Rethinking recent history teaching: some approaches and contributions from the Argentinian case

EFRON, LAURA

Congreso; South African Society of History Teaching; 2014

University of Witwatersrand

For the last thirty years Argentinian high school teachers had to face the various problematic of teaching recent history in the classrooms. While the democratic State ?after the dictatorship regime 1976/83- created new educational policies and came up with new approaches to recent history, school communities answered differently to those proposals. While some decided to avoid teaching that part of our history, others got involved and use a bunch of sources and strategies to talk about the traumatic past with the students. By using my experience as a high school teacher in Buenos Aires and as a researcher in the South African field, my aim is to problematize the teaching of recent history in the classrooms and to present some tools that could help to deal with traumatic pasts.Describe how recent history has been taught at high school since the democratic transition in Argentina and South Africa and the problems faced by teachers in the classrooms is the first step to construct new approaches to the past.