Ways of Reading and Writing in History: Students' and Teachers' Perceptions in Pre-Service Teacher Education

Reading and writing to learn disciplinary contents implies the gradual appropriation of particular ways of thinking and doing with written discourse in a certain disciplinary area. From this assumption, our purpose is to identify and analyze teachers' and students' perceptions regarding reading and writing practices in the context of three courses of a pre-service teachers' History program imparted in Buenos Aires. As well, we describe which senses and purposes the participants ascribe to those ways of reading and writing. Through a semester of classes' observations and in-depth interviews to students and educators, we identify different requirements that characterize literacy practices in these courses. In the present article, we detain to analyze two of the participants' most referred demands: 1) to analyze authors' historical perspectives; and 2) to understand processes versus memorizing/describing series of events. Results show that students can ascribe to these requirements a disciplinary or an arbitrary sense, depending upon if these aspects are put into play in dialogical or monological teaching class-contexts.