Browsing by Author "Gouws, Brenda Raie."

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Investigating Holocaust education through the personal stories of history teachers.
(2017) Gouws, Brenda Raie.; Wassermann, Johannes Michiel.
This study is an investigation into Holocaust education through the personal stories of history teachers. It answers two research questions: what are the personal stories of history teachers and how do these stories shape their teaching of the Holocaust? Following narrative inquiry theory and methodology, the study examines the personal stories of seven history teachers in KwaZulu-Natal who teach the Holocaust as part of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement for History in a post-apartheid, post-colonial context. Whilst some history teachers in South Africa have taken part in targeted Holocaust education workshops, the majority have not. This study focuses on those history teachers who teach the Holocaust with only the curriculum, textbook and personal stories at hand. Responding to the first research question, the restoried stories of the seven participants are told. To answer the second research question, I conducted a cross-story thematic analysis of the restoried stories to find common themes and categories and thereby develop a deeper understanding of how the Holocaust is taught in South African schools. The study draws on the theories of Clandinin and Connelly to theorise that history teachers use their personal stories to teach this complex, emotive topic to fourteen- and sixteenyear-old learners, the majority of whom have had little or no contact with Jews. It also seeks to expand the body of methodological knowledge and pushes narrative inquiry boundaries by telling the restoried stories in a manner that narrativises real events and places them in a creative setting. The result is a model for assessing history teachers’ personal story usage in Holocaust education. It illustrates that history teachers tell both overt and veiled stories. Overt stories are educative, societal, connective and biographical in nature, while veiled stories are both seen and unseen. There are even irrelevant stories, depending on what transpires in the Holocaust classroom. And finally, there are stories that are not told; submerged stories that lie below the surface but nonetheless shape the teaching of the Holocaust. The study concludes with ways in which the thesis adds new knowledge to the body of work on Holocaust education and history teachers’ personal stories.
Investigating Holocaust education through the work of the museum educators at the Durban Holocaust Centre : a case study.
(2011) Gouws, Brenda Raie.; Wassermann, Johannes Michiel.
What is the work of the Durban Holocaust Centre museum educators and how are they shaping Holocaust education there? These questions provided the impetus for this study. Education about the Holocaust has been included in curricula not only in South African schools but in various countries around the world. The reasons for this extends beyond the hard historical facts and figures and go to the heart of a human search for meaning and the desire to promote democracy and human rights in society. The Holocaust was an event in which millions of Jewish men, women and children were murdered as well other ethnic groups. The dilemmas they faced and the decisions taken at that time differentiated the participants into victims, perpetrators, bystanders and upstanders. In the years since the end of World War II, people have strived to extract meaning from those events and to teach it to new generations in order to create a better world - a world in which bullying, racial and ethnic taunts and tensions, violence, discrimination against minorities and strangers, and genocide still occur. The findings show that as in other places in the world, this is the educational focus at the DHC. Teaching the history and events is the bedrock on which this social Holocaust education rests but it takes second place in the educational programme to this social goal. The findings show the local context for this learning is significant and that apartheid, racism and xenophobia all underpin the museum educators' educational philosophies while mother-tongue language moulds their teaching strategies. The museum educators play a pivotal role in presenting the educational programme and in so doing shaping the Holocaust for the visiting learners and teachers.