Produção de memória: o (não) lugar do holocausto brasileiro no currículo de história em Barbacena/MG

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the memory of the “Brazilian Holocaust”—the term by which the practices carried out at the Colônia de Barbacena Hospital have come to known due to their tragic consequences. The choice to examine this memory stems from its potential to influence the processes of identification and subjectivation of Barbacena residents through the teaching of History. Positioned within the field of History Education and informed by a postfoundational epistemic stance, which is also embraced as a political stance by the Group for Studies and Research on Evaluation, Curriculum, and History Teaching (GEPACEH/UFJF), the objective of this research was to investigate whether, and how, the memory of the Brazilian Holocaust—here perceived as a sensitive topic—is addressed in the History Curriculum of the city of Barbacena (MG). This is despite the fact that the city does not have an “official” municipal curriculum, instead adhering to the Reference Curriculum of Minas Gerais, in which this theme is silenced. The analysis is structured around three axes: Memory, Narrative, and Curriculum. The empirical body of the research consists of online narrative interviews with History teachers working in the city. From the perspective of Gabriel (2019, p. 76), the History Curriculum can be seen as the very act of engaging with it and can be understood “as the set of experiences and actions that occur in schools, particularly in the classroom, involving the singular processes of production and distribution of historical school knowledge.” Based on this assumption, our investigation identifies a movement among teachers producing a History Curriculum. This perception was named as a political action by teachers, namely, simultaneously contesting and creating a History Curriculum and historical knowledge “of” and “for” the city of Barbacena. Thus, we engage with the concept of “borderland” (Monteiro, 2007) for History teaching and Curriculum, enabling displacements between the memory of the Brazilian Holocaust and the curricular prescriptions of History governing public basic education schools in Barbacena.