Teaching History in a Post-pandemic World: The Perceptions of Teachers on Training

Muñoz, Carlos; Torres, Bastián; Martínez, Rosendo; Carrillo, Olga

doi:10.3389/feduc.2022.866731

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ., 29 April 2022

Sec. Teacher Education

Volume 7 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.866731

This article is part of the Research Topic Teaching History in the Era of Globalization: Epistemological and Methodological Challenges View all 16 articles

Teaching History in a Post-pandemic World: The Perceptions of Teachers on Training

$\r\nCarlos Muoz*$ Carlos Muñoz^1*

Bastián Torres^2*

Rosendo Martínez³ $Olga Carrillo\r\n$ Olga Carrillo⁴

¹Departamento de Ciencias de la Educación, Facultad de Educación, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile
²Departamento de Currículum e Instrucción, Facultad de Educación, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile
³Departamento de Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales, Sociales y de la Matemática, Universidad de Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain
⁴Departamento de Ciencias de la Educación, Facultad de Educación, Universidad Católica de Temuco, Temuco, Chile

The purposes of the study were (1) to identify the level of knowledge that teachers in training have on globalization and the world health situation in recent years, with the aim of discovering the critical knots that exist; and (2) to understand the perceptions that teachers in training have on the foundations and purposes of history teaching on the current context of globalization and the health situation. The study is part of the project Proyecto FONDECYT Regular No. 1221872 titled El Desarrollo de habilidades de pensamiento histórico para vivir en sociedad. Tensiones, desafíos y propuestas para el sistema escolar chileno (Historical thinking abilities development to live in society. Tensions, challenges, and proposals for the Chilean school system) and part of the project El desarrollo de habilidades, pensamiento histórico de estudiantes de Pedagogía en Historia y Geografía de la Universidad de Concepción: un estudio de caso para la mejora de la formación inicial docente (Skills development, historical thinking of History and Geography teaching students of the Universidad de Concepción: A case study for the improvement of initial teaching training) (UCO-1798). The information was collected through in-depth interviews with 30 teachers in training of both sexes from the last five cohorts. The results show that teachers in training recognize the importance of teaching history in order for people to know their culture and their past, and to commit themselves in the construction of democratic societies. Moreover, and despite the fact that they perceive their university training to be deficient, which is associated with globalization and the pandemic, teachers in training are able to identify elements and characteristics of both phenomena. This enables them to conduct historical analyses that highlight the existence of skills associated with the development of historical thinking.

Introduction

The world has never been as interconnected as it is today, and that has to do not only with the massive exchange of goods and services but also with the information circulation flow throughout increasingly complex systems and the presence of the media, which makes political, economic, and cultural events, in their broadest sense, occurring anywhere in the world, known in real time on the other side of the world. In addition, our society has been a privileged witness of other important phenomena whose effects can be seen simultaneously in different territories, such as climatic and environmental phenomena, as well as those associated with the health of the population, with the COVID-19 pandemic and its many variants as a privileged protagonist (Agamben et al., 2020).

Today’s hyper-connectivity has caused concepts such as globalization and interdependency to be redefined, both conceptually and factually. This obliges educators to broaden the analytical scenarios of reference and, at the same time, to generate more direct links between what is local and what is global. This is if their aim is to promote meaningful learning and situated learning among students.

Nowadays, a young person from any Ibero-American country can interlink his or her present with events occurred in China, Columbia, Venezuela, the United States or Spain and, at the same time, has the opportunity to access various pieces of evidence that allows that person to comprehend that; beyond the variety of territorial, social, and cultural scenarios, there is an increasingly close and evident interrelationship between the reality that a person experiences on a daily basis in her or his living spaces and what happens or fails to happen in other parts of the world in political, social, economic, and cultural matters. Even by expressing herself or himself on issues that directly grab her or his attention, such as those related to the fields of music, sports, health, commerce, religion, environment, respect for human rights, diversity, among others. Therefore, and just to mention a few examples, the presentation of a new Korean K-Pop album, Messi’s leaving Barcelona, the detection of a new strain of COVID-19 in Africa, a strike by Amazon or Aliexpress workers, the Pope’s opinion on homosexual unions, the falling of the Amazon forest, and human rights abuses in Chile demand the teachers a set of epistemological and methodological challenges that should be studied and analyzed in, with, and for the school, with the purpose of offering learning proposals situated in the context in which students live, with methodologies and strategies that claim and reaffirm their condition as historical subjects, as well as subject of rights.

