Historical Literacy and the Structuring Process of Historical Knowledge in Students

Abstract

In the 19th century, history emerged as a professional cognitive faculty and historians tried to exempt historical writing from its rhetorical elements and literary features. According to Ricoeur, historical narration is defined as the logical organisation of heterogeneous elements, so that actors, actions, means and unpredictable events are transformed into a constitutionally organized whole with a plot, namely into a history (Kavvoura-Sissoura, 2011). History is not just the narration of war or definite events, but the attempt to restructure the past with the aim to interpret the past and maybe to predict the future. In the educational framework, historical knowledge does not include only the learning of events, as well as the development of skills that will make a person historically literate.
 School history, with the contribution of the interpretive method, is a study of the historical past, the space and time, the intentionality and causality. It also records the historical context, so that students become historically literate. The main purpose of historical literacy is the distinction and understanding of historical knowledge, which is developed through historical description, narration and interpreting of text with the aim to obtain historical thinking, historical reasoning and historical consciousness.
 
 Key words: history, historical literacy, historical knowledge