The cinema as mediation in the production of historical knowledge about Brazilian dictatorship (1964-1985)

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the possibilities of historical knowledge construction about the 1964’s Brazilian dictatorship by using cinematographic language as a tool for the teacher’s mediating action. The film, like other audiovisual languages, has become an educational tool with great potential to establish contact between a highly “mediatized” public and the historical knowledge. Through the concept of cultural mediation, we investigated the impacts caused by the teacher, as mediator in the learning process, by stimulating the students through exhibition and discussion of the movie Batismo de Sangue. This analysis makes use of students’ narratives in questionnaires developed in the Focus Group practice in order to investigate prior knowledge, oral narratives and changes in thinking. By comparing previous narratives with discussions after the film and reflecting about the stimuli situations created by the participants, we search for changes in the students’ thinking and understanding about the topic. Developing a methodology of work with students in the focus group, a dialogic process was set up in the group, which made it possible to verify the mobilization of historical knowledge, modification of comprehension of the past and its relationship with the present. The analysis of students’ oral narratives proved it possible to use the film as a mediator, able to act as a tool for the teacher’s purposes and as subsidies to the students in the development of discussions that led to changes in their thinking, an exercise of empathy which increased the students’ knowledge of the period and the use of this historical knowledge to understand the present.