment to educational laws enacted after Brazil’s Federal Constitution of 1988, which emphasizes education for citizenship. From another perspective, this attitude entails recognizing criticisms made by young students and our peers stating that History classes can be tedious, uninteresting (even if not indifferent), and rely on memorization, which perhaps (and we emphasize perhaps) was very useful to educate a certain national identity, but that earned History teaching criticisms such as those revived by Elza Nadai 30 years ago (Nadai, 1992/1993). Moreover, it may reflect in interpretations of History theory that accept the ethical and political positions of historians in the methodology and epistemology of History.

Our students from the History course are immersed in historiographic discussions that consider present or recent history as a field that retrieves the subjectivities of historians and challenges the pretensions of a history that believed in the possibility of producing the past separated from the present of the historian. Therefore, they are aware of the warnings from Franco and Levín (2007), who declared that recent history is not exclusively defined by temporal, epistemological, or methodological rules, but also by questions that provoke society and transform the facts of the past into problems of the present. In this regard, traumatic events have a strong presence, but not they are not the only ones. Different questions invite educators to make and teach History using a script that includes what happened as well as what remains from what has passed. These discussions constitute analytical tools that define the choices of future teachers when they prepare lesson plans. They allow understanding the specificities of this field based on various forms of coevality between past and present and the existence of living social memory of the past. The contemporaneity between the experience lived by historians and the past they study implies thinking about the present as a historical construction related to the experience lived by the subject who knows it. Consequently, it is not the history of an epoch, as Aróstegui announced, but can be delimited by a historical lapse of a chronological profile or one that has its matrix established by a decisive event: “Without effectively measured time, there would be no possibility for history” (Aróstegui, 2004, p. 57, our translation).

For those learning to be History teachers, understanding the debates about present history involves committing to the implications of the past in the present, being open to questionings about the task of the historian in the face of limit-events. How is it possible to make history given the atrocities that have taken place before the eyes of the world, before a modern society that benefits from the development of the finest technologies that promised to facilitate our lives and improve our relationships with each other and of everyone with the world? It also consists of practicing teaching, aware of the political and ethical dimension of history, allowing oneself to be challenged by the question: how can the present be studied so that the memories of the past help to interpret what happens today? Thus, the political and ethical dimension of recent history is also an opportunity for building futures. Between the past studied and the present lived, History teachers are responsible for situating the lived experience in a historical context to expand understanding and keep an open mind to new experiences in which injustice, racism, and violence do not exist.

Regarding History teaching, the work of Joan Pagès is perhaps an example that illustrates well the complexity of relationships between present, past, and future in the field of education. In his opinion, the teaching of History, Geography, and Social Sciences has the responsibility of taking a stand in relation to problems of the present and helping people to act upon them.

The problems are deep. […] From my perspective, the most troubling are those related to hate speech and the use of violence, any type of violence, but in particular the one against women, children, older adults, and groups and collectives that want to be different. The increase in violence and sexist, homophobic, racist, xenophobic, and intolerant attitudes, as well as their political expression in Europe, America, and practically the entire world should be the object of grave concern and make us question what are the challenges that we should be responding to through the teaching of Social Sciences, Geography, and History and in the education of teachers of these fields. (Pagès, 2018, p. 19, emphasis ours, our translation)

Considering these problems, Pagès affirms that

Democratic citizenship must be, without a doubt, the main goal of an education that emphasizes what makes us human, all the rights of all people, and human dignity above anything else. (Pagès, 2018, p. 20, our translation)

In short, democratic citizenship is that which judges as unacceptable any type of injustice, hunger, and violence, and that, in parallel, recognizes the many possible ways to build just societies. An education grounded on these two fundamental principles would be responsible for allowing young people to know about the paths taken by humanity and the possibility of making a stand and acting on what must change, based on the study of relevant social problems or socially experienced issues. That is, it involves enabling new generations to perceive that it is possible to change the world and encouragingly offer them the knowledge necessary to do so (Pagès, 2018, p. 21). The criteria for selecting these contents - and that simultaneously question the chronological organization and the concentric circles model - should be the following: offering a broad view of the issues, including various protagonists, and being situated in time and space. From a methodological perspective, strategies are needed to organize and gradually complexify the thinking of students (Pagès, 2018, p. 23).

Finally, Pagès expresses a concern for emotions and feelings in classrooms, closing the circle with the demands of a present time to which the mobilization of hate and fear have returned. Beyond thinking about the relationship between present and past, it is necessary “[...] to teach for the utopia, that is, for the future, [which] can be a reasonable alternative to an education both obsolete and distant from the current problems of citizenship” (Pagès, 2018, p. 41, our translation).

