From Teacher's Guide to Social Change: The Role of History Textbooks in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The motivation for undertaking this study stems from my Honours degree project that examined the guidelines of a Grade 9 Oral History Project which focuses on the impact of apartheid on ordinary people's lives, as represented in the CAPS Social Sciences textbook called Oxford Successful. The guidelines were examined based on how they allow learners to develop history concepts. The textbook is labelled Social Sciences because in General Education Training (GET) phase which are grades 7-9, Social Sciences is made up of two subjects namely, Geography and History (Department of Basic Education, 2011). My experiences as a novice teacher who had the drive to assist learners to understand the content being taught to them led to the start of this Honours project. The findings in that project were that the guidelines do not utilize knowledge forms in a manner which afford conceptual development to learners. Given that grade 9 is an exit level, I was disturbed by these findings and wanted to investigate this further. I was curious to know the extent to which history texts provide learners with access to knowledge which can help them develop concepts.