As categorias tempo e espaço: aspectos históricos, teóricos e epistemológicos

Abstract

Time and space are important categories for understanding history. In this way, they also establish theoretical assumptions for thinking about History teaching. However, despite the importance of these categories in understanding social life, it can be said that, in teaching, they have not received a more in-depth reflection, due to the complexity and profuse interpretations that fall upon them. Considering the need to think about teaching that promotes the development of historical thinking – and, undoubtedly, historical awareness – we asked ourselves: are the categories of time and space treated as content or methodology in the official documents that guide the teaching of History? Faced with this problem and based on the hypothesis that the categories of time and space are linked to an epistemological perspective, this investigation was organized with the aim of understanding the historical and theoretical significance of the categories of time and space, in order to contribute to the debate on the processes of teaching and learning History in the early years of elementary school. In order to answer the problem and achieve the objective, the methodology for this research was defined as bibliographical and documentary studies. In order to approach the historiographical aspects of time and space, the bibliographical studies are based on thinkers considered classics in human history: Durkheim, Bloch, Braudel, Lefebvre, Le Goff and Harvey. With regard to the teaching of history, based on the reflections of Bittencourt, Nadai, Rüsen, Siman and Schmidt, the importance of time and space as centrais categories of historical consciousness was analyzed. The documentary studies are based on the guiding curricular documents of the educational systems at national, state and municipal levels, such as: the National Common Curricular Base (2017); the Paraná Curriculum Framework (2018); and the Curriculum for the Cascavel Municipal Public Education Network (2020), to identify whether the categories of time and space are treated as content, method or epistemology. With the support of scholars of history and history teaching, it was analyzed that the categories of time and space in the three curricular proposals are approached differently. Despite the differences, the approaches prioritize content, with the exception of the Cascavel Curriculum, which, when discussing teaching methodology, presents an articulation between content and methodology, expressing that this issue is a problem relating to the epistemology of History.