Is History teaching, therefore, to teach about time? The ways of representing time have made the History classroom a place of the “cold and disciplined past” (White, 2014) where history and time coincide, while the premise that supports this article indicates the opposite. The inclusion of questions from the current public life in History classes is part of the assumption that time and history are not identical. This supposition suggests, firstly, that addressing pressing issues of the present allows joining the delicate debate about time policies (Ávila, 2016) in a History class. Secondly, it proposes that the problematization of the present and current time does not indicate a submission of the lesson to the present, be it an “eternal present” or any form of “presentism” (Hartog, 2013).

Studying the present time in History lessons, as well as citizenship and injustice simultaneously, as elements through which the historical narrative gains meaning in people’s lives, seems to lead us to a problematization of time and temporalities that have subjected History classes to becoming the locus of a dead, disciplined (White, 2014), and uninteresting past. Therefore, turning current urgent issues into content for History classes and a catalyst for lesson planning consists of placing ethics in the center of the debate about the implications of History teaching and means elaborating a strong criticism of the imprisonment of time derived from Eurocentrism. This creates opportunities to think, measure, or represent time in still uncatalogued ways. Thus, what we propose is - after breaking the identity between time and history - allowing minority-becomings to flow (Deleuze and Guattari, 1997), enabling “the people who were missing” to move through our History classrooms. That is, finding the people who escaped the historical narrative, as they were always seen and described within Eurocentric temporal markers (modern, backward, innovative, antiquated, evolved), by this “hegemonic image of time in our culture” (Pelbart, 2000, p. 129), which is separated by a line that morally divides modernity (Europeans) and backwardness (other peoples) (Quijano, 2005). Similarly, this incompatibility of time with what is said about it opens the historical debate to themes that usurp the successive, linear, and evolutionary time through the strength of their relevance, creating an apparently irreconcilable distance between past and present.

This criticism creates the possibility to rethink the present and its urgencies, as well as the past of which we speak and address, both this past and this present, as coexisting and coeval, making “the facts of the past problems of the present”. In this scenario, the ethical and esthetic character of History teaching becomes a way to problematize the present and open possibilities of futures. Addressing the relevant issues of the current public life, such as racism, violence, or authoritarianism (as in the documents we will analyze), reveals this labyrinthine way of thinking time, having past and present coincide, and presenting a past that remains, and precisely for this reason, persists and survives as an event that distributes its effects since a non-chronological and unstable time. Everything takes place as if time does not fit the modes of measuring, representing, or signifying it. If we assume that these modes are qualities that policy creates, produces and imposes on time, as particular and contingent ways of establishing its chronological limits, then time comes to be considered ontological, allowing itself to be captured in its retreat by only specific forms through which we determine the limits for the experience. Time is excessive in relation to the temporalities we create to shape it. Therefore, they are human creations, cultural products, time policies that, upon being constituted and established, exclude other temporalities, other ways of giving human qualities to time.

These questionings about the present time in History class are not casual. They emerge as a moving phenomenon, which, for Ana Zavala and Magdalena Scotti (2005), is the origin of practical investigations of the practice, that is, of studies conducted by teachers about their practices. We were engaged by the productions of our students, future History teachers, in their first experiments with creating History lessons, in two courses that we teach. One course has a theoretical-practical nature, introducing student teaching internships, and is jointly taught by us. The other is a course that involves the actual student teacher internship in elementary school. These productions have been the object of our research projects, which focus on the phenomenon of History classes and History education for youth. This text results from collective reflection, which has generated many questionings, some of which have been published. In other words, the reflections presented here have time and place of birth, growth, and maturity. Nevertheless, the actors involved are not only the authors of the article. The nature of the classes we teach makes us attentive to “what goes on in the heads and mouths” of both pre-service teachers and students from schools and other institutions where the internships take place. The History lesson is discussed, planned, and organized based on the dialog between supervising professors and interns in History teaching, who work in public schools in the Porto Alegre Metropolitan Area, grounded on complex negotiations with the desires and wills of youth cultures. All of these elements have changed in recent years, by including social and political demands presented to History teaching during this period, in addition to the visible climate of persecution and censorship caused by the combined action of the “schools without political parties” and “gender ideology” movements, as discussed by Seffner and Picchetti (2016) and Seffner (2017).

The sources we used to analyze the concern for the present time in History teaching practiced in our classes in this period were: course schedule; lesson planning by student teachers; field diaries of the observations and guidance given during the internships; and the articles written during this period addressing this issue. These records were read and analyzed, specifically focusing on the concern for the present time in History lessons, and comparing them with the theoretical problematizations we presented at the beginning. This assessment was transformed into a research project about the elaboration of lesson plans and History lessons, from the perspective of thinking of the present and future as significant temporal elements of a History class. What we discuss below is a small part of this exercise of investigation, constructed in two moments: first, we situate the concerns for the present, examining the syllabus of the courses related to student-teacher internships; and then we analyze some lesson plans and practices of student-teachers who were challenged to think about the present time.

HOW DO/DID CONCERNS FOR THE PRESENT TIME OCCUPY THE CLASSES RELATED TO STUDENT TEACHER INTERNSHIPS IN THE FIELD OF HISTORY TEACHING?

