Nationalism and National Narratives in a Secondary Education Textbook of History of Chile

Abstract

Textbooks teaching school history, as a pedagogical, cultural and communicational phenomenon, allow us to investigate the narratives of the ideology of nationalism, which when imagining the nation creatively, exclude and include subjects, actors and realities. This research analyzes the national narratives of a historical stage in Chile. A qualitative approach and Critical Discourse Studies have been chosen to analyze the narratives of a textbook of History, Geography and Social Sciences of the Third Year of Secondary Education. The results indicate that nationalism occurs in the periods of structural transformations investigated, since, in addition to uniting the members of the community, validating authorities and political projects, articulating national imagery through semantic differentiations, which narrate a "We" compared to "Other internal / external", including new realities, which were omitted and silenced. It is concluded that, despite the fact that history textbooks respond to the canons of history and official collective memory, they report an expansion of the concept of nation, incorporating actors and excluded social realities.