What, How and Why We Teach: Teachers as Makers of Peace in South Sudan

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Navigating Education in Crisis and Conflict: Teachers and Social Change

Proposal

In January 2020, the Ministry of Education in South Sudan implemented a new national history curriculum throughout the nation-state’s classrooms. Having recently celebrated ten years of independence, the new curriculum marks South Sudan’s first developed and implemented curriculum since its formation in 2011. And yet, this new curriculum’s implementation across the country is uneven: some schools now use the new curriculum, while others still rely on old textbooks or resources from neighboring countries. With few official resources to teach history, little training, and bringing to bear their own experiences, teachers in violent conflict-affected settings are faced with the constant challenge of deciding what and how to teach. How young people learn the narrative of South Sudan’s conflict will profoundly impact their political and cultural attitudes and the country’s emerging nationhood and relative peace.
The study of history textbooks and their role in educating students is not new, as textbooks have long offered a lens into goals for building collective identity and shared memory (Carretero, 2011; Williams, 2014). For nation-states like South Sudan emerging from conflict, writing new history and civic textbooks presents an opportunity for transformation, reconciliation, and peace (Bentrovato, 2017, p. 38-39). However, history and civic textbooks can also hinder the reconciliation process and further reinforce stereotypes, ethnic tensions, and divisions within a society (Bentrovato et al., 2016; Richter, 2008; Vickers & Jones, 2007). Importantly, what and how students learn are not simply a result of curricula and textbooks. These processes are heavily reliant on the critical role played by teachers, who are responsible for enacting the curricula within their classrooms, by which I mean deciding what, how, and why they will teach in the ways they do.
Teachers are “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 1980). As “street-level bureaucrats,” teachers have “substantial discretion in the execution of their work” (Lipsky, 1980, p.3). Viewing teachers as “interpreters” of the written curriculum, “assumes that fidelity between classroom action and written words in a teacher’s guide is impossible,” and instead that teachers draw on their own beliefs and experiences of the curriculum to create meaning (Remillard, 2005, p. 219-220). In this way, teachers are active agents who are not just conduits or implementers of the curriculum but construct the curriculum through teaching their students (Connelly & Clandinin, 1986; Lopes Cardozo & Hoeks, 2015). From this perspective, scholars seek to understand what influences teachers' choices and how these choices are played out in the classroom.
The decisions that teachers make about curriculum and instruction in social studies and history teaching are heavily influenced by contextual factors such as school environment, class composition and atmosphere, the teacher’s approach to the curriculum, his/her professionalism, student, and teacher backgrounds and more (Durrani et al., 2021; Thornton, 1991; Van den Akker, 1998). While there is considerable research that unpacks the challenges that arise in considering history curricula, too often, this research places little attention on who enacts this curriculum within classrooms: the teachers volunteering and working at the schools whose individual experiences and identities, including their ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, inform their teaching practices and interpretations of history.
This paper explores how South Sudanese teachers at two schools teach this new curriculum through two research questions:
1) How and why do teachers at two schools in South Sudan teach the history of conflicts in the ways they do?
2) How do situational factors and the school environment influence each teacher’s decision-making processes on what content they teach and the pedagogy they use to teach?
To answer these research questions, I draw on data collected through a multiple case study Yin (2018) design at two schools in Juba, South Sudan: 101 semi structured interviews with teachers, school leaders and government officials, 67 classroom observations, a textbook analysis of the four secondary school history textbooks, and field notes and informal observations at each school. My decision to situate this research at two school sites is to allow for a comparative case study approach (CCS) (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017. The value of CCS is the ability to compare across three axes: (1) a horizontal analysis that will allow me to compare and contrast social actors, documents, and other influences across cases; (2) a vertical analysis that will allow me to compare influences across micro-, meso-, and macro-level scales as aforementioned in the Bronfenbrenner framework (1977); and finally (3) a transversal analysis over time which will allow me to consider the temporal elements of this case study and historically situate the processes or relations under consideration.
My paper sits in the lacuna in research on classrooms and teaching within South Sudan. There is a need to add to the body of classroom studies in divided societies in post-conflict and conflict contexts where resources are lacking, and teachers and students are subjected to trauma from conflict. Skårås (2019) highlights the need for classroom studies in South Sudan that explore how students and teachers use history textbooks. This is the only other study that has included classroom observations in history classrooms in South Sudan. Beyond history education, few researchers conduct qualitative research in classrooms, observing South Sudanese teachers’ teaching practices.
I believe that this paper is an important contribution to the CIES 2024 conference as it demonstrates that teachers have a great sense of agency in their teaching and in many ways act in resistance to the government as they take great risks to teach students the “real” history of South Sudan. This work will make a more significant contribution to the fields of education and conflict and history teaching as my research captures a key moment in time for South Sudan – one in which many other countries amidst conflict and/or emerging from conflict might learn from. This research provides a window into how a new country determines their history: what they incorporate, what they leave out and how that history is portrayed to its students through teachers. I hope this research can contribute to a more realistic, informed understanding of the role teachers play in shaping these narratives.

Author

• Orelia M Jonathan, Harvard University Graduate School of Education