In the scenario previously described, there is no doubt that history teaching plays a fundamental role, especially because of the fact that it promotes a set of intellectual abilities that allow the comprehension and better appraisal of the phenomena of the present and, at the same time, the interaction with other disciplines, languages, and social science methods (Archila, 2004, in Aguilera, 2017). Regarding history and social science teachers, in 2004, Adler already warned that their initial and ongoing training was at a time of change and challenge; that it was necessary to train teachers to be capable of satisfying a complex and changing system of demands so that they can prepare their students to work with the thinking (Adler, 2006).

Taking into consideration the importance of history teaching in a changing scenario at the level, with its respective demands on the training of teachers of the specialty, this study has been intended to achieve two objectives: (1) to identify the level of knowledge that teachers in training have on globalization and the world health situation in recent years, with the aim of discovering the existing critical knots and, (2) to know the perceptions of teachers in training on the foundations and aims pursued by the teaching of history in the current context of globalization and the health situation.

School and Education in COVID-19

The school closure as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the world of education to reflect on its traditional ways of functioning, the existence of an uncertain post-pandemic world, and the need to deepen the training of people with a set of strong skills in accordance with the need that the new reality demands. To all this should be added yet other challenges, given that recent studies have shown that territorial, gender, social, and cultural differences have aggravated the educational gap due to the existing digital divide (Cannellotto, 2020; Lloyd, 2020; Salinas, 2020; Arenas, 2021; Ballén et al., 2021; Jiménez et al., 2021).

It is also interesting to note how literature recognizes that the institutionalism of schools, which is expressed through rituals, practices, and spatiality, was not only a contextual element of education but also was an essential aspect of it, and the absence of which brings about substantially different results in the teaching-learning process, even if the contents to be covered are the same (Plá, 2020). In this regard, the focus has shifted from digitalization efforts to pedagogy of emergence, understood as an answer born out of solidarity, adaptability, and social justice (Cannellotto, 2020; Plá, 2020).

History Teaching and Historical Thinking

Over the last decades, the teaching of history has been submitted to in-depth reviews. Discussions that have promoted the shift from episodic — or événementiel— history to a teaching of history focused on the development of historical thinking abilities are a testimony of this. In the traditional method of the teaching history, historical events have been addressed from an isolated, static, fragmentary, rote learning perspective, focused on heroes, dates, and school text, with unchanging representations of chronology of historical time and a deep emphasis on the development of national identity (Gómez et al., 2014; Aguilera, 2017; González, 2018; Plá, 2020). On the one hand, a characteristic of this case is the limelight of substantial content or of first order, that is to say, factual and conceptual knowledge that answers to questions like what? who? where? when? On the other hand, strategic knowledge — or of second-order—, meaning, those that involve the competences of the historical method, such as the management of sources or the historical perspective, has become only in recent years more and more relevant in the curricula of many states (Wineburg, 2001; Lee, 2005; Barton, 2010; Vansledright, 2014, in Gómez et al., 2014). It is on these curricular instruments where the importance of developing historical thinking in the promotion of interpretative abilities beyond specific facts in the school system has been slowly introduced in order to comprehend how past times were produced, understood, and taught (Ashby and Lee, 1987; Wineburg, 1999, 2001; Lévesque, 2008; Carretero and López, 2009; Prats and Santacana, 2011; Seixas and Morton, 2012).

The concept of historical thinking has been thoroughly developed by Seixas and Morton (2012). They have been argued that it refers to the type of reasoning that results from the study of history, dimensions of which are translated into historical relevance, analysis of sources, change and continuity, causes and consequences, a historical perspective, and the ethical dimension of history. This way of approaching historical knowledge stimulates the development of structured abilities on the basis of four central areas: historical problem posing, analysis and gathering of evidence from historical sources and evidence, development of historical awareness, and the construction or narrative representation of historical past (Sáiz, 2013, in Gómez et al., 2014). There is awareness that history education is not the same as professional historical research, nor does it claim to be; hence, the purpose of history teaching is not to train little historians but to promote a set of tools for students to think historically and to be able to explain reality and its context (Gómez et al., 2014; Aguilera, 2017: Plá, 2020).

