A laboratory of social change: the Latin American sixties in a comparative key. A proposal for teaching

Abstract

In the late sixties, Mexico and Argentina went through processes of high social mobilization, the emergence of youth as a social actor, common references (not without tensions) to the French May movements that are relevant similarities for a comparative approach. In dialogue with the contributions of didactic research we propose to recover this comparative perspective to analyze the ‘Argentine May’ and ‘Mexican May’. We understand that key notions of this way of thinking are enhanced by comparative studies when discussing dimensions such as the local and the global in the historical processes (scales), the synchronic and diachronic in the development of the conflict (temporality), the structures and conjunctures (causality) in the outbreak of events that move the political and / or cultural foundations of both countries at the end of the 1960s. At the same time, positioned in the critical didactic, we will pay special attention to the categories with which those experiences of the recent past have been named and interpreted. ‘Social change’, ‘conflict’, ‘defeat’, ‘tragedy’, ‘defeated’, ‘future’, are part of those narratives that we propose to revisit with the purpose of building an alternative teaching proposal that promotes the formation of thought critical and creative of the students.