A hashtag movement for independence: using Twitter to teach history

• Main Author: María Mercedes Zerega-Garaycoa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal do Paraná 2015-12-01
• Series: AtoZ: Novas Práticas em Informação e Conhecimento
• Subjects: enseñanza de historia; twitter; redes sociales; juego de roles
• Online Access: https://revistas.ufpr.br/atoz/article/view/43596

Introduction: There are difficulties in understanding historical time. It is necessary that students stop seeing historic events in a one-dimensional way and see them by means of the actor's tale instead. How can teachers achieve that students do so by developing empathy? Can one use current technology in order to “play” the past? This research summarizes a class project that organized a game using role-play via Twitter, called “Twitting for independence” in a course in History taking Teaching for Understanding (TfU) as reference framework. The objective was to comprehend the position of the actors of Latin-American independence and build empathy regarding their roles. Method: It was evaluated the level of perception and comprehension of the students concerning the development of empathy promoted by this activity, as well as their satisfaction with this, applying a open questionnaire in order to measure their learning, as well as closed questions and scales to measure their empathy and satisfaction level. The questionnaire was applied to 72 young high school students. Results: Students learnt that in order to understand a historic event it had to be seen from the actors' different points of view. They reached good levels of understanding of the role each actor played in achieving Latin American Independence and indicated that the activity largely contributed to developing their empathy. Conclusions: The social network Twitter can be used to develop historical character role-plays and reinforce the comprehension of History as an ensemble of tales produced by actors with different roles and positions around it.