History teachers and problems of recent history from the local case of Merlo: conceptions, practices and school institution

Abstract

This work is a study on the teaching of recent history (HR) that starts from the testimony of a group of history teachers from the town of Merlo, Buenos Aires. In the interviews, we sought to investigate the conceptions that teachers have about HR, its teaching in the classrooms and the commemorations in schools. In this way, in the first part the interest in HR and how it is conceived by teachers are analyzed. In the second, the exam focuses on ways to generate interest in students and the results that this generates in educational practices. The last section focuses on the school space in which teachers work and how they experience, from their point of view, the development of commemorations and their activities around HR. It has been found that teachers share a political narrative that involves a way of understanding HR as a tool of struggle for the present and that this could have original characteristics developed around the socio-political context of the interviewees.