Yesterday and Today, Vol. 23 (2020)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/2263/80413

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Learn history, think unity: national integration through history education in Cameroon, 1961-2018
(Yesterday & Today, 2020) Ndille, Roland
Since independence, one of the greatest worries of African states has been how to maintain national cohesion amongst the multiplicity of ethnic groups which characterize them. My aim in this paper is to show that, other factors notwithstanding, national integration had been a major educational ideology in Cameroon and that it contributed to the peace and stability that the country was known for, amidst a turbulent central African region until the advent of neoliberalism and multiparty politics in 1990. I discuss the nature of contents that helped to achieve this while arguing that a de-emphasis on the social sciences and particularly on the integrationist approach to history education in the multiparty era is not unconnected to the post-1990 reinvention of various parochial identities antithetic to national cohesion in which recent calls for the secession of the Anglophone region by some radical groups is seen as the culmination of the trend. I conclude by highlighting the social relevance of curriculum within which history education should be re-invented as a vector for peace, unity and national integration in the country.
Hands-on articles higher education community engagement projects at local museums
(Yesterday & Today, 2020) Jordaan, Martina; Jordaan, Martina
The University of Pretoria, South Africa, presents a compulsory undergraduate module, Community-based Project (code: JCP) in the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology. It entails students working for at least 40 hours in the community, and then reflecting on their experiences through various assignments, including a presentation, a report and a YouTube video. A large number of students are enrolled in the module each year. Projects vary from basic renovation and building projects to the teaching of Mathematics and Science, repairing old computers for schools and non-profit organisations, and teaching community members basic computer skills. A number of projects are also taking place at local museums and other historical sites. This servicelearning- related course aims to make students more aware of their social responsibility and to teach them soft skills, for example, communication, leadership and time management skills.
“What’s in the box?” – Archives, history skills and honours students
(Yesterday & Today, 2020) Harris, Karen Leigh; Van der Merwe, Ria
Historical thinking skills have become the mantra of the history profession. The aims, objectives and outcomes of history classes and courses at both secondary and tertiary level resonate with the inclusion of the skills of the historian’s craft. Primary materials are among the tools included in school teaching packs and university readers to inculcate the research dimension of history coupled to analysis, selection, critical thinking, and logical formulation. In this article we propose to reflect on a recently developed component of a postgraduate Honours module introduced in the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies at the University of Pretoria in collaboration with the University archive. This element involved students engaging with un-inventorised virgin primary documentation emanating from the Museum of the Transvaal Education Department. They were tasked with not only having to critically read the content of the “box”, but to sort, appraise and contextualize the documentation. In addition, the brief also required students to consider the research potential of the contents and present their findings at a colloquium entitled “What’s in the Box?” We argue that the success of this component of the course took the students one step further in the making of history and thus exposed them to experiential learning and what could be termed the “inner workings” of the historians’ craft.
Using graphic organisers to teach History
(Yesterday & Today, 2020) Dawkshas, Lucille
The reality of teaching History in government schools in South Africa is that the subject is many times the “dumping ground” for students not performing well in other subjects. Many learners are not in the subject by choice and are consequently disinterested. Classes are filled to capacity or overfilled - the biggest class I taught had 68 learners. So, naturally, if we do chalk and talk or the textbook marathon, we lose the learners. The challenge is to make History fun, to make it relatable and to get learners involved. It is in this vain that I have used and developed teaching tools that in my view succeed in achieving the above. Evidence of this is that I get a bunch of disinterested learners in Grade 10 and by the time they get to Grade 12, they have been transformed to interested Historians, loving and acing the subject. The results, both in terms of marks and attitude towards the subject, are so good, that my fellow teachers from time to time approach me to ask: “How did you do it? We know the quality of learner you work with, how?” In this article I will share “how” I do it.
Creating a historical sport narrative of Zonnebloem College for classroom practice
(Yesterday & Today, 2020) Cleophas, Francois
This article attempts to create a sport narrative of the Zonnebloem College prior to 1950. The introduction provides a motivation for proceeding with a decolonising format and lays out what the elements of such a format would entail. Next, an overview of sport historical developments at the Zonnebloem College is explored. The administrative history of sport at Zonnebloem is explored as well as selected sport codes. Finally, the article is summarised and concluded by presenting teachers and learners with sample questions, which they could consider using in their local conditions.
Remaking history: The pedagogic device and shifting discourses in the South African school history curriculum
(Yesterday & Today, 2020) Bertram, Carol
This article uses Bernstein’s pedagogic device as a framing heuristic to trace the shifts in the South African school history curriculum from 1995 – 2019. The article focuses on how the instructional and regulative discourses have changed over the past 25 years. The instructional discourse refers to the selection, sequencing, pacing and assessment of knowledge, while the regulative discourse refers to the rules that create social order. I map the curriculum shifts onto the broader policy discourses, such as the competence framework of outcomes-based education (which informed the South African curriculum from 1997 to 2011), the performativity and accountability discourse which emerged after 2012 and the discourses of decolonisation that strengthened after 2015. This article aims to tell the story of how the history curriculum reforms reflect the broader regulative discourses and to show the relationships between the official and pedagogical recontextualising fields. The story is a detailed case study of how curriculum design is influenced by selection logics that are both internal and external to the discipline of history, which reflects curriculum-making as a process fraught with tensions and fractures.

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