“Professora, afinal, para que serve a História?”: vidas no papel e projeções de futuro no ensino-aprendizagem de História da Geração Z

Abstract

This dissertation's motivation lies in a common questioning of many school students: "So, what's the use of studying History, Miss?" Because History education knowledge yields direct impacts in the practical life of students, it can be considered fundamental that taught History may act significantly on the construction of human subjectivities. The main activity undertaken in this research was assembling, through theoretical analyses, a notion that is not exactly personal, but arranges itself in a an argumentative and analytical way in this paper: the aforementioned questioning about History's utility as a school subject does not seem to be made with the intention of "testing" the teacher whilst they are practicing their profession. This dissertation's aim is to, therefore, affirm that the student who questions about the utility of school taught History knowledge develops an attempt of approaching this specific knowledge regarding its possible uses in practical, everyday, immediate life, especially on the account that these teenagers and young people were born in a hyperconnected world, filled by technologies and media, which makes them fundamentally, subjectively and generationally part of Generation Z. This paper, therefore, is a direct result of experimentations more in an area of unforeseen events' than of certainties, composed by people – I, the other, us – that are wrought by words used to make sense of what happens to us, what we are and what we will become. The outcome's dimension corresponds to the elaboration of classes with specific propositions, different among themselves, considering fundamentally the participation of students and theoretical reflection elicited, and sustained, by activities that aim not only to enable orientation towards the practical life of these subjects, but also to make them experiment imagining, during History classes, a way for themselves to perceive who they are and who they want to be, including, therefore, the dream as a projection of the future from History education knowledge to the existence of a self and of the other.