Abstract

Remaking history: The pedagogic device and shifting discourses in the South African school history curriculum

Highlights

  • Bernstein’s pedagogic device provides a set of general principles which inform how knowledge is selected into official curricula and how this knowledge is transformed into pedagogic communication

  • I draw on official curriculum policy, Ministerial task team reports, existing accounts and studies of curriculum reform to show how the nature of substantive and procedural history knowledge has shifted in the various official history curricula since 1990, as well as how the purpose of, and justification for teaching school history has changed

  • Further reference will be made to other research and studies that have been published at the time of the curriculum reforms

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Summary

Introduction

Bernstein’s pedagogic device provides a set of general principles which inform how knowledge is selected into official curricula and how this knowledge is transformed into pedagogic communication. I use the pedagogic device here to show how the broader educational discourses in South Africa have influenced the official school history curriculum. The aim of this article is to interrogate the various history curriculum reforms between 1994 and 2019 and create a narrative of the interactions, tensions. 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 the internal and external to the discipline of history, which reflects curriculummaking as a process fraught with tensions and fractures

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