In the course syllabus and the notes made to guide the classes we teach, we noticed, with reformulations of language, the emergence of statements such as “questioning ourselves about the relevance of History contents and their connection with contemporary issues”; “elaboration of History lesson plans in tune with the contemporary school reality”; “attention to issues of youth culture”; “avoiding the accumulation of historical information that is not connected to the reality lived by the students”; “responding to student requests”; “emphasis on topics that help students understand the reality they experience”; “preventing History from being seen as a science solely concerned with the past”; “reflecting on the reality experienced by students to develop History lesson plans better”; “prior observation of the school internship and the teaching conditions, and conversations with the students in the class where the student-teachers will work to gather elements that will help to elaborate the planning in line with this reality”; “capacity to establish connections between the History topics taught and themes concerning the reality lived by the students”; “developing a way of teaching History that allows understanding human actions in time and space, providing elements for thinking of contemporary problems”; “developing strategies to promote significant learnings in History, understood as those in which lessons of the past clarify questions of the present and make a difference in the life of students, changing the way they are and think”; “avoiding the temptation of wanting to teach ‘all’ historical knowledge of a certain period, favoring the selection of topics that can make a difference in the present life of students”. Besides being present in the course schedules, these issues were the object of articles written at the time.

These questionings imply rethinking a range of school knowledge that has a long tradition in History education and, to some degree, breaking with this tradition. If History is the construction, narrative, and interpretation of the past based on questions raised in the present, education in school will be attentive to the ways of producing readings of the past and building arguments that provide a coherent and plausible narrative, pertinently situated in time and space. The elaboration of narratives of the past grounded on current issues presumes the use of specific instruments, procedures, and vocabulary. (Seffner and Stephanou, 2005, p. 176, our translation)

The concern for the present was broad and often served to fight a certain encyclopedic bias in History education. Focusing on the present of the students can be a criterion for leaving aside parts of the past that, at that moment, do not help to “understand” the present. Over time, concerns for questions of the present increased upon considering the planning of History lessons, and consequently, incorporated concepts and themes from other human sciences, such as Sociology, Political Science, and Geography. This context gives some space to the so-called teaching of sensitive, socially relevant, or controversial issues (Pereira and Seffner, 2018).

HOW WERE THE CONCERNS FOR THE PRESENT TIME EXPRESSED IN THE CLASSES OF STUDENT TEACHERS?

With respect to the expressions of this concern for the present, we identified two distinct pedagogical strategies. The field diaries with observations of the classes and the supervision meetings with student-teachers indicated that the present was not precisely the starting point for History lessons. The emphasis was placed on good teaching of a topic from the past, that is dense and rich with information and concepts, concluding with the classic question: what does this tell us about current times? The concern for the present thus appears after the study of the past. The Table 1, part of a report of the Field Diary on Classroom Observation, revealed this:

Table 1 - Field Diary on Classroom Observation from 1996. 

[...] 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.

Source: archives of the course Introduction to Practice and Student Teacher Internship in History (Faculdade de Educação/Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul -FACED/UFRGS).

The second pedagogical strategy of concern for the present had two main focuses: the present is everything (it is the beginning, middle, and end of History classes, especially when they are taught to lower-income and working-class students) or the present is a ground where we collect clues to study the past. In the first case, the History lesson has the risk of becoming nothing more than a certain contemporary journalism; while in the second, we have an opening to study sensitive issues of the present, which have a difficult coexistence with the traditional historical narrative, looking, at times, more like a class in Anthropology or Sociology than History (Tables 2 and 3).

Table 2 - Field Diary on Supervision sessions for Lesson Planning, 1998. 

The supervision session for lesson planning was difficult today. The two student teachers are working in a large school in a neighborhood close to the downtown area, with first-grade high school classes, assisting the same teacher, in the night shift. Both classes are composed of students who work. […] The student teachers are strongly tied to certain theoretical and political positions that describe a revolution carried out by the poor and workers against capitalism. They were thus a bit disappointed when they found that the theme of the classes they would teach in these first-grade high school classes was Ancient History. […]. In addition, the classroom teacher, according to the interns, gave them considerable freedom to choose the contents they would teach. We are in an election year, with the opportunity for re-election approved the previous year. […] The combination of all these factors resulted in a proposed curriculum for the History lessons that would follow the election for president and other officers, and include an evaluation of the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. [...] Ancient History was completely out of the planning, replaced by an overview of the current elections. When I asked about this, they immediately responded that, for these students, all poor and workers, it did not make sense to keep teaching contents about Chaldeans, Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, with so much happening in the Brazilian political context. Moreover, upon talking with the students, the interns had realized that some of them were a bit older, and consequently, they could vote. […] After much negotiation, we reached an agreement, in which the classes would have a session to follow the national life (that we called observatory of the present), organized with the students and based on their political interests (and not on the strict interests of the student teachers) […], and Ancient History content connected with the reality of the countries that are now found in those regions.

