Historical Narratives and Concepts: Delimitations and possible perspectives

CASTORINA, JOSÉ ANTONIO; CARRETERO, MARIO; BARREIRO, ALICIA VIVIANA; VAN ALPHEN, FLOOR ; SARTI, MARÍA

Santiago

Congreso; 15th Biannual Meeting of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology; 2013

International Society for Theoretical Psychologyc

Different studies on historical thinking have shown that historical concepts are utilized, by experts as well as novices, in the frame of historical narratives. However, it is necessary to undertake a more detailed analysis about the empirical and theoretical relation between historical concepts and narratives. For example, there is no doubt that the causal explanation that students construct to understand historical events are based on narratives, yet they can include abstract concepts or not. The elucidation of the relation between historical concepts and narratives is necessary, as either of them is insufficient to account for the complexity of historical comprehension. To understand school content requires a conceptual change of students? naive theories or conceptions in the direction of academic knowledge. However, the implications of school narratives in this process have not been sufficiently analyzed, considering that they generally include concepts. History learning depends on the appropriation of historical narratives, social or academically constructed, and on the capacity to consider the temporal and contextual dimension of the concepts that they include. Furthermore, this process requires critical understanding of empirical sources and the canonical narratives. Historical concepts have multiple meanings due to their intrinsically changing nature. Their polysemy is not only the result of their own history, they express social change and can be used in different ways depending on social groups or interests. The general aim of this paper is to make a theoretical contribution to the elucidation of the meta-theoretical relations that can be established between the psychological categories of ?concept? and ?narrative? in the learning of History. Firstly a characterization and problematization of historical narratives will be presented, focusing on their connection to teaching in schools. Secondly, some distinctive features of the concept involved in the teaching of History will be considered, establishing a comparison with other domains of knowledge. For example in the natural sciences concepts do not involve agents, intentions, motives and other constitutive elements of narrative thinking. Finally, empirical data obtained by this research group, about young people?s comprehension of ?nation? will be presented as empirical support for the theoretical elucidation. To understand the relations between historical narratives and concepts is very important, because it enables constructing teaching proposals focused on the identification and change of the concepts included in the historical narratives.