Fostering historical learning in elementary education through whole class shared reading activities ( Fomentando el aprendizaje histórico en Educación Primaria mediante actividades de lectura compartida )

Students have their first contact with the subject of history in elementary education. At this point, they have still not developed the reading strategies that this type of domain requires. At elementary level, teachers must support their students to contextualize information and make explicit the relationships among ideas as a basic aspect of historical reasoning in the classroom. This paper explores the ways in which teachers with specific experience in teaching history in elementary education support their students to access the contents and relationships in history textbooks. Results show how teachers often contextualized and shared the ideas and the relationships among those ideas needed to understand the text. However, once the help provided to their students has been analysed in relation to the perceived level of complexity, the data reveal that teachers focused on the less complex ideas and relationships, rather than on the more complex ones. This seemingly paradoxical strategy could be explained by the discrepancy between the intrinsic complexity of texts and the learners’ historical background knowledge.