The internalization of disciplinary knowledge and abilities has thus become fundamental pedagogical disciplinary knowledge in the educational practices for teachers, as well as for the management of the curriculum and the elaboration of didactic proposals based on the development of thinking, associated with a reflexive, critical, and pedagogical praxis and constantly under construction (Shulman, 2001; Restrepo, 2004; González, 2018; Da Silva et al., 2021).

Nevertheless, the importance that knowledge associated with historical knowledge, in studies such as the one by Gómez et al. (2014), is indicative of the lack of clarity that teachers in training have and, in some cases, practicing teachers, regarding the objectives of teaching history, mainly, as a consequence of the lack of consideration of the topic and the associated epistemological knowledge in the formative processes of future teachers, where there are traditional beliefs and conceptions related to the teaching of the specialty. Those beliefs and conceptions are understood as “personal forms of knowledge, implicit assumptions that teachers have about students, teaching, classes, and content” (Kagan, 1992, in Martínez et al., 2019, p. 13). In this regards, Evans (1990) categorized five types of teachers: the storyteller, the scientific historian, relativist/reformer, cosmic philosopher, and eclectic. Each of these categories emerged as a product of case studies from around the world, as in the case of the study by Martínez et al. (2019). The authors of this paper show how most published research gives the nature and depth of disciplinary knowledge an importance that is not comparable to that attributed to the teaching of history itself.

However, this is not to deny the importance of study of historical knowledge, far from it, since its importance is undeniable in order to situate, for example, the social reflections of the present, and it is especially useful in the context of challenges of teaching history in the 21st century.

In another context, and despite the fact that the consolidation of Latin American democracies has made possible to rethink the didactics of history, there is no shortage of research that highlights another no-less-important variable, associated with teacher autonomy. There is evidence demonstrating how certain antipartisan manifestos limit the democratic, social, and political problematization inherent of history classes, such is the case of the escolas sem partido since 2014 in Brazil (Gilherme and Picoli, 2018; Cannellotto, 2020; Plá, 2020; Da Silva et al., 2021).

The autonomy of schools and the deliberative capacity of teachers’ judgement are called into question in scenarios as the one described above; therefore, the deployment of teaching competences to educate in a globalized world is a task that becomes essential.

Finally, it is necessary to note that the history and social sciences curriculum faces yet another tension, linked to the hegemony of one historical memory project over another. This has meant that a school historical discourse, according to Acevedo and Salazar (2011), has remained with traditional teaching practices, responding tepidly to the challenges of globalization itself, such as the awareness and reconstruction of local cultural identities in the face of global identity and virtual displacement of the spatial-temporal borders of the territory. Conversely, reality indicates that globalization has formed generations that are no longer related temporally or spatially to concepts, procedures or knowledge previously assumed as every day and widely known, such as planting and crops, to such an extent that students are totally alien and useless to establish links with previous knowledge of more complex historical content (Álvarez, 2011).

Hence, we maintain that the current health situation offers a valuable opportunity for the restoration/reconstruction of pre-pandemic school dynamics and the redesign of an institutionalism that responds to the challenges of a post-pandemic world, in particular, because, in our opinion, this health situation provides an opportunity for the social sciences in general, and history, specifically to help the students to resolve a number of critical issues: tension between the excess of information and the lack of capacity to make sense of it; to recognize the value of rational knowledge vs. irrationalism; to counter the cultural domination through the claiming of equality of dignity of all cultures; local, national, and international articulation; to promote the relational principle as a defense against essentialism; to overcome the monopoly of the present and the ideology of the end of history; and, finally, to overcome the traditional temporal chronology of present, past, and future (Tenti, 2020).

There is no doubt that continuities and changes can be observed in the evolution of teaching history, from their epistemic conceptions to didactic practices. Nowadays, it is possible to recognize in it permanencies, emergencies, inertias, breaks, latencies, legacies, contradictions, mixed temporalities, practices without a model or linear condition, a strong sense of democracy, inclusion toward cultural diversity, with a formative sense toward critical, democratic citizens, endowed with an agency as a historical subject, and competent to face the problems of the time and historical events and with interpretative tools. Hence, we agree with González (2018) in stating that it is a discipline in movement under constant construction.

