Selected millennial history teachers’ engagement with rainbow nation discourses in relation to post-apartheid South African history.

Abstract

This dissertation presents an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) on how the millennial history teachers engage with the discourses of the Rainbow Nation in relation to post-Apartheid South African history. Millennials are understood as “digital natives”, those born after 1980, thus they form a cohort of history teachers with a generational experience of communicating, working, creating, and maintaining relationships through Internet-based technology. With the changing political discourse in South Africa, the Rainbow Nation has come to be a contentious phenomenon; both as a nation-building metaphor, and a notion capable of serving socio-economic justice. This contention was visibly manifested amongst the millennials, who expressed their frustrations through the #MustFallMovement, some of whom are history teachers. For the purpose of this study, 10 millennial history teachers were conveniently sampled as participants. Data was generated through three stages of 1) visual elicitation technique, 2) video-recorded unstructured interviews, and 3) focus-group discussions. The findings are thematically presented; and show that the millennial history teachers engage differently from those in the Rainbow Nation Discourses, depending mainly on the environment (space) in which the engagement occurs. While most history teachers are personally critical of the Rainbow Nation, they seem prepared to teach in its favour when in the classroom. I therefore argue that there are tensions in the engagement, which this study has found to be inextricably linked to the context of engagement.