Learning Legacies: The role of history education in transitional justice and the "culture wars"

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As an anthropologist of education, I am interested in how people learn to use history to make sense of their societies. This is a particularly interesting question in post-conflict societies - such as South Africa - where attitudes towards thepast and its legacies can result in social and political conflict. Yet it is also of increasing interest in countries like the UK, where the legacies of colonialism are implicated in polarizing debates about Britain's place in the post-Brexit world. In these contexts, what role should history education play?I will use this fellowship to pursue this question in two overlapping stages - analyzing and publishing data from completed fieldwork (consolidation), and engaging history teachers with opportunities for reflection, knowledgeexchange, and professional development (new work).ConsolidationMy previous research has drawn several findings which have important implications for the field of history education and transitional justice. I intend to develop and publish these findings over the course of this fellowship, submittingfour academic articles and a monograph which will be submitted to Routledge.In particular, I wish to further explore the finding that one's beliefs about the contemporary influences of the past (i.e. "historical legacies") are distinct from ones understanding of historical "facts". My DPhil demonstrated that Grade 9students in Cape Town who studied the same history of apartheid, drew very different conclusions about the influence that apartheid had on contemporary South Africa. The conclusions they drew were mediated by their racial identities.All students agreed that grave injustices took place during apartheid, but they disagreed on the extent to which these injustices endured in the present. This led to strong - and often racialized - disagreement on how the past should beaddressed in a post-conflict society.My research with Professor Dryden-Peterson - drawing on fieldwork data from 1998 and 2019 - drew a similar conclusion. History teachers in Cape Town in 1998 used history class to help their students understand how racialized poverty was a legacy of apartheid and required collective action. In 2019 however, the same history was used in the same schools to promote an individualistic narrative, in which poverty was the consequence of the "ungrateful" postapartheid generation.I draw on this research to suggest that making a conceptual distinction between 'history' and 'legacies' is valuable both for understanding the role of history education in polarized societies, and for helping history teachers to navigatecontroversial curricula.New workI plan to use this research to facilitate knowledge-exchange workshops between history teachers in South Africa and the United Kingdom. I have received funding from the University of Oxford Department of Education to undertake a pilot study of ten people who made submissions to the Rhodes statue inquiry, and the elationship between their own views about historical legacies and the "historical facts" that they know. I intend to develop this study to investigate teacher trainees' views about historical legacies. Alongside my research described above, this study will inform a series of history teacher workshops, developed with the assistance of Associate Professor Burn (Oxford University) and Dr Angier (University of Cape Town). These workshops will facilitate dialogue between history teachers from Cape Town and Oxford provocatively questioning whether Britain should also be considered "post-conflict". The workshops willbe designed to promote reflection on the nature and approach to polarizing histories, and their relationship to the present. Discussions from the workshops will be developed into professional development podcasts for historyteachers in both contexts.