Aprendizaje histórico de estudiantes colombianos y españolesanálisis a partir de sus concepciones sobre la historia

Resumen

This research, based on theoretical and practical principles derived from the current of History Education. It proposes a debate around the survival of traditional models of teaching history and its effects on the historical learning of young students who have completed their primary and secondary education in Colombia and Spain. In this sense, the general objective of the research has been to analyze the learning of history by young Colombian and Spanish students through their conceptions about temporal links between past, present and future, and the development of their historical thinking. This general objective was approached from six specific objectives: to describe and compare the epistemological conceptions that Colombian and Spanish students have about history; characterize and compare the conceptions of Colombian and Spanish students about history understood as school knowledge; to identify the degree of interest of Colombian and Spanish students regarding the learning of substantive contents of history teaching; compare the forms of historical reflection through which Colombian and Spanish students build positions around historical problematizations; establish the degree of agreement between the conceptions of past and future of Colombian and Spanish students, and; to value the differences and similarities in the explanations that Colombian and Spanish students build around common historical processes. To meet these objectives, a non-experimental survey-type quantitative design was used. The study involved 764 Colombian students and 646 Spanish students between the ages of 15 and 17 who were in the last grade of compulsory education in the cities of Bogotá and Murcia, respectively. These students responded to a closed questionnaire –ACONHIS– made up of 25 questions based on five analytical dimensions: epistemological conceptions of history; school culture/historical culture; interest in substantive content; problems of historical thinking, and space of experience and horizon of expectation. As a complementary instrument for collecting information, the production of a written historical narrative was established, focused on the explanation of a historical process common to the two national contexts of the students who participated in the research -Colombia and Spain-: the conquest and colonization of America. The data collected through the answers given by the students around the ACONHIS questionnaire were taken to a database, coded and analyzed using the Statical Package for the Social Sciences software –SPSS version 22 for Mac–. In processing the information, a descriptive statistical analysis, an inferential statistical analysis were taken into account –identification of significant differences between the responses of the sample groups through the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test– and the establishment of correlations between the results of some items – calculation of Spearman's Rho coefficient–. The data obtained through the questionnaire was triangulated with the information collected from the narrative production exercise. The analysis of these stories was carried out from a quantitative logic through evaluation matrices associated with levels of complexity of the use of historical metaconcepts. The results indicate that, despite the registration of some statistically significant differences between the sample groups, there are structural elements of the historical learning of the student body that exceed national contexts. In this sense, difficulties and problems can be traced in the development of historical thought that are common in students trained in different curricular frameworks and historical cultures. From this perspective, the process of triangulating the results obtained against the epistemological conceptions about history, the assessment of school culture and historical culture, the interest in substantive content, the resolution of problems of historical thought and the forms of positioning against to the spaces of experience and horizons of expectation, reveals two major axes of critical reflection on the historical learning of the students who participated in the research: a) for students to think historically they must have incorporated into their mental schemes concrete tools that allow historical perception, interpretation and orientation in practice, and b) in the subjects various forms of constitution of historical meaning survive and intermingle that define their positions around specific realities and problems; however, the most complex learning – of a critical and genetic nature – tend to be more easily diluted in the absence of mastery of metahistorical skills.