‘Teaching Maths is Easier Than This!’: Pre-Service Educators Confront the Challenges and Opportunities of Teaching Emotive and Contested Pasts in Post-Apartheid History and Social Science Classrooms

This paper describes some of the affective fall out of teaching slavery in South African schools following the latest version of the curriculum, known as the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS). Over several years, it has become apparent to the author, who is a teacher educator at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), that teaching the sections of the curriculum on Cape slavery and on transatlantic slavery causes significant distress among school learners and that student educators have become increasingly apprehensive about the impact these topics will have when they present them to their own classes comprising several dozen adolescents. Student educators have expressed concern that they will be unable to resolve racial conflict that seems to be just under the surface, and which teaching topics like slavery threatens to release. The author gives an account of an ongoing experiment in what are called 'silent conversations' that she has conducted with student educators and which, as a methodology, many have subsequently taken with them into their own teaching at schools. It is argued that the silent conversations allow for students to converse with each other in a way that keeps emotions in check while allowing them to express their responses to stimuli related to the topic of slavery. The silent conversation methodology is rooted in an international literature referred to in the paper that investigates possible solutions for teaching controversial histories at school level in countries where divisive political or other allegiances make them particularly difficult to present.