Image as Language: Gender Representations in Pibid History Classes

Abstract

This article reports on the experience of the Institutional Program for Teaching Initiation Scholarships (Pibid) in History, carried out at the Marcos Rovaris State School, in Criciúma (SC), with a 9th-grade Elementary School class. The pedagogical intervention used image as language to historically analyze representations of women, demonstrating how "being a woman" constitutes a cultural construction that is permanently disputed. Grounded in Roger Chartier's concepts of representation, Peter Burke's methodology for image analysis, and Raymond Williams's notion of culture as a field of struggle, the proposal was developed over two class days, mobilizing photographs and advertisements from the Cold War and from Brazil. The results indicate that image analysis constitutes a powerful tool for deconstructing gender roles, promoting the inclusion of immigrant students, and forming critical subjects committed to social transformation.