Materials and Methods

The methods and techniques used in this investigation were qualitative. The sample consisted of voluntary participants, and the criterion for self-selection was to be studying the program of History and Geography at the Universidad de Concepción-Chile during 2021. Data were obtained through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 30 students from different cohorts. Following the qualitative approach, the research opts for an instrumental case study that does not seek generalization but, rather, the understanding of a concrete phenomenon of interest and little investigation (Coleman and Unrau, 2005; Stake, 2007), such as the set of perceptions held by teachers in training of the field on the teaching of history in a post-pandemic world.

The investigation was conducted in four stages. The first stage included a review of specialized literature. The second stage involved the collection of data by means of interviews, consisting of six opinion, knowledge, and background questions (Mertens, 2019), and their further transcription. This second stage was followed by the start of analytical tasks through the initial deep immersion (Hernández et al., 2014). The interview script, previously validated by three experts, included the following questions.

i Do you think you have received adequate university training to deal with the teaching of globalization and the pandemic in the school world?

ii What effects do you distinguish from globalization in the way we understand the teaching of history in the school world?

iii What effects of the current health reality influence the way we understand the teaching of history in the school world?

iv Why should children and adolescents learn history in school?

v What is history (or learning history) in today’s society or reality?

vi What should the teaching of history develop or enable children and adolescents to do?

Because of the health context, the interviews were conducted by video call, with the consent of the participants, and lasted an average of 30 min. In order to maintain and safeguard the identity and opinions, it was agreed to refer to each participant by a generic sentence that would identify them and in which their sex, interview number, and year in which they are in their training process would be recognized. Thus, for example, the expression EH5.5 means that this participant is a male student, interviewed in the fifth place and in the 5th year of his career.

In the third stage, a detailed analysis of data through grounded theory and concept maps supported by the software of quality data analysis in vivo (ibid.) was carried out. For this purpose, the emerging categories were described by means of conceptualization and meanings in order to, subsequently, cluster and relate categories according to topics and patterns in accordance with the developed analysis.

Lastly, the resulting categories, together with their relationships and interconnections, were described by means of narrative proposition, which implied a conceptual elaboration of the collected data. The weight of the analysis was on the symbolic material of the data, expressed through the actor’s own language. In order to maintain and safeguard of his or her identity and opinions, it was agreed that he or she would be referred using a generic term that would identify him or her.

Results

When analyzing the empirical material available, intended to know the perceptions of teachers in training on the foundations and purposes of the teaching of history in relation to globalization and the pandemic, the first aspect of the qualitative analysis that stands out in their responses given by all the interviewees is that globalization seems to be a subject that is not addressed in the course curriculum. This highlights the need to update the curriculum in which the teachers of the specialty are trained. However, as the teachers in training continue their narrative, they establish relationships that show the development of a set of thinking abilities that allow them to analyze the subject under study, regardless of the greater or lesser depth in which the matter has been addressed during their training process.

It is important to note that, although future teachers initially associate globalization with a purely economic phenomenon, the health situation we are experiencing has forced them to rethink the term conceptually and factually, using their previous knowledge and their ability to search, organize, synthesize, analyze, and communicate information. These abilities are undoubtedly linked to their historical training. This means that, from the students’ narratives, a set of foundations and purposes emerges, which pursues the teaching of history in an applied way, both in the matter of globalization and the pandemic. In fact, some students become aware of this process and end up softening their initial perceptions about the responsibility they had placed on the university for their apparent lack of mastery of the matter by saying… “well, the university was not going to do everything” (EM3.1) or “luckily, we were given tools so that everyone could find his or her own information, study, and come to some plausible conclusions” (EH5.5).

When analyzing in depth the answers given by the future teachers, other categories that are important to note emerge, especially because of their relation with some thinking abilities for teachers who intend to teach. These are:

The Perception of the Importance of Events Over Time, Making Distinctions According to Regions or Groups

In one of the categories that most strongly emerge in the discourse of the interviewees, for example, is the important relationship they make between the New York Wall Street Crash and the installation of the model of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) and their repercussions in different parts of the world, to the point of bringing their analysis to Chile and then to our own region.

