What is history? Views from a primary school teacher education programme

Sarah Godsell

doi:10.4102/sajce.v6i1.485

Abstract

This article focuses on how history as a concept is understood by first-year BA Education students. Students were asked to respond to the following questions: ‘what is history?’, ‘what is history to you?’ and ‘who writes history?’ Verbal and written consent was obtained from the students to participate in the study. Their answers demonstrated a concept of history that is imbued with a spatial and temporal as well as ideological and moral position. This article argues that, through the data, it seems that for these students the concept of history emerges as an object that is given a moral value, rather than history being seen as having value as a knowledge or skill set. I draw parallels between my findings and Donovan and Bransford’s work on how history is learnt by primary school students in the United States. There are clear similarities between the primary school understandings recorded in Donovan and Bransford, and first-year university understandings that emerged in the data of this study. This article argues that if history is understood as moral, as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, critical thinking and analytic skills which learning history can imbue are vastly diminished. Furthermore, this article uses Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’ to consider the implications of how the participating students understand what history is.

Highlights

The concept of historyThe question of how people understand ‘history’ is complex
It has made the argument that students give history itself both a moral value and the ability to influence events and people either positively or negatively
I have argued that this is detrimental to the critical thinking skills and analysis that history, when taught well, can give students (Donovan & Bransford 2005): Some students behave as if they believe the past is somehow just there, and it has never really occurred to them to wonder how we know about it. (p. 37)

Summary

Introduction

The question of how people understand ‘history’ is complex. It involves interrogation of both what a concept is and what ‘history’ is. The critical thinking skills that are developed through learning history do not require a post-modern ability to divorce any idea of truth – rather they require a neoVygotskyian (Henning 2012) understanding that everything is mediated by signs and symbols, and different factors get in between the subject and the object that is acted upon. In this case, many students seem to understand history as a subject in itself – rather than an object created by subjects. It can be as extreme a cliché as the case of the victor writing history, or how South African history was portrayed under apartheid (Godsell 2015)

Methodology

Conclusion