Students' accounts of contemporary past

Abstract

This paper reports some results of a study concerning Portuguese students‘ accounts of contemporary history, in the context of the Historical Consciousness – Theory and Practices Project (II). The construction of accounts or versions of the past can be seen as a way of making sense of history, and analysing specific students‘ accounts can help us to gain some understanding about the way (or ways) they construct their pictures of the past and how they attribute significance to it (Lee, 2002; Rüsen, 2004; Wertsch, 2004).