Source: archives of the course Introduction to Practice and Student Teacher Internship in History (Faculdade de Educação/Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul -FACED/UFRGS).

Table 3 - Field Diary on Supervision sessions for Lesson Planning, 2017. 

Excellent conversation today in the supervision session for lesson planning with two student teachers, who will work in a shared teaching regimen in an eighth-grade class. They are feminists and presented a proposal for classes in Brazilian and European History focused on issues related to women and gender relations. They brought plenty of teaching materials, wonderful ideas, and planning from the first to the last class. The class they will teach has, according to them, a vast majority of girls, in a school in the eastern region of the city, which is a general traditional school in high school. […] But we spoke about these strong characteristics, which called for a specific line, and how this dialogs, or could dialog, with a more general presentation of each historical period. It was difficult to reach a consensus or compromise about this.

Source: archives of the course Introduction to Practice and Student Teacher Internship in History (Faculdade de Educação/Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul -FACED/UFRGS).

This brief report helps to identify the concern for issues of the present time in History lessons. In recent years, with the increasing and active presence of students who attend university through the quota system and with the higher number of women in the History education course, a variant of the concern for issues of the present time emerged. This variant is the problematization of the profile of the intern, presented as a teacher marked by their social status, generation, gender, ethnic aspects, class belonging, school trajectory, sexual orientation, political convictions, religious belief, family history, and future projects. It is increasingly common that, upon presenting their teaching plans and ideas for the internship, student teachers do so by problematizing their own lives and personal and political trajectory. This brings a certain centrality to their bodies, an element of the present symbolized by skin color and the group of marks that constitute us. The theme of the teacher’s body is old in educational literature.

Professors rarely speak of the place of Eros or the erotic in our classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body. […] What did one do with the body in the classroom? […] Entering the classroom determined to erase the body and give ourselves over more fully to the mind, we show by our beings how deeply we have accepted the assumption that passion has no place in the classroom. […] To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of Eros within ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire. (hooks, 2001, p. 115 and 123)

WHAT CHANGED IN 2018?

In the first semester of 2018, the Introduction to Student Teacher Internship course, planned and taught jointly by the authors of this article, as mentioned previously, proposed an intense challenge concerning connections between History teaching and the present time. In small groups, the students were invited to elaborate a didactic sequence (including teaching material prepared by them) inspired by the text of Joan Pagès (2015), La educación política y la enseñanza de la actualidad en una sociedad democrática (Education policy and teaching about the present in a democratic society), choosing one of the author’s proposals for History teaching using issues of the present. They are: current time as pretext, current time as present, current time as comparison, current time as problem, and current time as perspective. In the text, Pagès discusses the need to relate the political education of youths with teaching about current issues, contributing to involve them in the problems of public life. This involves building a pedagogical project of school, whose daily praxis is based on cooperative work and the construction of knowledge and less on repetitive communication or contents: “[...] they must be focused on political problems that can be easily identified as such and upon which it is possible to intervene” (Pagès, 2015, p. 24, our translation). Thus, the author indicates the importance that the curriculum also be constituted by an approach to problems of the present, which address current public and political debates. At the end of the semester, we conducted a seminar to discuss each lesson plan. The Table 4 presents eight of these plans, highlighting the focus on the present, the concepts, objectives, and methodology.

Table 4 - Lesson Plans in 2018/1. 

Focus Concepts Objectives References
1 Current time as perspective

  • Imperialism

  • Ethnocentrism

  • Racism

Understanding the concepts, breaking with the idea of History linked only to the past, and applying the concepts in the present.

  • Edward Said

  • Paulo Freire

  • Nilton Pereira

  • Lana Siman and Araci Coelho

2 Current time as comparison

  • Violence

  • Authoritarianism

  • Human Rights

  • Promoting the movement present-past-present through cases of human rights violations in the military dictatorship.

  • Participating, discussing with arguments, and acting critically.

  • Rafael Saddi

  • Sonia Miranda

  • Marizete Lucini

  • Mével and Tutiaux-Guillon

3 Current time as present Police violence Reading and analyzing sources critically and reflecting on the differences and similarities between the military dictatorship and current police violence.

  • Alessandra Gasparotto

  • Enrique Padrós

  • Suzana Zaslavsky

4 Current time as problem

  • Advertising

  • Monarchy

  • Republic

Identifying what changed and persisted in the concepts of monarchy and democracy, problematizing this perception in advertising and memes.

  • Luis Fernando Cerri

  • Joan Pagès

5 Current time as comparison

  • State Terrorism

  • Resistance

  • Political Art

Debating censorship, thinking of continuities and discontinuities between the present and the period of the military dictatorship.

