What to Remember, What to Teach

What to Remember, What to Teach contributes to the understanding of the processes of memory practices and their construction in the pedagogical discourse of the traumatic recent history of Chile.

Chile's recent past of human rights violations and dictatorship is part of a history shared by Latin American countries. This sensitive past is historized, transmitted and co-constructed by new generations of youth and their history teachers, through a discursive exploration of the processes of remembering and forgetting in the micro-space of memory practice in the classroom, and through teachers' and students' personal and social memories.

This book offers a detailed analysis of how Chile's painful recent history is recontextualized and negotiated into secondary level Chilean history education. It proposes a social discourse analysis of key written and oral corpora of pedagogical practices from a multimodal perspective, paying particular attention to the construction of evaluative prosodies in these discourses. The corpora contemplated for analysis include official history textbooks and classroom interactions, teacher and student interviews, Chilean history written by specialists, and official documents produced by the state during post-dictatorial years. This book also presents a theoretical development of the interpersonal and experiential regions of meaning from a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach and with Spanish language resources.

What to Remember, What to Teach is intended for researchers, graduate students and teachers who are interested in the fields of discourse and memory studies.