“… the stock market crash in the United States and the later installation of the ISI model in Chile are good examples of globalization and its effects in different countries… also, it was not the same if you were a businessman or a worker… the famine was severe, for example, in Santiago and in the main cities of the country. If we add to this the current effect of the existing economic interconnection between countries, with an abundant and disparate exchange of goods and services… and also disparate effects of the pandemic in different parts of the world, there is no doubt that the scenario is certainly much more interesting to analyze and highlights the existence of more than just an economic interconnection” (EH3.1).

There is no shortage of people who reiterate to the disparity in the production and consumption of goods to explain the phenomenon:

“… I have always said that this is fiction, because, from everything I have read… It is clear to me that globalization is linked to the exchange of goods… but that is unequal… depending on the region and the country in the world that produces, consumes, or that, fatally, does neither one nor the other… because that does not exist. This highlights the existing disparity and how some regions and countries are able to actively participate in the globalizing model, and others only see how other countries or regions exchange a large amount of goods and services” (EH5.1).

Appreciating the Importance of Contextualizing the Sources Used According to Their Date, Author, and, Especially, Their Nature

With regard to the variety of information about globalization and the pandemic and the effects on the economy, and, above all, on people’s lives, teachers in training insistently emphasize the importance they give to meticulously recording and corroborating each and every one of the sources they consulted to give an opinion or to give an account of the process. They were also able to carry out an interesting metacognitive exercise aimed at verbalizing both the information available to them, the way they accessed to it, and the cognitive processes involved.

“… when one sees especially how much information there is about globalization and its positive effects, as well as the abundant lies circulating about the coronavirus, about its origin, development, consequences, variants, statistics, etc.…, one can certainly not overlook the importance of checking the data and the origin of those sources, on which website the information is… etc.… I value that more today. I feel that we have been privileged witnesses of a historical process that will be studied in texts and for which there is no doubt that the quality of sources used will, undoubtedly, be a very important issue to be considered” (EM2.1).

“It is important for me to identify the origin of the sources, but also, and at the same time, to be able to contextualize them, date them, know their origin, their authors, and their intentions. That is why if there is one thing I would emphasize, it is precisely that” (EH5.1).

Comparison, Corroboration, and Contrast of Different Sources

This is one of the issues that is closely connected to the idea of knowing the origin of sources, since teachers in training show how the era of globalization and, especially, the health situation, has forced them to know exactly where the sources of information come from and how essential it is to corroborate them with official international sources. The purpose of this is to provide the students that they will be responsible for teaching in the educational system, with truthful and verifiable information, minimizing error, inaccuracy, and confusing messages. For teachers in training, this is a legacy of their historical training, recalling how their initial training has insisted on the importance of mastering the historian’s method:

“…with regard to what we are going through, I think that, in some way, our historical training has helped us, especially when it comes to not only examining the origin of sources of information we use but also to corroborate and compare them with other official and responsible sources, avoiding repeating lies or falsehoods that, with so much information available, even contribute to the creation of a post truth. I believe that is when one’s professional training comes out, especially when it is related to what we have seen of how a good history teacher should present the sources and help her or his students constantly to use the historian’s method, as my professor said” (EM1.1).

Analyzing the Perception of Progress or Decline According to Different Groups

On the issue of globalization, on the pandemic and on the effects of the latter on the former, future teachers are able to notice how the same historical event can be questioned in different ways, depending on the person or group. They indicate that, even though the interface of markets can bring benefits, it can also bring detriment to both producers and consumers and even the environment so that historical events and processes affect people unequally; what may bring a tremendous economic benefit to some can mean ruin to others. They do the same when reflecting on the pandemic, as they are able to note that, while there are millions of people around the world affected, those who have the means to produce or buy vaccines, see the pandemic differently from those groups who cannot produce or buy them:

“I…keep an eye on the fact that, behind every economic catastrophe, there are people who benefit and others who are affected, as in war… because they need the war industry to function, and they are the ones who do business with destruction and death… with the globalization and with this pandemic that something similar happens, there are groups for whom both globalization and the pandemic have brought them economic benefits, while, for others, it has been pure suffering. There are many examples of this throughout history; we could make a long list, and we would realize that there are people who have not benefited from globalization, others who have benefited from globalization, and others who have not even been aware of its existence” (E3H.1).