  • Michel Foucault

  • Enrique Padrós

6 Current time as comparison

  • Civil-military dictatorship

  • Military intervention

Learning about the period of the military dictatorship and its contradictions, thinking of the recent appeals for military intervention.

  • Carla Rodeghero

  • Joan Pagès

7 Current time as pretext Immigration Discovering different aspects of European immigration to southern Brazil.

  • Joan Pagès

  • Lana Siman and Araci Coelho

  • Miriam M. Leite

8 Current time as pretext

  • Malê Revolt

  • Regency period

Learning historical information about the Malê Revolt and the regency period. Relating this information with current problems based on works of art.

  • Silvia Petersen and Bárbara Lovato

  • João José Reis

Source: archives of the course Introduction to Practice and Student Teacher Internship in History (Faculdade de Educação/Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul - FACED/UFRGS).

The lesson plans that showed more complex temporal connections had some common points: all participants volunteered to explore the bibliography offered in the course and combine it with their own references, created original and creative teaching materials or strategies, and rejected the dichotomy between a traditional lecture class and a “different” class. This deeper reflection stimulated the creation of teaching materials and/or lesson strategies that could encourage questionings and expand the concepts chosen in each lesson plan. These teaching materials also had the role of breaking with the separation between the explanation of the content and the activities, allowing fluidity, and guiding the reasoning of the youth beyond the simple acquisition of information about the past. We can preliminarily conclude that these productions expose the problem of time in History lessons in an exacerbated manner - each one in its own way. If the present seems to take over the main role, in reality, it is the futures, the horizon, which hover over each lesson. The pre-service teachers created, in a deliberate and engaging way, didactic sequences so that the History curriculum included issues involving public life in the present. We find, therefore, that the present as a trigger for the creation of didactic sequences reveals a deep problematization of time and temporality.

PLANNING THE FUTURE FROM THE PRESENT

To complete the cycle of analyses, we return to two History lesson plans that were effectively implemented during the student teacher internship. We consider that these two productions problematize time in its Eurocentric representations and its particular ways of proposing and establishing relationships with the past. The perspective that we present at this moment is based on two central arguments. The first concerns rethinking the frontiers between past and present, placing the existence of pasts that remain and coexist with the present at the locus of the discussion during the History lesson. The second argument relates to the idea that the lesson plan proposes that studying History from the present indicates and refers to neither the past nor the present, but to the future, which consists of a state of opening that allows creating new historical experiences not yet cataloged and defined in the limits of the present. Everything takes place as if the future is a construction undertaken through learning the broad historical experience of the past and criticism of the present, constituting a basis that can build new futures.

The first lesson plan was prepared by the students Luana de Lima da Silva, Maria Cristina Estima da Silveira, Priscila de Souza Santos, and Vitória Guedes Duarte. It corresponds to plan 1 from the Table 4 and involved the elaboration of three lessons focused on the acquisition, construction, and use of four historical concepts: imperialism, resistance, colonization, and ethnocentrism. The pedagogical strategy used was to begin the first lesson with an activity that would allow responding to the following question: are there cultural, political, and social phenomena in the students’ lives that can be classified as forms of imperialism, resistance, colonization, and ethnocentrism? Based on this exploration, the proposal was to build these four concepts, examining the articulations between them and their explanatory potential. In the two following lessons, equipped with these conceptual tools, the students would analyze situations from the nineteenth century in which these concepts could help to understand the historical relationships between some regions. The activity was originally planned for high school students. In the following semester, two of the students who authored the lesson plan, Priscila and Vitória, did a student teacher internship in a sixth-grade class from a school in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in the eastern area of the city. The supervising professor attended the first lesson, which lasted two periods, and later discussed his observations with the student teachers. The lesson plan prepared by the two students was inspired by the one elaborated in the previous semester, but included important changes, as the following description reveals, and adaptations to the themes being studied in the program of the year indicated.

