Between identification and empathy to elaborate the difficult past: an experience of a classroom debate with Chilean children

ABSTRACT

This article presents an analysis of historical thinking operations deployed in a student debate on Chile’s difficult past. A discussion was held in a public school during the second semester of 2019 on sensitive issues in recent history. Twenty-seven students between eleven and fourteen years of age participated in the activity, corresponding to the sixth grade of primary education. The results indicate that the students are active thinkers of past events through operations such as identification and historical empathy. According to the debate, these operations unfold through the categories of family affiliation and social class from which they identify and empathise with the actors of the past and the temporal relationship with their own experience. The article concludes with some insights about peace education in post-conflict societies where the past conflict remains in the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Identification
• historical empathy
• difficult past

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Museum was created in 2010 to make visible the human rights violations committed by the Chilean state between 1973 and 1990. Its objective is to dignify the victims and their families and stimulate reflection on the importance of respect and tolerance (https://ww3.museodelamemoria.cl/sobre-el-museo/)

2. On 18 October 2019a series of popular demonstrations, known as ‘Estallido social’, began in different cities in Chile. The participants of this popular revolt demanded economic rights in the face of the neoliberal model implemented during the dictatorship and sustained by the governments of the democratic transition. Following the mass protest demonstrations, the Chilean government perpetrated numerous serious human rights violations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FONDECYT [ANID/FONDECYT/POSDOCTORADO/3190569].

Notes on contributors

Evelyn Palma Flores

Evelyn Palma Flores: PhD in Social Sciences, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Argentina. Postdoctoral Researcher of the Research Nucleus ”Daily Lives in Emergency: territory, inhabitants and practices”, Department of Psychology, University of Chile. Her areas of specialization are educational counseling in school management, children's subjectivities in institutional spaces, transmission of the memory of the conflictive past in the school space and attention to victims of human rights violations.

Natalia Albornoz Muñoz

Natalia Albornoz Muñoz: Psychologist who holds a Master’s in educational psychology from the Universidad de Chile and is currently a PhD student in psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Catoólica de Chile. She also is teacher of Universidad de O’Higgins. Her research areas are learning and development of historical thinking, experimental pedagogy, and theoretical psychology.