HISTORY TEACHING IN THE HIGH SCHOOL BNCC: HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE, COMPETENCIES, AND CHALLENGES OF ORGANIZATION BY AREAS

Abstract

This article analyzes the place of historical knowledge in the Brazilian National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) for Upper Secondary Education, with emphasis on the organization of the Human and Applied Social Sciences area, its structuring categories, specific competencies and skills. It revisits and deepens issues discussed in a previous study on History in the BNCC, shifting the focus from a general description of the document to an examination of the possibilities and limits that area-based organization creates for the epistemological and didactic specificity of History. The study adopts a qualitative, bibliographic and documentary approach and takes the BNCC and the previously published article as its central sources, maintaining dialogue with authors mobilized in that analysis, including Apple, Barretto, Benito, Caimi, Sacristán, Tonegutti and Young. The analysis argues that the BNCC expands the role of intellectual operations relevant to historical thinking — identification, selection, comparison, contextualization, analysis, interpretation, argumentation and criticism of sources and narratives — and favors interdisciplinary approaches. At the same time, the formulation of competencies and skills at the area level, without explicit History-specific objects of knowledge, creates tensions regarding the selection, progression and guarantee of school historical knowledge. The article concludes that the educational potential of the document depends on curricula and teaching practices capable of articulating interdisciplinarity, disciplinary knowledge, source analysis, temporality, otherness, human rights and students’ critical education.