The 23 students were greeted in their classroom and taken to a video room. The activity concerned the concepts of ethnocentrism and imperialism and focused on Ancient Egypt. In the second part, the lesson plan involved the use of illustrations to show how the official History of Egypt had erased or reduced the role of women. The class was organized into five groups. The student teachers then asked that, at first, they only listened to the songs played without commenting. The first song, entitled “Nour”, was in Arabic and sung by Egyptian rapper Zap Tharwat (in collaboration with Amina Khalil). This song provoked curiosity and attempts to guess the language. The students identified the rap style and were surprised by the alternation between the male and female voices. The second song was Brazilian, and some female students recognized it as “Dona de mim”, by the singer Iza. Symptomatically, the boys in the class did not know the lyrics and melody of this song. A round of discussion showed that the class did not know the author of the first song, or what it was about, but they speculated about elements of the Orient and spoke about the desert. They mentioned the possibility that the language was Arabic, and imagined the clothes they were wearing, saying that they must be terrorists, that the song was about a religious ritual, or that “they were all drugged, because of the way they sang”. Next, the music video in Arabic was shown, now with image accompanying the sound. The debate after the screening, mediated by the student teachers, allowed the class to identify that the singer was a young man - who the girls said was very handsome and the boys declared looked like a terrorist - who took care of his children, feeding them, taking them to school, putting them to sleep, and talking musically with a woman, who could be his wife or companion. In some scenes, the domestic tasks were equally shared by the man and woman. The music video had English subtitles, which allowed understanding that the dialog between the man and woman was about gender equality, but this information was not accessible to the students. Contrary to the speculations about the desert, the video took place in a city and the students noticed many elements similar to their reality, as well as some that were different, in terms of the aspect of the streets, mass transportation, the interior of the apartment where the characters lived, the clothes, foods consumed, cars on the street, etc. The class unanimously affirmed that they could not identify the theme of the song and that they were surprised that it involved the story of a man taking care of his children and sharing tasks with the woman. Here, the concept of ethnocentrism was constructed, and the students in the groups made some observations based on the question: why are we surprised to see a man and a woman sharing domestic tasks in an oriental video? Then they watched the music video of the Brazilian song. Some girls sang along, while the boys remained quiet; some were even a bit embarrassed because the singer made some strong statements.

The girls dominated the debate that followed, showing that they knew the singer, and citing many cases in the neighborhood of women who had to work and take care of their children alone. One girl affirmed: “a woman who is her own boss (is independent) has a tough time in this neighborhood”. In contrast, some boys mentioned cases, rarer ones, in which a man took all of the responsibility for child care, in an attempt to show that this was also found in Brazil. In any case, the debate focused on female agency, a concept that was present in the lesson plan. One verse from the music video was particularly polemic: “Já não me importa a sua opinião/ O seu conceito não altera minha visão/ Foi tanto sim que agora eu digo não”. (I don’t care what you think/ Your opinion doesn’t change my point of view/ I heard so many yeses that now I say no”). Some boys used the tactic of ridiculing the girls and the activity itself, improvising a line of music that said “before they just said yes, now they want to say no, but it’s yes, yes, yes”, which led to a heated discussion. The lesson took place on a Thursday morning, between two important dates: on the previous Saturday (September 29, 2018), the feminist protests known as “Ele não” (Not him) were held to express women’s repudiation to the presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. The following weekend would have the first voting round of the elections on October 7.

This situation was not considered in the lesson plan and caused the debate to incorporate partisan positions. A black boy, who made a clear argument using careful vocabulary, emphatically declared that “a woman does not care only for the house, she can do other things”. In response, a white boy simply said: “I support Bolsonaro”. Some girls and the black boy who had made the first statement said that Bolsonaro was a sexist and racist candidate. The white boy then affirmed that “he may be sexist and racist, but he’s not in jail”. The black boy replied: “Lula’s imprisonment was not legal”. The white boy said: “He’s in jail because he stole”, and the black boy ended the discussion declaring: “He stole a little, but his administration helped the poor”, which received some general support in the class. The student teachers took the opportunity to end the issue and move the debate towards what interested them, which was to address the man’s care for his children in the video from the East and the independent black woman in the Western video. Some male and female students said that in fact they thought that “over there in Arabia”, men were all terrorists and never took care of their children, while women were completely submissive, never went out, and dressed from head to toe in a burka. The boys had to recognize, under pressure from the girls, that they did not look fondly on independent women. One effeminate boy, seated in a group with four girls, took the opportunity to say that gay boys were also victims of aggression and returned to the issue of the elections saying: “I will not vote for Bolsonaro”, to which some responded: “you don’t even vote because you’re a minor”.

The interns then asked the students to write in their notebooks some conclusions from this first moment, insisting on the conceptual issue. Then, they presented some slides showing politically powerful women in Ancient Egypt, such as Queen Hatshepsut, an important Egyptian pharaoh. The students recalled Cleopatra and Nefertiti, and the interns showed slides of them. However, what most drew the class’ attention were slides and information about groups of women with considerable independence in Ancient Egypt, such as professional mourners, prostitutes, owners of small businesses, rich widows, etc. They stated that they did not expect this scenario related to Eastern people, and much less in Ancient Egypt. One slide about the right to divorce in Ancient Egypt stirred discussion because it was surprising. Once again, the concept of ethnocentrism was used, and important elements of the concept of imperialism were raised, with the class agreeing that everything that they knew about “the Arabs” was from Western sources, particularly from the US. They all laughed when one girl stated that none of them had ever visited Egypt and never would. This statement led them to discuss if they could only know “precisely” how life is in some location by going there. However, the student teachers reminded them that the music video was a local production, and thus important for comparing with the sources they mentioned.

