Experiences of the teaching and learning of history in a context of rurality: a case study of a South African rural high school.

Abstract

The teaching and learning of History continues to gain momentum in post-apartheid South Africa and the Department of Basic Education (DBE) has even proposed a decision to make History compulsory in South African schools. Within such a context, it is of paramount importance to take into consideration the reality that teaching and learning is not uniform. In fact, most teaching and learning policies are not created with the schools in rural areas in mind. Hence this dissertation presents an exploration of how teaching and learning of History is experienced by teachers and learners in a rural context. It foregrounds the voices of the participants of the teaching and learning process in the rural areas to counter the dominance of the perspectives of the people in urban areas and those in managerial positions at school and government levels. This study is a phenomenological case study in which focus group interviews and semi-structured interviews were used as data generation methods. The participants were three History teachers and seventeen History learners who were conveniently selected from one of the schools in Port Shepstone, KwaZulu-Natal. The findings suggest that rurality influences the teaching of learning in both positive and negative ways. The negative factors are predominant, and they demonstrate that either the policies must change to suit History teaching and learning in rural areas as well, or the History teachers and learners must improve their additivity in order to teach according to the expectations of History education. Despite the predominance of negative experiences, the ingenuity of both History teachers and learners in the context of rurality however creates some positivity in History teaching and learning. The study concludes that not all hope is lost for school History in the rural areas and, in fact, a lot can be learnt from rural History teachers and learners.