The complexities of implementing a human rights-oriented curriculum after conflict: pre-service history teachers’ experiences in post-apartheid South Africa

• In Event: Pre-service teacher education and human rights: moving beyond aspirations to good practices

Proposal

Teachers across the globe have increasingly been expected to integrate human rights education into their teaching. History teachers specifically have been expected to contribute to the global human rights agenda by equipping younger generations with the knowledge and skills able to facilitate an informed understanding of past human rights abuses and their legacies in the present as an integral part of concerted efforts aimed at promoting societal transformation.

This paper discusses the results of a study we recently conducted in South Africa, a country where human rights underpin the post-apartheid school curriculum, including the history curriculum; this is reflected in both its content knowledge and the critical, democratic and participatory pedagogy it embraces. In this sense, we argue, history classrooms in South Africa can be seen as primary sites for the engagement with and the promotion of human rights.

In this paper, we juxtapose an analysis of South Africa’s history curriculum from a human rights perspective with an exploration of the experiences reported by 75 pre-service high school history teachers in enacting policy and its requirements in a variety of schools in the Gauteng province. The study thereby sheds light on some of the complexities of implementing South Africa’s transformative, human rights-oriented history curriculum in a deeply divided and unequal post-conflict society. It does so by elucidating real-life examples of inhibiting factors commonly hindering the implementation of the intended curriculum. As we will illustrate, these factors primarily relate to the resistance to transformation posed by obstinate institutional cultures, dated practices by mentor teachers, and learners’ preconceptions fed by unofficial histories. These factors, we argue, effectively perpetuate a hidden curriculum that runs counter government policy, academic teacher training, and, ultimately, the very human rights values that are embedded in South Africa’s constitution and educational policies.

Ultimately, the analysis indicates a significant disjuncture between curricular policies and theories studied at university on the one hand, and teaching in the real world on the other hand; it thereby points to a resulting experiencing of the context of curriculum enactment in South Africa’s history classrooms as a liminal space, that is, a threshold that acts as a barrier to professional growth. It also provides evidence of largely untransformed history classrooms, as illustrated by the centrality of race and racism to classroom experiences – a sign of the deep-rooted legacies of South Africa’s violent past which continues to influence the way institutions, pre-service teachers, mentor teachers and learners relate to history and to each other. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of its findings for teacher education and professional development in South Africa and by gauging their possible relevance for societies that are similarly struggling with a history and legacy of violence.

Authors

• Denise Bentrovato, University of Pretoria, South Africa

• Johan Wassermann, University of Pretoria