A fotografia como fonte para uma aprendizagem significativa sobre o tempo histórico

Abstract

The objective of this research is the use of photography as a source for meaningful learning about the historical time. Beginning from the perception that photography is a historical source, because it is a human production in time and, as such, according to Le Goff (1996), can be observed as a document/monument. At the same time, by being able to produce meaning and feelings in that one who observes it, photography acquires language status, a non-verbal, semiotic language. In analyzing photography in these two senses - as a historical source and as a language -, starting from the presuppositions of Kossoy (2007) and its methodology of deconstruction of this imagistic field, through the analysis of its iconographic and iconological aspects, it was intended that students of the 3rd grade of high school from Escola Estadual Técnica de Caxias do Sul, were able to produce legends in the form of a historical narrative that privileged historical time in its multiple dimensions, ruptures, stays, transformations and continuities. In order to do so, we used photographs of the students' family collection, therefore, located in the past, in counterpoint with photographs that were produced by the students in the present time. It is worth mentioning that today's young people already live and work with technologies on a daily basis, they are constantly recording their lives through photography without realizing that they are producing a record, a document and a memory of their time. This fact may be related to what Hartog (2014) stated as a crisis in relation to time and its temporalities, the "presentism", which began in the late twentieth century. There is an urgency in living the present moment that ends up disregarding the relations between past and future. In addition, using technologies that are part of the daily life of young people to mediate the analysis of historical time is in agreement with the pedagogical theories about meaningful learning.