Media Culture and School Textbooks: The place of Brazilian and Portuguese History Magazines

Abstract

This study discusses Portuguese and Brazilian history magazines in circulation for the last 20 years. Understanding the History magazines as potential educational media products, what elements distinguish them from a dialogical perspective with the concepts and meanings of textbooks? In this article we seek to understand the history magazines
in Portugal, identifying their pedagogical purpose, besides of their sense of disseminating historical knowledge and their commercial interests. We aim to raise questions from a panoramic view of the Portuguese editorial projects in circulation nowadays. To do so, we’ll use the Brazilian cases as reference, both because of the theoretical contributions already consolidated around this topic, and the potential cultural dialogs in Portuguese language in the publishing and historiographical production fields. What relationship or distinction can be drawn between these printed materials and school textbooks? This is thus an attempt to analyze the existence of strategies to meet the needs of history teaching, official curricula and the readership ideally
formed by education professionals.