Historical and narrative empathy: thinking about the Columbus expedition with future Basic Education teachers

Abstract

Historical empathy is one of the metacognitive pillars of the didactics of history most transcendental in the training of basic education teachers, since it allows them to understand the past in a contextualized way and teach the subject of history to their future students in a rigorous, systematic and critical. However, despite its great importance, in specialized literature there is little research on the development of historical empathy in teacher training. For this reason, in this article, the stories constructed by 36 future teachers of Basic Education from a university in southern Chile are analyzed, in order to evaluate the levels of development of historical empathy that they applied in their narratives based on one of the four main historiographical positions on the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America (Eurocentric, anti-colonial, conciliatory and chronological). The content analysis was used to identify the levels of achievement of historical empathy from the following typology: presentist historical empathy, experiential historical empathy and simple historical empathy. It is concluded that 8.3 % of the stories are based on presentist historical empathy, 50 % on experiential historical empathy and 41.7 % on simple historical empathy. These results are positive compared to other similar studies on historical empathy because most of them show that future teachers tend to express their historical interpretation from the presentist perspective.