Carol Bertram

Exploring an historical gaze: A language of description for the practice of school history

This paper brings a sociology of knowledge lens to the practice of school history. It is set against a backdrop of curriculum reform in post-apartheid South Africa, which has embraced a competence curriculum with a strong focus on the generic skills (outcomes) that learners should develop at school. This study argues that history as a discipline has both specialized substantive knowledge and specialized procedural knowledge. This paper describes the specialist nature of history knowledge as understood by those in the field of history education and maps this onto the work of Dowling in mathematics education. As the discipline of history is recontextualized into the school classroom, teachers and textbook writers will vary the degree of specialization of both procedural and substantive knowledge in order to make the knowledge accessible to learners. I suggest that having a clearer descriptive language for the domains of school history practice can support educators in making more conscious decisions about how best to move learners into the specialized domain where they begin to develop an historical gaze, and thus gain epistemological access to powerful knowledge structures.

Exploring teachers’ reading competences: a South African case study

The purpose of this study is to investigate the reading competence of teachers who are enrolled in a distance education programme in a South African university. Many South African teachers upgrade their teaching diplomas by enrolling for a part‐time, distance degree at a university. However, many are not prepared for academic study and its focus on reading to learn. Many of them struggle to read to learn, which is ironic given the fact that distance learning has a strong focus on learning from texts. The study used the cloze procedure to measure reading competence. The study shows that more than a third of the teachers are reading an ordinary academic text at frustration level, and that there is a strong correlation between reading competence and academic achievement on the course. The implications are that course writers need to support and scaffold students’ learning so that they can access the original reading with understanding. It also means that although distance education is traditionally seen as a way of opening access to students, their weak reading competences are likely to militate against them achieving success.

Specialised knowledge and everyday knowledge in old and new Grade 6 history textbooks

Abstract The post-democratic South African curriculum encourages integration between disciplines, and between disciplinary knowledge and everyday knowledge. This article uses the lens of integration of knowledge to interrogate two Standard 4 history textbooks published in the 1980s and two Grade 6 Social Science textbooks written for the new National Curriculum Statements during the last five years. Using Bernsteins concept of classification, the article describes the extent to which the textbooks represent knowledge as specialised to history or integrated in both substantive and procedural knowledge. Similar content in the chapter ‘History of medical science’ was analysed across all four texts. The findings indicate that the textbooks for the new curriculum contain reduced substantive history knowledge compared to the old textbooks. The new textbooks have a greater focus on inclusive history and on everyday knowledge. One of the implications of this integration is that the new textbooks do not develop a...

Knowledge, pedagogy and assessment in the old and new Further Education and Training History curriculum documents

History in a school curriculum is often and understandably used by government education authorities to present and promote a particular worldview. History curriculum documents in South African have long come under fire for being content-heavy and having a Eurocentric bias. How has the new Further Education and Raining (FET) History curriculum dealt with these and other issues regarding knowledge, pedagogy and assessment? This paper compares the ‘old’ Interim Core Syllabus for History Standards 8-10 (1996) with the new National Curriculum Statement (NCS) for History Grades 10-12 (2003). The tools of analysis which are used are Bernsteins concepts of classification and framing (to analyse knowledge and pedagogy respectively) and Blooms Revised taxonomy to analyse the cognitive levels of the Learning Outcomes and Assessment Standards. The analysis shows that the NCS presents knowledge in a more integrated way than the ICS, and that the knowledge is framed using key questions. The knowledge is structured us...