The History Workshop, Teacher Development and Outcomes-Based Education over the Past Seven Years1

Abstract

Besides its pioneering scholarship on the social histories of the marginalised and oppressed communities in South Africa, the History Workshop (HW) at the University of the Witwatersrand has also made an immense contribution to the teaching of history in secondary school through its teachers’ workshops. Its input in the realm of teacher development has been quite remarkable in the context of the changing curriculum and educational policy more generally since the 1990s – an aspect of the HW's intellectual project that has received limited scholarly attention. After the introduction of the new curriculum, oral history was placed at the centre of the history syllabus from the early 2000s. However, the curriculum gave no concrete guidelines on how to deal with the complexities of oral history or other new components of the syllabus. Furthermore, no provision had been made for the retraining of the teachers, who were mostly left to their own devices. The HW with its many years of oral history experience partially filled the vacuum. It resuscitated its annual teachers’ workshops and provided the most critical support of introducing oral history to the educators, exploring its strengths and weaknesses, as well as showing how this could be beneficial in the classroom. This article reflects critically on the experiences of the HW on the issue of oral history in the schools mainly in Mpumalanga (but also in other provinces) between 2002 and 2009 – experiences that showed a mixture of possibilities and challenges.