Contingency and identity: Challenges for a transdisciplinary dialogue between historiography and didactics of history

Abstract

In the following theoretical work we intend to analyse the relationships between historiography and the didactics of history in the Spanish case starting from a phenomenological proposal about the multiple agents making up historical consciousness in contemporary societies. The main atony between historical knowledge and its transmission in the classroom is situated around two concepts: identity and contingency. In the first place, history maintains a nationalizing function in the educational system that obviates modern historiography on the subject, delving into its condition as a constructed and historical social imaginary. The teaching curriculum goes on characterized by a teleological and positivist sense of the country's history, as a succession of events that would explain the journey in time of a personified and homogenous entity: the nation. Secondly, we analyse the continuity of the deterministic and teleological conceptions of history, which, based on closed causal schemes, try to explain complex and contingent events. Both the identity function of the teaching of history and the positivist notion of the discipline projected to an inescapable end are at the origin of modern historiography and its integration into the educational systems of nation-states. Hence, it is necessary to reflect on the uses of the past and to integrate epistemology, historiography and notions about the elaboration of historical knowledge and contingency at all levels of the educational system.