Written language and historical consciousness in children and adolescents productions

Abstract

The empiricist conceptions of learning in the teaching of History are centered, mostly, in the transmission of facts and concepts through the exhibition of the content and fixation exercises. In the teaching of the written language, they privilege the domain of the code and of the spelling, being centered more in the structures than in the usage. Opposed to that, the present article bring to us some aspects of the understanding of the cognitive processes involved with development of the historical consciousness and the narrative competence, looking into the reflections of Vygotsky and Bakhtin on the relationship word and consciousness of Rüsen on the historical consciousness as learning. The corpus of the investigation was constituted by 134 textual productions of 67 students (29 of the 5th grade and 38 of the 8th grade of the secondary school) of a municipal school of São Paulo. They were invited to writing and rewriting a text considering a social problem.