Introducing the Case

Much has been written about the epistemic considerations of history teachers who are both in- and pre-service in the Global North (Stoel et al., 2017). However, very little research of a similar nature has been conducted in the Global South. A particular blind spot in the existing literature is the epistemological considerations of school history held by Post-graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) students who embark on their teacher training. This chapter takes as a case study a single cohort of the PGCE-History students enrolled for the methodology courseFootnote 1 at the universities of Cape Town and Pretoria, two historically White institutions. The former is characterised historically as “English and liberal” and the latter as “Afrikaans and conservative”. Both universities are now racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse and draw students from across southern Africa.

The post-apartheid South African world is filled with ambiguities and contradictions in which the voices of PGCE-History students, the teachers of tomorrow, are important but rarely heard. Given that teacher purpose has been shown to influence pedagogy (Evans, 1990) and, in turn, student understanding of both history and society, we consider it important to understand the epistemological considerations with which students enter our university classrooms to be trained as history teachers. Ours is a work in progress that was born out of our responsibility as university teachers to know our students better, to work more productively with the diverse resources they bring to class, and to co-construct our knowledge and understanding of teaching and learning history in what is an epistemological “contact zone” (Pratt, 2012).

Both authors are teacher educators based at the universities of Cape Town and Pretoria and are responsible for initial teacher education programmes and the teaching of PGCE-History methodology courses. As middle-class, White scholars teaching in elite institutions in a context of coloniality, we are conscious of our positionality, which has shaped our access to knowledge and ways of seeing and understanding the past. We are mindful that we occupy positions of power in the classroom space for multiple reasons, including age, status, race, and wealth. Importantly, our positionality requires that we develop our critical reflexivity on and in practice and examine our epistemic considerations about the nature of school history.

The students who enter our PGCE-History classes are racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse and have experienced a wide range of school and university contexts. This heterogeneous cohort was “born free” in post-apartheid South Africa, a constitutional democracy, and yet one of the most unequal societies in the world in terms of wealth. Systemic and social injustice still shape and reshape every aspect of contemporary experience and life chances. These injustices influence identity formation and memory, all of which position students in relation to our understanding of the past. Our lived reality is one in which the legacies of a colonial and apartheid past are powerfully present, and “coloniality” hangs heavily in the very air we breathe. It is maintained alive, as Maldonado-Torres (2007, p. 243) explains, “in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, [and] in aspirations of self”. It is also embodied in the national school History curriculum which we are preparing our students to teach.

Importantly, the students in our study are becoming teachers in turbulent times. Nationally, the miracle of a post-apartheid “rainbow nation” has faded or been exposed as little more than a mirage, and the real threats of economic collapse, global epidemics, and climate catastrophe have left young people asking how this present was brought into being. Furthermore, the past decade in South Africa has witnessed a rising tide of anger and frustration with the slow pace of societal transformation. Students entering our PGCE-History classes in 2022 did so after a period of intense student activism driven amongst other issues by calls to decolonise the curriculum and the inadequate funding of higher education.

A case in point is the #RhodesMustFall campaign, which started in early 2015. Triggered by calls for the removal of a statue of the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes prominently positioned on the University of Cape Town campus, students aligned with worker activists to highlight the lack of post-apartheid transformation, the perpetuation of White privilege, and the legacies of colonialism experienced most especially in our former White universities. As a result, late 2015 saw the birth of the #FeesMustFall movement, a successful countrywide student-led protest aimed at preventing universities from increasing fees and for the state to increase its financial support to students. These fallist movements served to foreground debates on decoloniality and Afrocentrism and shift the discourse around knowledge production in higher education. Notably, in relation to curricula, it posed questions about epistemicide, understood as the epistemological marginalisation of African-centred intellectual traditions in formal education. Questions were also posed about epistemic harm caused in the past and what would constitute epistemic justice. In the process, generative dialogue and the re-working of the curriculum in many of our academic spaces were encouraged (Fataar & Subreenduth, 2016).

