The role of autobiographical narratives in the historical understanding of the subject and his community

Abstract

This article collects the results of an interventional research regarding the educational possibilities and obstacles that arose after the implementation in the classroom of a teaching and learning sequence that sought to link the historical narratives with the autobiographical fragments of young people around the Civil Military Dictatorship. in Chile (1973-1990). This qualitative research acquired the methodology of content analysis in thirteen stories written by high school students in a paid private school in Santiago de Chile. The results show that the student group elaborated narratives with different structures according to the temporal context. Thus, the autobiographical fragments acquire prominence in the present and future, since the students explained some personal ideas from conceptual quasi-characters (individualism) that were consolidated in the Chilean dictatorial context. Despite the above, the quasi-characters incorporated in the stories limited the spaces of freedom of the subjects and hindered, on some occasions, the incorporation of the individuality of the students. In addition, the presence of the past-present-future temporality allowed the autobiographical to be incorporated into a broader temporal context, characterized by negative judgments about the political conflict and by ways of acting as citizens restricted to individual spaces, preventing the encounter with others. In conclusion, the links between the content and skills of historical thinking with autobiographical narratives are not natural, but complex to work in school and present challenges on how students can understand themselves historically.