Comprehending the Multiplicity of Causes and Consequences From the Same Historical Event

This is one of the abilities most frequently expressed by teachers in training, being able to clearly verbalize how no historical phenomenon has only one cause, nor can its consequences be lightly studied, since there are effects that can even be noticed and assessed with the passage of time. They are foolish to say that they have studied a long list of variables, which are needed to know in order to explain an economic fact (which for them is the most recurrent example when talking about globalization), or the pandemic itself, and that the comprehensibility of these requires exhausting all the possibility of investigation, both their causes and their consequences.

“… if one analyzes the economic history of Chile, it can be noted that it has been closely connected to globalization since the dictatorship because there were a set of variables that influenced this to happen; [these variables] are neither fortuitous nor a coincidence, which can be seen more clearly as time goes by and new and more varied sources of information emerge. Of course, that is valid for any historical event that one wants to study; that is why there is still much to say about the pandemic, because, now, we are seeing its most immediate consequences: death, suffering, prohibitions, restrictions; but as the time goes by, there will surely be other consequences in the economy, in culture, in people, etc” (EM3.4).

Valuing Aspects of the Past That Can Help the Comprehension and Action in the Present

This is one of the favorite phrases of teachers in training when asked about the foundations and purposes of history teaching in the era of globalization, in particular, in a post-pandemic world. In this sense, they recognize that, when they heard the first information about the advancement of the pandemic in the world, they automatically remembered the Black Death and some of the pandemics that had been studied, turning to books and sources to update knowledge that had been studied, but, in the light of the events they were experiencing, they felt the need to review again, mainly, to establish particularities and similarities between them, but above all, extract the best lessons from the past and take advantage of the information available to better illustrate and understand what was happening.

“The pandemic has forced us to be pandemic experts and to look to the past to try to understand what we were going through. I remember that, in a group of friends, I was in charge of telling them how pandemics had been like in the past and what to expect from this one. In fact, I remember that I read a lot about the effects of the Black Death in Europe and Asia, but also about other plagues and pandemics that followed in order to know and understand more, but I was not the only one because we all felt the need to do so. Of course, I also checked the WHO website every day and tried to help explain… all locked up, because I could not go outside” (EM5.3).

Finally, the last category that emerges from the study is related to the reflections made by the teachers in the training on the importance of:

Analyzing the Intention and Motivation of Authors and Institutions When Giving Their Opinions on the Same Historical Event

This is one of the questions posed by the group of teachers in the training as essential questions to ask when talking about globalization and the pandemic, especially because the information available to them is disparate in one way or another, and they have experienced how important it is to verify the provenance and verisimilitude of the historical sources consulted. In addition, it is crucial to go a step further and assess the intentionality and motivation of both informants and institutions to disseminate information on the subject under study.

They consider that it is of particular relevance to take the time to open up spaces for the analysis of these intentions and motivations as a way of advancing transparency and comprehensibility, with others advocating that teachers’ own intentions and motivations should also be made known when reporting one or another historical event or process, also taking into account their own biases:

“There is no doubt that verifying why such and such a person say such and such a thing, what his or her interest is, why associations are concerned about such and such an aspect, what the interests of WHO or IMF are, why do businessmen consider that some taxes are bad, etc., are necessary and urgent questions that one should always ask himself or herself, because beyond a paper, a letter, a public statement, a press point, there is always an explicit and an implicit discourse that gives an account of the reasons that motivate people to speak; therefore, it is not only important to be aware of messages, news, information, data that are there, but also to ask oneself whether there are vested interests created in himself or herself or not” (EH6.1).

When analyzing the set of categories that emerged from the answers given by the interviewees, it is necessary to note that, although our initial purpose was to question them directly about their knowledge about globalization and about the pandemic, and also about the foundations and purposes of history teaching in the era of globalization and in a post-pandemic world, in the interviews, we realized that they were not only capable of accurately outlining some answers associated with those foundations and purposes, but that they were also capable of applying those foundations and purposes to the chosen subject. This is in spite of the fact that the teachers in training in unison recognized that both globalization and the health situation that the world was facing had not been explicitly addressed in their training processes to become teachers.