Concurrently, however, accusations were made in public and political spaces that the youth were ignorant of their history and needed to be re-educated on the liberation struggle against colonialism and apartheid (Wassermann, 2018). Deep concern was expressed about the palimpsest national school History curriculum, which, despite several revisions since 1994, retains much of its “colonial grammar” (Cutrara, 2018, pp. 250–275), visible in its overtly Eurocentric content and methodology, as well as its failure to tackle the depth of trauma experienced by Black South Africans under colonialism and apartheid. Concerns were also expressed that the analytical and disciplinary nature of the History curriculum, which foregrounded the development of historical thinking skills, did not adequately teach the “real” story of South Africa (South African Democratic Teachers Union, 2014). In an important scholarly addition to what has tended to be a curriculum war played out in the media, Maluleka and Ramoupi (2022, p. 65) argue that the school History curriculum, which the PGCE-History students participating in this study studied at school, “continues to undermine indigenous ways of knowing and being” and must go “beyond inclusion”. Furthermore, these “marginalised intellectual projects must form part of the nervous system of a decolonised school history (sic) curriculum” (Maluleka & Ramoupi, 2022, p. 78).

The outcome of the public debate over the school History curriculum was the appointment of a Ministerial Task Team in 2015, whose brief included the review and strengthening of the school History curriculum. At the time of writing this chapter, the curriculum writing process is ongoing. However, it is anticipated that the new school History curriculum will be African centred in content and decolonial in spirit and will pay particular attention to Africa’s long pre-colonial past by drawing on African philosophical traditions as well as its material culture, orality, and language as sources of historical knowledge (Ndlovu et al., 2018). This will be the national school History curriculum that the PGCE-History students who enrolled in 2022 will teach in the future.

Meanwhile, calls to decolonise the curriculum have resonated with and conscientised high school learners, most notably those in the former White schools where policy and practice have been slow to transform. More broadly, in many of the History classrooms in which we observe and our students teach, the celebratory narrative trajectory articulated as the official school curriculum 20 years ago has given way to a more critical discourse—from the “miracle” to the “myth” of the “rainbow nation” and from “Mandela the Hero” to “Mandela the Sell-Out”. We hear the widespread disillusionment with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, once the international poster child for restorative justice, and the frustration at the inadequate redistribution of land and wealth. In this context, where the past is present and shaped by lived experiences, teaching and learning the official History curriculum of colonialism and apartheid as a “scientific” or “cognitive” discipline can be difficult and evoke strong emotions of anger, hurt, guilt, and shame (Keynes, 2019).

The post-apartheid South African History classrooms, particularly those like ours in Historically White Institutions, are, therefore, an epistemological battleground filled with ambiguities and contradictions best understood as contact zones, which Pratt (2012, pp. 33–40) describes as those “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today”.

For the class of 2022 and those of us who taught them, existing asymmetries of power were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant that the students did not attend face-to-face classes for the best part of two years during the course of their undergraduate studies. And, while all our PGCE-History students have studied History in their undergraduate degrees, this happened in the context of online and remote teaching, where the debates, discussions, social interactions, and the construction and deconstruction of historical knowledge that go hand-in-hand with the contact zone of studying history at the university level were very differently, and inequitably, experienced.

It is from within the borders of these ambiguous spaces that we are rethinking how to prepare our students, with all their different knowledges and experiences, to teach the national school History curriculum. It is against this backdrop that the process of constructing what Connell (2015, pp. 49–66) calls “mosaic epistemology”, a conception in which separate knowledge systems sit beside each other like tiles in a mosaic, each based on a specific culture or historical experience, started. This concept has been criticised for essentialising and rendering epistemologies static and for inadequately addressing the power relations which shape knowledge production (Bakare-Yusuf, 2004). However, we have found it useful for thinking about differences with connection, for unique “ways of knowing” being able to co-exist without compromising their integrity. And, perhaps idealistically, the mosaic picture created from diverse fragments offers some hope of fulfilling the South African national motto, ! ke e: /xarra //ke, written in the Khoisan language of the /Xam people and meaning diverse people unite.

The Methodological Moves We Made

The epistemic beliefs about the nature of the subject held by history teachers have been identified as an important element in understanding the pedagogic choices they make to facilitate student learning and their development as analytical and disciplinary historical thinkers in the classroom. Innovative research conducted in the past decade has resulted in the development of a domain-specific framework for analysing these ways of knowing, namely the Beliefs about History Questionnaire (BHQ) (Maggioni et al., 2009). This questionnaire categorised historical thinking into three stances: “copier” (which views the aim of history to reconstruct an accurate picture of the past), “borrower” (which views historical interpretations as constructed from source materials with selections made on the basis of opinion), and “criterialist” (where the contextual, contingent nature of historical interpretation is recognised, and disciplinary criteria are used for evaluating the validity of claims). While empirical research conducted using the BHQ has been valuable and revealing, interventions attempting to develop more sophisticated epistemological stances in pre-service teachers have identified “epistemic wobbling” (VanSledright & Reddy, 2014, p. 63). This is explained as students having “difficulties in coordinating subjective and objective aspects of history” (VanSledright & Maggioni, 2016, p. 140).