After this activity, the student teachers showed illustrations depicting how the Egyptians had developed the production of paper with papyrus. Once again, some students commented that they thought paper was invented in Europe and not by the Arabs. The groups received a cutting and pasting activity: they would make papyri on which they would write sentences. The technique for producing papyri, involving glue, gauze, coffee grounds, and some sheets of paper, took the entire second period, and was very appealing. During the production, the groups discussed the images and sentences that would be placed on the papyrus and that showed female agency, with traits of Egyptian artistic production. They had a lively discussion about the images and sentences while they made the papyri. The papyri were hung on a string to dry in the back of the class. In a later report, the pre-service teachers mentioned that most of the class decided to draw Cleopatra or Nefertiti, with a few groups giving space to the professions and occupations of less prestige that had been shown, such as prostitutes, professional mourners etc. The papyri produced were displayed, showing the efforts to make designs using the artistic styles of Ancient Egypt. The back of the papyrus had the title of the painting and the reason it was chosen. To conclude, the students tried to find information about common women in Ancient Egypt in books from the library but found nothing, only references to famous women, such as Nefertiti, Cleopatra, and less often, Hatshepsut.

The activity stimulated questionings about current social practices and female agency in connection with ethnocentrism and imperialism, but in a way that was at times “confusing” to the eyes of a professional historian, basically because the entire study was permeated by issues from the daily cultural and social life of the students. The objective was to consider the historicity of the present. The students were shocked to discover the female agency in a society that is so backward and even more so because it is located in what they generically designated at times as “Arabia”. This activity showed how historical concepts allowed operating with certain realities and identifying pasts that insist and persist, in a process of coexistence with the present. In this sense, the present became a trigger that demonstrated the disturbance and anguish related to current times. The notion of female agency dialogued intensely with that of ethnocentrism, and the past became an experience confused with the present of this same past. As a result, thinking simultaneously about the present and the past created an rift in time, allowing an excellent exercise of imagining futures that are not described or prescribed, in which ethnocentrism, imperialism, and sexism do not exist.

The second lesson plan was produced by the students Bruno Corrales and Misael dos Santos Beskow (2018) and addressed the theme of Imperial Brazil based on a pedagogical strategy that considered the present as a catalyst for thinking of living pasts (Pereira and Seffner, 2018), such as the case of slavery in Brazil. The content to be studied consisted of socioeconomic aspects of the period, including the various social groups participating in the economic processes and the theme of slavery, taking into account “the power structures involved, manumission, slave resistance (quilombos, escapes, and conflicts with the masters), and the situation of the free and formerly enslaved black population during the entire imperial period” (Corrales and Beskow, 2018, p. 1). The lesson began with a plan from which emerged challenging situations that created events involving unusual relationships, uncertain problematizations, and productions foreign to the model of temporal ties familiar to Eurocentrism. This is how the present entered this lesson: as pure bewilderment. Instead of representing what defines the future or suggests a limit to possible relations with the past, the present and its urgencies become time itself, still not marked by the pattern of possibilities for its interpretation. Thus, it provokes anguish, which starts with the teacher and spreads to the students, becoming the very time of the lesson. That is, the anguish with the present becomes the opening that allows going to the past to problematize the present and learn with the experience. In this way, the lesson started with a cliché repeated by the then President-elect of Brazil: “It’s all ‘victimism’, Bolsonaro said about black people, women, and people from the Northeast” (Veja, 2018 apudCorrales and Beskow, 2018).

The use of this statement to begin a History class about Brazil’s imperial past was like creating a pit into which fell all models previously seen and experienced about what those students understood as learning about the past. The forces continued to cross what had been, at that point, an event - the classroom of Bruno and Misael. And they asked the students: “Is it really ‘victimism’?”. An apparently simple question is precisely what creates anguish, while simultaneously opening the fields of imagination, problematization, and finally, creation. This type of question shakes the common sense, which not only seems unquestionable in the historical experience of the students, but also prepares a non-place from where all beliefs can be undone in the blink of an eye, and it is precisely at this point, in a type of genesis, that the past appears, at the same time as the present and the future. Misael and Bruno affirmed that:

The idea is to discuss with the students if the social movements and struggles of discriminated populations can be considered purely as “victimism”, or if they stem from a reaction to a larger process in which these prejudices were historically produced and constructed in Brazilian society over the past two centuries. (Corrales and Beskow, 2018, p. 3)

This lesson for Class-82 was notable because it proposed to address pressing issues that went beyond temporal limits and study the concepts of “slavery, resistance, discrimination, racism, and social inequality”. Bruno and Misael explained that the lesson would be divided into three moments: the first involved reading Art. 3 of the Federal Constitution of 1988, which initiated a brief discussion about how prejudices against origin, ethnicity, gender, skin color, and other forms of discrimination are present in our society today, establishing a relationship with discriminatory discourses found in the media. They then presented some newspaper headlines to showcase what the recently elected president thinks about these issues. In a second moment, the students received data about the black population, in an attempt to think historically about racism and prejudice. The third moment involved the screening of a DVD that is part of the pedagogical box “Africa in the Archives” (África no Arquivo), prepared by the Public Archives of Rio Grande do Sul State (Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul - APERS).

