¿Cómo y con qué propósitos leer para aprender en historia? Sentidos contrastantes adjudicados a la lectura en la formación docente

Currently, contributions of socio-rethorical research, specific teaching and applied linguistics have shown extensively that learning contents in a discipline implies the gradual appropriation of particular ways of thinking and reading in a certain field of knowledge. Nevertheless, it is not clear yet in which way/s the relationship between how to read and how to learn to (re)construct the content of a particular discipline take place in a classroom. Drawing from this situation, the purpose of this study was to identify and analyze how and with which meanings, teachers and students connect learning history contents with characteristic ways of reading in History. For that purpose, we observed and recorded all classes that took place during the second semester of a scholar year in three courses of a History pre-service teachers’ program imparted in Buenos Aires. Simultaneously, in-depth interviews to students and educators were conducted. The qualitative analysis of the collected data shows that participants report reading modes similar to those that, according to various studies, experts in History report. In this article, we analyze particularly two of the most frequent ways of reading that students reported in the interviews: 1) read to analyze the historical perspective or historiographical work of authors; and 2) read to understand processes versus read to memorize dates and events. Results show that students can ascribe to these ways of readin, a disciplinary sense –seeking to perform them on their own– or an arbitrary sense –trying to reproduce/imitate the professor’s own interpretations about texts they do not fully undestand–. The attribution of a disciplinary or arbitrary sense seems closely related on whether the aforementioned ways of reading in History are contextualized and put into play in dialogic or monologic teaching and learning class-environments. Since many educational policies emphasize the importance to prepare “teachers as researchers”, showing the necessary interpenetration of instruction and knowledge production activities, our study contributes to the discussion about how pedagogical practices can promote or hinder History pre-service teachers’ disposition to read, study and learn about what they read, positioning themselves as legitimate interpreters and (re)constructors of the disciplinary content knowledge they will teach in the future, instead of just as reproducers of other’s interpretations.