Enseñar Historia en México: percepciones docentes en Educación Primaria

This research seeks to understand elementary school teachers’ conceptions of history as a subject and its educational purposes in Mexico. A qualitative methodology was used, with 25 teachers from two elementary schools answering a questionnaire anonymously. Following analysis of these responses, semi-structured interviews were conducted with four of the teachers to gain deeper insight into their discourse. The findings include a clear tendency toward positivist conceptions, which influences the educational purposes of the subject and favors the teaching of traditional content from Mexican history. This restrictive conception of the past and of instructional content conditions the type of learning that teachers can support in their classes and hinders a competency-based teaching of history grounded in the development of historical thinking, which demands an open and interpretive view of the past.