O lugar do tempo presente na aula de história: Limites e possibilidades

Abstract

Recognizing the importance of present time in the conformation of the history taught and the modern conception of history as a whole, the text delineates the history of this centrality, associated with the tension between unavoidable approximation and necessity of distance from history in relation to the political context. In a second movement, an analysis of contemporary perspectives on the issue is made, taking into account 1. the expansion of the repertoire of subjects, objects and methods of history, since the second half of the twentieth century, questioning the Eurocentric paradigm and the idea of Civilization that is intrinsic to it; 2. the emphasis on the concept of citizenship as the central ideia of school historiography, whose elasticity is doe of this new arsenal of historical experiences and narratives; 3. the historical culture of the present day and its presentist emphasis, distrustful of stable futures, but valuing the memory and the social circulation of the past in short, in this historiographic context, the article problematizes the place occupied by the present tense in history classes in its limits and potentialities. On the one hand, the place of present tense is elevated as fundamental to confer conditions of intelligibility and production of historical sense, adequate to the pedagogical objectives of history and its formative purpose; on the other hand, the limits of an exclusively centered emphasis on the present are shown, unable to allow the experience of decentering over time and the understanding of permanence, the cumulative dimension and long historical duration.