Learning empathy through school history textbooks? A case study

Abstract

Historical perspective-taking or learning empathy are important skills that the South African history curriculum wishes to promote in schools in its quest to heal the injustices and divisions of the past. A set of chapters in six recently published Grade 11 textbooks serves as a case study to analyse how empathy is mediated in legitimatised educational materials. The topic is that of ‘nineteenth century race theories leading to genocide’. First, the concept of empathy is interrogated and contextualised within the wider debate about the incommensurability between the ontology of ‘history-as-past’ and ‘past-as-history’. Thereafter, the data from the six books is grouped under two related thematic headings, namely ‘seeing different perspectives’ and ‘using primary narratives’. While there is considerable variation in how each of the textbooks mediates empathy, one of them stands out as an exemplar of how to do this well. This book relies on primary textual sources, presents different perspectives as well as diversity within those perspectives and shows how personal, individual choices play a role in the unfolding of the narratives about the past. All these are helpful for mediating empathy through connecting to learners' own lives. The article contributes to an understanding of how empathy as a concept can be understood in the wider study of history and educational media.