This study reports the findings of an investigation into young South Africans' knowledge and understanding of their national past derived from narrative accounts of South African history written by 27 university students who had recently completed the national school history curriculum.
Analysis of these narratives indicates two fundamental differences in the way the history of South Africa is told, in terms of emphasis (the relative weight assigned to different periods and people) and of agency (who 'did' and who was 'done to'). These differences point to the continued importance
of racial identity as a factor in the formation of a national historical consciousness in post-apartheid South Africa. The highly selective emplotment of South Africa's past by the students highlights the importance of sociocultural factors in the development of young people's historical consciousness,
a conclusion that has implications for classroom pedagogy. These findings suggest that unless the historical understanding with which students come to the classroom is engaged and is complicated through evidence-based historical enquiry then neither the 'disciplinary' nor 'social justice'
aims of the intended curriculum will be realized.
This paper demonstrates how history textbooks can be used in high school classrooms as ‘primary’ as well as ‘secondary’ sources, to develop learners as critical and curious readers of history. History textbooks, like any other historical account, are a form of discourse which present a selected and ideologically constructed interpretation of the past; however, school learners tend to view them uncritically as 'the truth'. Simple strategies of ‘annotation and tabulation’ provide scaffolding which enable learners to deconstruct the textbook extracts (literally and figuratively) and identify the similarities and differences between accounts given of the same event. This in turn make more visible the ideological construction of school textbooks and the authorial positionality of the writers, encouraging learners to ask questions about their provenance and purpose. The classroom activities described in this article encourage learners to consider the effect and affect of telling the stories of the past in different ways, and help them to develop their disciplinary skills of reading and thinking like a historian.
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