Memory, historic imagination and historic empathy: two experiences with elderly people

Abstract

The work presented here shows two workshops developed from the Research Project "Memories and educational practices: from the knowledge built on the local past to the printed didactic material" of the Facultad de Ciencias Humanas (FCH), Universidad Nacional de San Luis (UNSL), whose aim is to approach the local past of the City of San Luis, valued as support of the diverse memories (popular, official, age-related, gende-rrelated, class-related), to be used with educational purposes. In this paper, we develop two proposals of experiential value carried out with elderly people who attend the Radio Workshop, depending on Secretaría de Extensión of the FCH and included in the Program of Courses and Workshops for Older Adults, with the intention of recovering the different memories on the local past. In the first workshop, called "Evoking memories” (Apelando a la memoria), we intended to promote the written narrative based on the evocation and observation of images from the past of the city of San Luis in the mid-twentieth century, appealing to both individual and collective memory in order to activate memory processes. The second workshop, "Appealing to the historical imagination" (Apelando a la imaginación histórica), refers to the colonial era of our city. In this workshop, recordings of different daily scenes from the colonial past of the city were used in order to promote historical imagination and historical empathy in the participants.