Abstract
This paper argues that history education is becoming dangerously obsolete, as it does not always relate to the contemporary needs of 21st century learners, who often find history useless and irrelevant to their present situation. This challenge is attributed to, among other reasons, the way history is taught through largely lecture-driven pedagogies that significantly reduced active learner engagement. This article draws on Gadamer’s Hermeneutic philosophy to advocate for dialogue in understanding and interpreting history artifacts using 21st century technologies. Gadamerian Hermeneutics focuses on horizons of understanding through open–ended questioning and answering between past and present rather than transmission to passive audiences. The article argues for the collaborative interpretation of history meanings between teachers and students mediated by a Wiki. The methodology involved a case study of pre-service teachers enrolled at Makerere University in Uganda. The purely qualitative study draws on Gilly Salmon’s five-stage model of online learning. The findings indicate that participants successfully engaged with the first three stages - access and motivation, online socialisation, and information exchange - but less so with stages four and five, knowledge construction and development. The paper concludes by proposing a framework that could be useful to teachers wanting to facilitate history education using modern approaches that are relevant and meaningful to today’s learners.
Highlights
Higher education in general and history education (HisEd) in particular, especially in the Sub Saharan Africa, is experiencing a range of challenges including a surge in student numbers (Tibarimbasa, 2010; Bunoti, 2011), reduction in the time given to cover vast amounts of content (Adeyinka, 1991 Savich, 2009; Russell, 2010, Takako, 2011; Kagoda, 2011), increased use of transmission pedagogy (Savich, 2009; Takako, 2011; Kakeeto, Tamale & Nkata, 2014), lack of capacity to learn from history (Adeyinka, 1991; Tamale, 1999; Vansledright, 2004; Savich, 2009; Davies, 2010; Nabushawo, 2013), and failure to relate history to learners’ everyday lives (Monte-Sano & Budano, 2013; Stockdill & Moje, 2013)
History education does not adequately serve today’s students (Bennmayor, 2008) who appear divorced from having a sense of a shared heritage (Mohamud & Whitburn, 2014) and find learning history both boring and irrelevant (Savich, 2009)
The study has shown that Wikis offer a strategy for achieving harmony in HisEd as they do afford peer interaction and enable group work viewed as parts, and the whole
Summary
Higher education in general and history education (HisEd) in particular, especially in the Sub Saharan Africa, is experiencing a range of challenges including a surge in student numbers (Tibarimbasa, 2010; Bunoti, 2011), reduction in the time given to cover vast amounts of content (Adeyinka, 1991 Savich, 2009; Russell, 2010, Takako, 2011; Kagoda, 2011), increased use of transmission pedagogy (Savich, 2009; Takako, 2011; Kakeeto, Tamale & Nkata, 2014), lack of capacity to learn from history (Adeyinka, 1991; Tamale, 1999; Vansledright, 2004; Savich, 2009; Davies, 2010; Nabushawo, 2013), and failure to relate history to learners’ everyday lives (Monte-Sano & Budano, 2013; Stockdill & Moje, 2013). Rather than teaching learners about our human past, contemporary history educators seek to focus on interpretation and meaning-making of historic artifacts using tools and lenses from the present They view this approach as critical in today’s study of history because it provides reasoned judgement (Coltham & Fines, 1971) and exploits the technologies that support information being presented and manipulated in smaller chunks (Ali, 2012) [which we have referred to as ‘parts’ (following Gadamer, 1975)] through a process of collaborative creation and co-editing of meanings. This step involves high-level interaction and scaffolding where participants should add, edit and contribute to each other work (Salmon, 2011) This implies that participants should engage in a never-ending dialectical activity of asking and answering each other’s’ questions whereby refining understanding as history meanings are constructed. The five-stage model was used to guide participants in engaging with history artifacts with a hope of reaching harmony
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