Iconography in History education: an inclusive pedagogical approach for students with visual impairments

Abstract

In History teaching, iconography is considered not only a valuable resource for representing the past, but it is also an historical documentation— a fundamental pedagogical material for the production of historical knowledge and the development of critical reasoning about History. The advancement of digital and communication technologies makes images become an increasingly important material in society, since social interactions have gained a strong visual appeal and many everyday situations are mediated by visual resources. This characteristic of contemporary times influences directly the educational context and highlights the need for teaching that promotes a critical analysis of iconography. Because of that, inclusive schools that have students with visual impairments face a challenge in their pedagogical practices to make this material accessible to their students. This article aims to reflect on the data related to an inclusive pedagogical intervention, carried out in partnership with a History teacher, which involved the use and analysis of iconography as a documentary source and as a teaching resource for the subject, in a class that had a blind student enrolled. The text presents the results of the study conducted in a 7th grade classroom of an inclusive public school in the city of São Paulo. The data collected were analyzed according to the theoretical framework of Bardin (2016). Based on the pedagogical proposal, we sought to reflect and point out possibilities in the teaching of History that were guided by a multisensory approach and based on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1999), in order to allow students with visual impairment to develop a more complete analysis of iconography.