Teachers in dark times: ethical objectivations in History Teaching

Abstract

We seek in the essay to debate about the directions of an ethics in the teaching of History. We aim to situate elements of everyday life and teaching practice as constitutive forms of paths towards ethics within the classroom. Therefore, we will present the progress of the debate mentioned, establishing a dialogue with reference authors. We will follow this path with two perspectives on the subject: ethics as a guiding element of our professional action, as well as ethics as an intrinsic component of school history knowledge, permeating the entire teaching-learning relationship of our discipline. We will also bring up dialogues with teaching in basic education, intending to launch intelligibility about experiential knowledge, promoting a dialogue between theory and empirical. In our analysis we found interesting results. It was from these problems and the multiple crises experienced in our country that the debate on ethics originates, in the disciplinary community of professors, teachers, researchers and researchers in the Teaching of History. Based on the contributions of colleagues, we observe that such teaching can be ethical insofar as we conceive the other placed inside the classroom and in the processes that we call teaching-learning as human beings. The other enters the scene at a certain time and in a certain space. Therefore, it is time to rethink the paradigms that guide our roles. These could enable the formation of a compassionate, empathetic, and less strange look in face of the characteristic differences of our human condition. We need an approach to History teaching that contemplates not only the cognitive dimension, but also the affective and ethical ones. We thus defend a teaching of history committed to ethics born of the richness that represents the human experience, this courageous collective adventure.