Abstract

RIOS, María Ester  and  GUTIERREZ, Rafael F.. Children and youths faced with documentary works. Cuad. Fac. Humanid. Cienc. Soc., Univ. Nac. Jujuy [online]. 2000, n.15, pp.407-415. ISSN 1668-8104.

This paper gives an account of what has been done during the first stage of the programme entitled "Children and youths faced with Documentary works", carried out since august, 1996, at Museo Histórico del Norte in Salta, Argentina. The main objective of this programme, aimed at children and youths aged 8 - 16, is to train them as divulgers of patrimony the museum is in charge of preserving, making known and researching on. The experience takes place at a complex of three museums which are National Historical Monuments, namely: Museo Histórico del Norte, Museo Presidente José Evaristo Uriburu and Museo Posta de Yatasto. These museums differ in patrimony, location -one of them being situated in the interior of the province- and approach. In one of them is a library specialized in historical issues, mainly those related to the region. Those books, together with a rich documentary patrimony, serve to contextualize the objects and research done by specialists and teachers in this area. What moved us to start this experience was our concern that in making the museum patrimony meaningful to children and youths, we are faced with difficulties implied by handling very specific bibliography and documentation. This concern is closely related to our belief that documentary works- which include museums, bibliography and community life itself - are means by which subjects should de able to find meaningful answers to their questionings. We started by acknowledging the difficulties children and youths find in understanding historical contents, and in analyzing and interpreting different kinds of sources, taking into account that such contents are dynamic and, consequently, grasping their context is essential. There are further difficulties such as: constructing time-space categories; the complexity and variety of historical concepts, which are not closed; the polisemy of texts, due to the shift between their time-space of production and their time-space of recognition; and the language of those texts, which differs greatly from colloquial of the age group, or even from the language usually found in books written for them. The project demands a joint labour in which historical, textual and didactic knowledge converge, since training divulgers of documentary works implies not only making information accessible and helping in the process of learning meaningful contents, but also encouraging and guiding the production of relevant messages and making them accessible to a public quite heterogeneous in interests and cultural background. Surmounting these difficulties will enable us to achieve our goal of involving the whole community with a historical patrimony. In this case, children and youths working with documentary works can find new research trends and new way of relating to the historical-cultural patrimony and to the subjects which are continuously creating and re-creating it.

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