The most impressive and difficult element was inserting issues concerning the recent presidential election in this lesson, particularly the statement of then-candidate Jair Bolsonaro, mentioned above. Nevertheless, the approach to the subject of slavery and racism, based on the statements of the current president, allowed accessing a social reality that cannot be seen from a cold reading of the past or as an indifferent description of an acceptable present that is considered normal. The resource of historically thinking about racism and slavery was rigorous, from a conceptual perspective, and necessary, from an ethical perspective. That is, the lesson created an opening and sympathy through a catalyst that dispelled beliefs, clichés, and rooted models about relationships between past, present, and future. This scenario allowed the lesson to combine problems of the present (inequality, social movements and struggles, resistances) with questions of the past (slavery, agency of the enslaved, economic aspects of the Empire) through the study of documents - letters of manumission, wills of former slaves, inventories of slave-owner properties, criminal suits, and sales documents. It also enabled imagining futures, opening a field of bewilderment to create new experiences, while we review and reconsider our relations in the present.

HISTORY LESSONS LIVE FROM THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

Thinking about the shape of a distant past from a present that is technologically and morally superior and of a future that promises redemption is a very particular kind of time policy, which is exclusionary, violent, and genocidal. It involves a Eurocentric concept of temporality, of giving meaning to time, of measuring, representing, and having experience. Therefore, the identification between time and history is nothing but a very sophisticated way of making universal and necessary a specific form of measuring and representing time. This quadripartite, continuous, successive, and evolutionist temporality is a tool created by European modernity to give quality to time. Its main weapon was having time and temporality coincide to hide its particular and political character. Addressing the urgencies of the present means, firstly, assuming that there is no identity between time and temporality and between time and history. This allows lessons to become spaces open to any forms of measuring, representing, or experiencing time. Secondly, it suggests thinking of time no longer within this Eurocentric, successive, and linear temporality, undoing the “solidarity between time and history”, as Pelbart defends (2004, p. 39).

It involves, at the limit, undoing the solidarity between Time and History, with all ethical, political, and strategic implications this ambition requires. By thinking of substantive multiplicities and the processes that operate within them, unearthing the most unusual temporalities, ranging from the Untimely to the Event, had not Deleuze given voice to those who, in a Benjaminian echo as he used to say, “History does not consider”? This obviously does not relate only to the oppressed or minorities, although it always involves them as well, but to the minority-becomings of all and each one: not exactly the people, but “the missing people”, the people to be.

This is how the thematization of the present is constituted in a process through which History problematizes the present and opens up to the futures. Everything takes place as if History lessons could open the past to the scrutiny of experience by problematizing racism, ethnocentrism, or the role of women as a past that remains and coexists with the present. This involves not only thinking of the historicity of racist practices and the structural character of racism in our society but also learning about human experiences of the past in which racism had no place, and the problems had different modes of resolution still unknown to us. In this way, we create an indiscernibility between past and future, given that the future is no longer a result of the historicity of the present and becomes the imagined opening for new life opportunities, in this case, without racism and injustice. This ethical element of History teaching consists of what Pagès (2018, p. 41) calls “teaching for utopia”, teaching for the future.

This is how the lesson plans that we presented and the lessons resulting from them shatter time: playing with temporalities; causing any event, addressed as an urgent issue of the present, to be able to communicate with other presents, like other pasts, and with other worlds; challenging not only the ill-fated continuous movement that has colonized our ways of thinking of and teaching History but the possibility of a description of a past that no longer affects life. In this article, we sought other times, other temporalities that are bifurcated, coexisting, coeval, and turbulent. We remained focused on the strength of Pelbart’s question (2000, p. 218): what would these other times be? Are they those “which our machines of loving, feeling, perceiving, dreaming, imagining create incessantly, and which cannot come close to entering the disciplined rubric of a time in history and its excessively guided meaning?”

The consequence was lesson plans and History classes focused on the imagination, the utopia, and the future, as a force open to create new relations and new worlds. Perhaps what we have done in these years was to incessantly pursue the signs that our “imagining machines” tenuously left along the road, suggesting the existence of many other lives, many other times, many other ways of creating relationships with the past and the future, based on the anguish that constitutes us in the present.

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Received: April 04, 2019; Accepted: August 06, 2019

Nilton Mullet Pereira has a doctorate in education from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). He is a professor at the same institution. E-mail: niltonmp.pead@gmail.com

Carmem Zeli De Vargas Gil has a doctorate in education from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). She is a professor at the same institution. E-mail: carmemz.gil@gmail.com

Fernando Seffner Pereira has a doctorate in education from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). He is a professor at the same institution. E-mail: fernandoseffner@gmail.com

Caroline Pacievitch has a doctorate in education from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). She is a professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). E-mail: caroline.pacievitch@ufrgs.br

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