Narratives of the Political Conflict about Chile’s Difficult Past from the Children’s Perspective

Abstract

Understanding children’s perspectives on political conflicts is a challenge for the social sciences, the pedagogy of memory and citizenship education. This paper will present the findings of a research on children’s protagonism regarding the memory of the difficult past with school children. A case study was conducted in two primary schools linked to sites of memory in Santiago de Chile in the second half of 2019. Ten girls and boys between 11 and 13 years old were selected and an intra-case analysis of their diverse productions was carried out with respect to three axes: understanding of political conflict, values with which they construct such understanding, and children’s agency in the face of conflict.