What to Remember, What to Teach
Human Rights Violations in Chile’s Recent Past and the Pedagogical Discourse of History
Teresa Oteíza [+–]
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Teresa Oteíza is an associate professor in the Faculty of Letters at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
What to Remember, What to Teach is intended for researchers, graduate students and teachers that are interested in the fields of discourse and memory studies and, particularly, in the linguistics and multimodal recontextualization of history into pedagogical discourses and their relationship with the transmission and co-construction of memories of a recent national past.
This book aims to provide a better understanding of the processes of memory practices and their construction in the pedagogical discourse of history in Chile regarding a recent painful national past of human rights violations and dictatorship, which is part of a history shared by Latin American countries. With this purpose in mind, this book offers a detailed discourse analysis of how this recent traumatic national history is recontextualized and negotiated into secondary level Chilean history education. The analysis proposed is a social discourse analysis of key written and oral corpora of pedagogical practices from a multimodal perspective, paying particular attention to the construction of evaluative prosodies in the discourses analyzed. The corpora contemplated for the analysis comprise official History textbooks, History classroom interactions, teachers and students interviews, Chilean history written by specialists and official documents produced by the state during post-dictatorial years.
This book not only offers a detailed linguistics and multimodal analysis of key discourses that construct pedagogical practices of recent traumatic past of dictatorship and human rights violations in Chile; it also presents a theoretical development of the interpersonal and experiential regions of meaning from a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach and from Spanish language resources. In sum, this book is intended as a contribution to our understanding of how a recent sensitive past of a nation is historized, transmitted and co-constructed by new generations of youth and their history teachers through a discursive exploration of the processes of remembering and forgetting in the micro space of memory practice of the classroom and through teachers and students personal and social memories.
Series: Text and Social Context
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
1.1. History, discourse and memory studies 1.2. Transmission of recent history to new generations of youth 1.3. Recontextualizing the past into a pedagogical discourse 1.4. Sociosemiotic approach for analyzing discourses 1.5. Interpersonal and experiential meanings and their role in constructing positionings in the discourse
Chapter 2
Remembering Recent Past of Human Rights Violations from the Official Documents Promoted by the State [+–]
Chapter 2 focuses on the remembering of recent past of human rights violations from the official documents promoted by the State: The National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation of 1991 (Rettig Report) and The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture of 2004 and 2011 (the Valech Report). In this chapter the process of remembering and forgetting is situated in a larger sphere of dictatorships and human rights violations that were experienced in the whole Latin American Southern one and a process that was highly influenced by the Cold War (1950-1990). In this chapter I pay special attention to the impact these two official documents have had on the curriculum of History and thus on the official history textbooks produced by the Chilean Ministry of Education.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3 is related specifically to the analysis of official History textbooks that have been published by the state for the last 30 years (1990-2020). This chapter pays special attention to the processes of building a social memory and of the historicization of memories of recent Chilean past. In order to present these processes, I focus first on the production, circulation and reception of official history textbooks and then I offer a critical discourse analysis that takes into account the symbolic construction of time and space through resources of graduation of attitudes and the valuing the historical experience with different levels of inscribed and evoked evaluations. This critical and social discourse analysis contributes with our understanding of the evaluative prosodies of power, conflict and fear that are privileged in History textbooks.
Chapter 4
Chapter 4 begins with an explanation of how history is recontextualized as a memory practice in secondary level history classroom interactions. Following this, I focus on the linguistic and visual resources for building historical evidentiality from an intertextual and intersemiotic perspective. Next I explore the negotiation of point of view through the discursive resources of dialogic contraction and dialogic expansion, also paying special attention to the further elaboration of the subsystem of ENGAGEMENT to better account for the building of evaluative prosodies axiologically and epistemically charged in the interaction.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5 focuses on multimodality and historical evidentiality. In this chapter I take particularly into consideration the space that symbolic images have in the transmission of memory in history classroom interactions and in history textbooks. In order to carry out this analysis, as previously mentioned, the selected verbal and visual construction of historical evidentiality is key to the building of historical explanations in both history classroom interactions and history textbooks. Therefore, I explore the space that symbolic images have in the transmission of memories and the particular status of photographs and other visuals incorporated in textbooks and as part of classroom material, as pedagogic semiotic artifacts.
Chapter 6
In chapter 6, I examine the transmission of memories and the co-construction of the past by new generations of youths and history teachers. This chapter focuses on the discursive analysis of students’ personal and social memories regarding their national recent traumatic past, as well as teachers’ personal and social memories and their impact in their teaching of this recent national history. This approximation to personal and social memories constructed in part in a pedagogical setting and related to the pedagogical space of the teaching of history is then put in dialogue with research areas of memory studies, social phycology and local historiography of recent past.
Chapter 7
Chapter 7 is a concluding chapter, in which I approach the general process of recontextualization of historical memories into history secondary education in Chilean schools. In this chapter I evaluate the teaching of recent history in Chile and the role of historicizing memory from a broader perspective, as well as the openings and encapsulations of memories in relation to official and alternative memories of Chilean recent past in a pedagogical context. I conclude the chapter with a reflection regarding new research avenues and linguistic intervention possibilities in secondary history school education.
ISBN-13 (Hardback)
9781781798690
Price (Hardback)
£75.00 / $100.00
ISBN-13 (Paperback)
9781800504110
Price (Paperback)
£24.95 / $32.00
ISBN (eBook)
9781781798706
Price (eBook)
Individual
£24.95 / $32.00
Institutional
£75.00 / $100.00
£24.95 / $32.00
Institutional
£75.00 / $100.00
Publication
01/09/2023
Pages
224
Size
234 x 156mm
Readership
researchers, graduate students and teachers
Illustration
34 figures
