Golpe de Estado y Dictadura Militar: Estudio de un Caso Único de la Enseñanza de un Tema Controversial en un Sexto Año Básico de un Colegio Privado de la Región Metropolitana — Santiago, Chile

This article reports on the qualitative analysis of one case study carried out in a classroom of a private school in the Metropolitan Region, Chile. It shows what happened in a 6th grade when teaching the coup d’état and the subsequent military dictatorship. The teacher, who had a constructivist approach, was in charge of 31 students aged 11-12. Classroom recordings were made during the sub-unit activities on this topic. The teacher adhered to the objectives and recommendations provided by the Ministry of Education on how to impart the subject matter. The results, presented as a chronologically ordered narration of 8 classsessions, reveal the tension between the teacher’s intentions of not showing his own opinion and the students’ need of actually knowing it, along with the students’ desire to describe and explain their memories and the difficulty of integrating their family history with the collective history. The article then focuses on these conflictive memories and on how working with family memory facilitates teaching. The need for teaching strategies that include both collective memory and emotions in history teaching is made evident.