Teachers' understanding of a Kenyan identity as a basis for their teaching strategies

Abstract

This article uses data obtained through semi-structured interviews to explore the explanations of the teaching strategies provided by secondary-school teachers of history in Kenya. They had to teach the subject to promote a Kenyan identity based on respect for the ‘varied cultures’ within the country. Their explanations reveal what they considered important to implement successfully this aim of the syllabus. The argument is that, contrary to what policy-makers in Kenya expected, accounts for teaching strategies reflected the challenges teachers faced in having to reconcile the politics of ethnicity and the political ideals enshrined in the history syllabus. They assumed that affirming ethnic differences could help nurture such an identity without critical interrogation of the contradictions, tensions, ambiguities and struggles that characterized the politics of ethnicity within the country. Understandings of ethnic difference were not to be challenged because the teachers could not imagine a culture that had no corresponding reality. They could not help their students understand their varied cultural representations as discursive formations that were political in nature. The article concludes by highlighting how the teachers' explanations are related to the system that has shaped them and continues to do so.