Didactics of history and cognitive processes for its thinking

Abstract

     School history is the subject of strong social demand in all educational systems around the world. However, the very nature of this discipline and its connection to different systems of political, economic, and even religious values make the teaching of history a topic of debates heavily laden with social and, above all, governmental issues.

Yet, time is not only the framework of historical phenomena; it constitutes the very substance of history. If time were merely a framework, it would reduce itself to a taxonomy classifying events in chronology, an essential operation to avoid anachronism but one that cannot replace historical reasoning.

Indeed, historical time is neither truly physical nor psychological. It resembles psychological time in its lived character, but it surpasses the individual to inscribe itself in a community. It is constructed upon conventions, a social objectivization that differs across societies.

In the perspective of constructing an education aimed at guiding an individual in the construction of their representation, it is necessary to be aware of their initial representations of the object. But what are the students' representations of time? What are the main cognitive operations mobilized during the learning of history and the cognitive processes for thinking historically? What are the processes of conceptualization that guide learning?

In this paper, we present the two essential processes of the theory of social representations, which fit into a comprehensive approach adopted by educators, referring to the epistemology of the discipline.