Evidence of the historical experience of the students. Documentary analysis of three activities with oral history

Abstract

The research seeks to recognize the evidence of historical experience (HE) from the perspective of the student learning. To this end, the HE model proposed by Meneses (2020) is used to recognize the development of different experiential aspects and cognitions,  and applied them to the  documentary analysis. It is a case study in which 22 intellectual products developed by high school students are analyzed from three concerted schools in Catalonia, whose teachers carried out a learning activity with oral history: biographical videos of the students of case A and oral sources of the students of  the cases B and C. The results suggest that the experiential dimension is the most evident in all three cases. A humanizing perspective of history could be recognized by focusing on the learning of the memories and emotions about past experiences. The applied dimension was developed through the construction of a final product, but the historiographic technique was not used properly. The cognitive dimension had significant weaknesses, especially because of the little historical contextualization that the students made about  the life stories. Teaching and learning processes should be regarded as a constant construction of HE. This requires transforming teaching practices and designing educational situations of learning by doing, thinking thoughtfully, and interacting with the environment. Also, a story must be presented in which the different protagonists are approached. In this sense, oral history as a didactic strategy has much to contribute.