Troca por troca: cidadania pela história? Ensaio bibliográfico sobre as relações entre ciências sociais e educação para a cidadania

Abstract

Like Pinar (2015) and Santomé (2017), we recognize in this work, that history is an unambiguous element in the context of education for citizenship, however denoting that, in this level, the remaining curricular areas cannot be despised. The teaching of history, also associated with other social sciences, based on certain intentionalities (Prats, 2006) can, in fact, contribute to a democratic education, responsible an open to dialogue, in an effort to real citizenship. If the students develop their own skills of historical thinking (Seixas and Morton, 2013), more than just memorize contents and unique explanations, acquiring citizen awareness as subjects capable of critically interpreting the society they belong to, grounded on the available evidence (Barca, 2015; Alves, 2016; Chapman, 2016). This process, however, foresees the understanding that education dynamics for citizenship are not circumscribed to only one area of knowledge. The process of citizen formation has to be a collective effort (Biesta, 2011), transdisciplinary and transverse (López, 2015), with the History subject having a fundamental role, but not exclusive. Having as a starting point recent news in Portugal that seem to confirm some confusion between historical education and education for citizenship, we intend to develop a reflection about these two formative domains. Thus, we will discuss dominant educational approaches, hidden curricular dimensions, (dis)ordered intentions inherent to the subjects that, several and with their own specificities, can assert themselves as a resource for a consequent citizen attitude.