These findings raise important questions for teacher preparation about when and in what contexts teachers are able to engage with history as an objective and disciplined study of the past and when the personal and political identities of teachers make such distancing too difficult. In the South African context, where the past is not past and its legacies are still very much present in lived reality and experience, we considered it more valuable to first explore the place from which history education students think about the past and its relationship to school history and then illuminate the beliefs, values, and cognitive understanding of the discipline that our students brought with them to class.

In light of the above and to generate a range of data, we asked our students to tell us through their narrative life stories about their experiences of learning history and their journey into teaching. The PGCE-History students, through their responses to an open-ended survey, class discussions, and semi-structured interviews, were given opportunities to explore their purposes for teaching history in post-apartheid South Africa and to consider what should be taught and how it should be taught. By adopting a discursive approach, inductive reasoning, and grounded theory, we allowed diverse personal philosophies of teaching history to surface. At the same time, we hoped to create spaces to explore different epistemological considerations towards history and develop the epistemic reflexivity we believe is vital for all educators to cultivate throughout their careers.

The Epistemological Mosaic of Our Students

The PGCE-History students who enter our classes have studied history for at least two years at university and have followed a national school curriculum which foregrounds as its specific aims the development of historical knowledge—conceptual, procedural, and substantive. Few, however, identified the development of a cognitive, “disciplinary”, epistemological orientation towards history when discussing their own sense of purpose or that of school History more generally. A mosaic of epistemological considerations emerged from our data analysis. However, in this chapter, as part of a work in progress, we present two pieces of the epistemological mosaic. These are: history is about the present, and it is personal; and history is African in perspective.

Mosaic Piece 1: History Is About the Present and It Is Personal

Emerging overwhelmingly from the student responses was a sense of the presence of the past in the present, which intersected with the personal. History is here and now, not past and distant, and their purpose as history teachers was explained in terms of helping learners to better understand “why things are the way that they are” (SUCT2).Footnote 2 This purpose was expressed in a variety of ways, some generic, such as to understand “the world we live in today” (SUCT4) or “current problems” (SUCT11) while others expressed the purpose more specifically. For instance, they spoke of the need to analyse the “current dynamics of politics, religion, race, [and] gender” (SUCT28) and “why poverty, sexism, and homophobia exist within our world” (SUCT7). Succinctly put, the PGCE-History students reasoned that history should help learners know the world they live in, why it is the way it is, and how it came about. History was, therefore, viewed as being of foundational importance in making sense of the contemporary South African world. It was also seen as necessary “to explain contemporary life in South Africa” (SUP6) or to ask poignant questions, such as “Why are things like this now, or has there been a transition? How do things transition? How do we come about? Why are citizens? Why is the school system like this? Why am I finding it hard to do this, and this because of certain beliefs that were there or like how does it work in particular?” (UPI2).

The epistemological considerations held by the PGCE-History students were that history is personal and emotional and not merely an intellectual or cognitive process of meaning-making. Central to the PGCE-History students’ understanding of the past was embodied knowledge gleaned from their own and their family’s lived experiences of apartheid and its legacies (UPI3, UPI4, UPS6). It was thus argued by the students that “studying history … helps [us to] understand who we are, our religions, our culture, and it brings families together” (BUP7). Through an understanding that “individuals are shaped by the history of their families, cultures, [and] spaces”, learners can “begin to conceptualise why things are currently the way they are” (UCT27). Others expressed this connection more keenly as the need to “give learners a background of where they come from. Make them aware … of the struggles of our ancestors” (UCT10). The sense of a personal connection with the past was made visible through the frequent use of personal pronouns. The students felt that it was important to make clear the connections between the present situation in which “we” live and past events. They spoke of the past and present in the possessive terms of “us” and “our” rather than through a passive, distancing voice.

Furthermore, the PGCE-History students felt that this past needed to be approached with “sensitivity” (UCT3, UCT9, UCT22) and “open-minded, understanding towards other people’s histories” (UCT4), and a “safe space” should be created (UCT29) where learners could “gain confidence and … have respect for others” (UCT33). Teaching and learning history was not perceived as a cognitive endeavour alone but as relating to positionality in the present and to self-identity and having the potential to cause an emotional response.

