History helps society understand its past and its influence on the present and future. South Africa is a country with a unique history, comprising of varying accounts from the different people that make up its 'rainbow' nation. In 2018, South Africa's Department of Basic Education; announced that history would be a compulsory subject for learners…

In 2013, as a strategy to enhance academic performance, the South African Department of Basic Education (DBE) published several English Across the Curriculum (EAC) manuals to guide in-service teachers who did not have prior knowledge of how to integrate the teaching of content subjects with language learning. The DBE introduced the EAC strategy as…

Despite extensive research into the function of education in promoting social cohesion, the role of the history curricula in promoting solidarity in South Africa and Zimbabwe remains under-researched. Understanding the history curriculum attempts made at the policy level to promote social cohesion by two postcolonial Sub-Saharan countries could…

This article proposes that participatory museum theatre can provide a platform through which learners studying history can engage a troubled past, specifically looking at South African history, to generate a more complex understanding of it. Through the use of performance, object-work, and creative arts-based responses, such as poetry and drawing,…

Managing History learning and teaching in schools of South Africa over the years has been characterised by diverse opinions regarding the causes of learner underperformance, who is to be held responsible over learner performance and possible leadership influence on History learner performance. In addressing the problem of underperformance in…

We propose a new framework for understanding post-conflict history education based on ethnographic fieldwork in the same South African school two decades apart. We explore how and why teachers engage with the legacies of conflict in 1998 and 2019 by investigating how they draw boundaries around 1) time, what the conflict period is and how stark…

Generational experiences create unique contextualised meanings for society. This is the case with millennials in South Africa, many of whom use social media to organise their lives and engage with issues pertinent to them, such as South Africa being a rainbow nation. Some of these millennials are history teachers who, when at work, have to teach…

This article considers the opportunities presented by -- and the obstacles preventing -- the adoption of online resources in teaching Shakespeare in South Africa. Taking into account Shakespeare's controversial place in South African education, it addresses the widely differing contexts in which Shakespeare might be encountered in the country's…

This paper explores the question of what is powerful knowledge in school history, drawing on an analysis of secondary school history curriculum documents from South Africa and Rwanda. The paper engages with how these official curricula make selections regarding history topics, and how conceptual relationships are structured, and then interrogates…

This paper was motivated by the anecdotal experiences of the lead author on the views of middle-class Black African parents who did their schooling under apartheid and who were parents of high school learners in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa. In this paper narrative inquiry was used to engage with ten purposively selected Black African…

According to the South African curriculum, two of the aims of learning history are to learn the process of historical enquiry and to understand historical concepts such as the use of historical sources and examining evidence. This paper explores how a sample of seven social science South African textbooks uses historical sources to enable learners…

The Soweto Uprising comprised a series of protests led by secondary school students in South Africa that began on 16 June 1976. Historians and political analysts concur that the Soweto Uprising was a watershed in the national liberation struggle and ushered in the demise of the apartheid system. This article examines the presentation of the Soweto…

Integration of history of mathematics (HOM) in mathematics education is emerging as frontier endowed with utility to stem decline in uptake, enhance performance and alter the negative perceptions about the subject. This case study sought to explore the influence of history of mathematics on grade eleven girls' perceptions of the Theorem of…

This study examined the role of history education for nation building in Ethiopia, Germany Rwanda, South Africa, Switzerland, and USA using a comparative research method. Student textbooks and syllabi were the main data sources. Document review was the principal data-gathering tool and the data was analysed qualitatively. Findings revealed that…

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…