Discussion

The results demonstrate that all teachers in the training that were interviewed value the knowledge of disciplinary content when teaching history, as in literature (Shulman, 1987). This can be seen in their critical analysis of the scant consideration of the subjects under study in their initial training, which they considered as a problem. There is no doubt that, the study of other historical topics during this training, and, above all, the work with methodological and analytical procedures that these entail, allow them to overcome the prominence that first-order contents have traditionally had in the teaching of history, moving toward those of the second order that involves competences that are proper to the historical method (Wineburg, 2001; Lee, 2005; Barton, 2010).

The study and work using such methodological and analytical procedures enable them to better comprehend how the past is produced, understood, and taught and, more importantly, the many links between the past and the present (Lévesque, 2008; Carretero and López, 2009; Prats and Santacana, 2011; Seixas and Morton, 2012). This corroborates Pantoja’s (2017) finding for the case of Colombia regarding the need for training programs to relate in their teaching processes the wisdom that sustains the fields of knowledge with the formative intentions that guide the processes.

The students interviewed approach the study on globalization using abilities of historical thinking, which, on the one hand, are the key in the discussion of the subject and, on the other hand, demonstrate their perceptions of the reasons and purposes of teaching history in the era of globalization and its contributions to the health crisis we have experienced. In this way, the students construct a story that is consistent with the proposals made by Limón (2008), who highlights the need for the teaching of history to go beyond the disciplinary content and move toward “a general reflection on how knowledge is acquired and constructed” (Limón, 2008, 99). And that is what students do, beyond what they have received in their formative processes. This confirms the findings of Éthier et al. (2010) that the progressive acquisition of the essential components of historical thinking is possible, independently of the more traditional contents. Therefore, as Sáiz and Fuster (2014) state, students resort to their knowledge of the past “from substantive or first-order contents but also from strategic skills to signify them, understood as second-order contents, or historical metaconcepts” (Sáiz and Fuster, 2014, 47).

When analyzing these perceptions on the basis of their narratives, important dimensions associated with historical meaning become visible, such as their assessment of the perceived importance of events over time, according to regions and groups, the use of evidence in contextualizing, comparing, corroborating, and contrasting sources; the continuity and change when considering the importance of analyzing the progress or decline according to different groups; the need to comprehend the multiplicity of causes and consequences of historical events and processes; the historical perspective when striving to understand the multiple perspectives existing in the same epoch; and, finally, the ethical dimension by stating the importance of an analysis of the past that can help in understanding and acting in the present. This is coherent with the thinking abilities proposed by Seixas and Morton (2012). At the same time, it is consistent with the purposes associated with the development of historical thinking described by Santisteban (2010), in which it is emphasized the importance of providing students with a series of instruments of analysis, understanding or interpretation, which allow them to approach the study of history with autonomy.

As a result of the above, students demonstrate these abilities in the proposed context of globalization. They are able to make sense of information, recognizing its value, but they are also able to assess cultures, relating the local to the national and international, making a reality of what Tenti (2020) calls the overcoming the monopoly of the present. These abilities of teachers in training act as strategic knowledge, very characteristic of the historical method, and which show that their historical thinking has been developed both in university and school experience. In the matter we have studied, teachers in training are capable of putting these second-order concepts into practice, such as the management of sources or the historical perspective, in order to confront and respond to the questions or little knowledge they may have —or believe they have— about the pandemic and globalization.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Universidad de Concepción. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

CM and BT were the primary authors of the manuscript. RM and OC contributed to discussion and revisions of manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Funding

This study has been financed by the Regular FONDECYT Project No 1221872 entitled “The development of historical thinking skills to live in society.” “Tensions, challenges and proposals for the Chilean school system” and by the project “The development of skills, historical thinking of students of Pedagogy in History and Geography of the University of Concepción: a case study for the improvement of initial teacher training,” within the framework of the UCO-1798 agreement between the University of Concepción and the Ministry of Education of Chile.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

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References

Acevedo, M., and Salazar, J. (2011). “La enseñanza de la historia en México en los tiempos de la globalización,” in Pensar históricamente en Tiempos de Globalización, eds R. López, L. Velasco, V. Santidrián, and X. Armas (Santiago de Compostela: USC), 377–382.