While the students foregrounded perspectival presentism and a sense of the affective nature of learning history, a sense of the future was significant in its absence. The student responses were largely silent about longer-term purposes, be they personal, national, or global. We had expected there to be far more than just the two students who responded that “knowing” history would “create awareness” and enable learners to “learn from mistakes” or “not allow the past to repeat” (UCT18, UCT24). Only a few took a critical stance hoping that an understanding of the past would enable learners to “challenge the norms” of the present (UCT9) and that it would prepare them to make more “informed decisions” (UCT18), facilitate “social (re)imagination and change” (UCT20), and “fight back” (UCT25). For the majority, however, there was little sense of teaching and learning history as part of a collective social project.

When researching his History students’ statements of purpose in 2009, the first author noted the strong statements made in support of “democratic citizenship”. Education, they claimed, should play a role in “social transformation” and contribute to “moral regeneration” while building “values, morals, [and] norms” (Wassermann, 2009, pp. 77–91). By contrast, not one of these “civic-minded” words occurred in the responses more than a decade later, although some had a general feeling that learning history might “enable learners to be more sensitive to the diverse communities and situations they may find themselves in” (UCT22). The extrinsic purpose of teaching history for nation-building or the belief that school History could or should play a role in the construction of the post-apartheid South African national identity or participatory democracy was entirely absent. This is particularly noteworthy given the ongoing popular belief that school History can contribute to social cohesion and transformative justice.

Although all our students are post-graduates and have studied history at the university level, they do not consider their engagement with the past as merely an intellectual or cognitive process of meaning-making. To them, it is both a personal and emotional endeavour. Surfacing far more frequently than a responsibility to develop their learners’ cognitive historical thinking skills was a concern that it was important to make the connections and continuities between the present situation in which “we” live and past events clear for the learners. Our students’ impulse as they entered our classes was to use history to develop their learners’ historical consciousness, a concept with which the South African school curriculum does not engage explicitly.

How do we make sense of this present–past orientation? Writing what he titled “a polemical perspective” on the pursuit of the past, Torpey (2004, p. 242) made the statement that “when the future collapses, the past rushes in”. He wrote this in 2004 in the wake of the collapse of communism and what he interpreted in that context as the decline of the nation-state. The post-Cold War “end of history” did not play out quite as imagined by some historians such as Fukuyama (1989), but Torpey’s statement gives pause for thought. The PGCE-History students who participated in this study were newly emerging into public spaces after the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented world event. Most were back on campus, albeit initially mask-to-mask, for the first time in two years. As discussed earlier, political corruption, climate catastrophe, and economic crisis were their context with an upsurge in student mental health issues across our university campuses. Meanwhile, we were awash in popular culture urging mindfulness, to be present, to be in the “now”, so it is perhaps not surprising that these young people were struggling to imagine a future purpose for their teaching about the past and were, instead, approaching the past as a “personal history of the present”.

Mosaic Piece 2: History Is African in Perspective

History for our students was present, it was personal, and it was also African in perspective. Based on the telling of the PGCE-History students who participated in this study, the fulcrum around which history should come together was “Mayibuye”, meaning “come back, Africa” in isiZulu. The longing to study more African history emerged from across the spectrum of participating PGCE-History students. A general sentiment called for teaching a “more diverse African history” (UCT6) and “an Afrocentric expression of history” (UCT3). More specifically, it was proposed that pre-colonial African history (SUP1, UIP4), the history of Central and North Africa (UP13), of “marginalised people” (SUP4) and not only African leaders like Shaka (UP13), King of the Zulu Kingdom from 1816 to 1828, should be studied. Others urged a more explicit focus on African history in a pan-Africanist manner (UPI2).

The rationale offered by the participants for studying a more African history was multifarious. It included the necessity to do so by dint of being “an Africa child”, because that is “our own history, our own identity” (UPI1) and because an “Afrocentric curriculum is the most realistic way to get your nation to understand the nation’s history and to collaborate with each other” (UPI3). However, caution was also expressed that it could be “dangerous to create a curriculum that is too Afrocentric because countries do communicate with each other, and you do need to understand the larger global image and history in order to collaborate” (UIP3).

How African history should be studied was also foregrounded, and caution was expressed that it should not happen by using a Eurocentric lens. In this regard, a student (UPI2) made it very clear that it should include a process of decolonisation and not merely “ascribing to the same traditions” as before. It must be “African history or history from an African perspective” (UPI4). Moreover, it must be studied using appropriate methodologies such as “listening to my grandmother when she told us about our history, how things were in their time” (BUP1) since such stories “gives more insight” into African history (BUP5). What many of the PGCE students were gesturing towards was a provincialisation of the Global North and a shift in a vantage point in favour of the teaching of “African history or history from an African perspective” (UP14) in a pluralistic manner alternating between historical accounts from the archive as well as vernacular recounts from social memory (UCT20).

Why, then, are there strong sentiments for African history to be studied from an African perspective at the school level and for it to be studied more deeply than how it is covered in the South African national History curriculum, especially when not long ago African history was viewed as unimportant (Wassermann, 2017, pp. 17–18)? Several reasons can be advanced for this, including that those students who have only known the post-1994 “new South Africa” have a greater sense of originating from Africa than their parents who experienced apartheid-induced isolation from the rest of Africa. At the same time, the contemporary challenges facing South Africa have probably eroded earlier ideas of South African exceptionalism (Mamdani, 1999, pp. 51–54) and birthed a sense of being similar to other African countries. At the same time, prominent public debates about decolonisation and the work of the Ministerial Task Team, which has publicly foregrounded ideas on a new Afrocentric school history curriculum, has also contributed to a point being reached in the quest for epistemic freedom that opposes the idea that European knowledge is more absolute than other ways of knowing history (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). A case in point is the student who argued for epistemic justice by stating, “We are so focused on Europe, and we are so focused on America and so focused on certain individuals that we forget about the bigger [African] picture” (UPI3).

Discussion and Conclusion

While accepting that our understanding of the precise epistemological orientations of the students who participated in this study remains partial, as embodied in the two mosaic pieces unpacked in this chapter, what is clear is that it does not fit neatly into the existing scholarship on epistemology and history from the Global North (Stoel et al., 2017, pp. 120–134). In this regard, the epistemological orientations of the PGCE-History students who participated in this study form mosaics that are at once entangled and emergent, sophisticated and simplistic, cognitive and spiritual, and public, practical, and personal. For us as teacher educators, these ways of engaging with the past are more generatively understood as knowledges, resources, and repertoires than positioned as disciplinary misunderstandings.

The PGCE-History students demonstrated diverse understandings of the past and its relationship to history, suggesting that they bring with them to the PGCE-History course an epistemological “mosaic” informed by their lived experiences, their disparate education pasts, and the range of ideological and subject positions that they hold. Noteworthy, however, are their commonalities which include the belief that studying history draws on the personal, enables an understanding of the present, and has a shared sense of frustration that, despite post-apartheid reform, the national school History curriculum has largely failed to shift to an African-centred orientation beyond the existing “settler grammar” (Cutrara, 2018, pp. 250–275).

In many ways, what our PGCE-History students told us speaks to a pluriversal world where the past comes together with the present in an omnipresent manner. As such, the past (especially the apartheid and colonial pasts) with all its horrors is not gone and cannot be distanced by disciplinary thinking. It is constantly present in people’s personal lives and in the fleeting moment that is the present intertwined with history in a post-conflict society (Morgan, 2022, pp. 1–10). To the PGCE-History students from the class of 2022, history then is a companion that transcends the classroom; it must help by providing a yardstick on how people can live together and navigate and understand the here and now. History is also a practical undertaking to deal with complex personal lives lived in the shadow of the apartheid past and a declined “new South Africa” framed by debates about decolonisation and Africanisation.

This relationship between the past and the present in a contemporary South African context is usefully grasped by the idea of a “historical Sankofa”, as explained by Morgan (2022, pp. 1–10). Drawing on this Ghanaian concept, Morgan, in the light of recent experiences of Black people in the United States, rejects the long-standing critiques of presentism and argues that “the realities of the past continue to materially inform the lives of real people in the present”. The above stands in stark contrast to the intended epistemological stance adopted in the national school History curriculum, which seeks primarily to distance the past through a process of historical thinking (Sexias, 2000).

How then can we understand this epistemological mosaic in the context of the existing literature? Revilla et al. (2021, p. 113) offered a possible explanation:

The way students and educators think about this discipline seems to be related not only to historical understanding or reasoning, but also to the social and practical dimension of history. In this regard, epistemological conceptions about how the past is represented from a disciplinary point of view not only have a connection with historical thinking, but also with historical consciousness.

In sum, to the PGCE-History students from the class of 2022 who participated in this study, history is a companion that transcends the classroom; it must provide an explanation of and guidance on how to navigate the present. Teaching history is, therefore, both a cognitive and practical undertaking to deal with complex personal lives lived in the shadow of the apartheid past and the faded rainbow of the “new” South Africa.