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

作为一名教育人类学家，我感兴趣的是人们如何学习利用历史来理解他们的社会。在冲突后社会--例如南非--这是一个特别有趣的问题，在这些社会中，对过去及其遗产的态度可能导致社会和政治冲突。然而，这也引起了像英国这样的国家越来越多的兴趣，在这些国家，殖民主义的遗产卷入了关于英国在后英国退欧世界中的地位的两极分化的辩论。在这些背景下，历史教育应该扮演什么角色？我将利用这一奖学金分两个重叠的阶段来探讨这个问题--分析和发布来自完成的田野调查的数据(巩固)，以及让历史教师有机会进行反思、知识交流和专业发展(新工作)。巩固我之前的研究得出了几个对历史教育和过渡司法领域具有重要影响的发现。我打算在这一研究期间发展和发表这些发现，提交四篇学术文章和一本专著，提交给Routledge。特别是，我希望进一步探索这样一个发现，即一个人对过去的当代影响(即“历史遗产”)的信念与对历史“事实”的理解是不同的。我的DPhil表明，开普敦的九年级学生学习了相同的种族隔离历史，他们对种族隔离对当代南非的影响得出了非常不同的结论。他们得出的结论是基于他们的种族认同。所有的学生都同意种族隔离时期发生了严重的不公正，但他们对这些不公正在目前存在的程度存在分歧。这导致了关于冲突后社会应该如何处理过去的强烈分歧--而且往往是种族主义的。我与德莱登-彼得森教授的研究--利用1998年至2019年的田野调查数据--得出了类似的结论。1998年，开普敦的历史教师利用历史课帮助他们的学生理解种族主义贫困是种族隔离的遗产，需要采取集体行动。然而，2019年，同样的历史在同一所学校被用来宣传一种个人主义叙事，其中贫困是后种族隔离时代“忘恩负义”的后果。我利用这项研究提出，在概念上区分“历史”和“遗产”对于理解历史教育在两极分化社会中的作用以及帮助历史教师适应跨国课程都是有价值的。我计划利用这项研究来促进南非和英国历史教师之间的知识交流研讨会。我得到了牛津大学教育部的资助，对十个向罗兹雕像调查提交意见书的人进行了一项试点研究，研究他们自己对历史遗产的看法与他们所知道的“历史事实”之间的关系。本研究旨在探讨受训教师对历史遗产的看法。除了我上述的研究，这项研究还将为一系列历史教师讲习班提供信息，这些讲习班是在伯恩副教授(牛津大学)和安吉尔博士(开普敦大学)的协助下开发的。这些研讨会将促进来自开普敦和牛津的历史教师之间的对话，他们挑衅性地质疑英国是否也应该被视为“冲突后”。这些讲习班将旨在促进对两极分化历史的性质和方法及其与现在的关系的反思。讲习班的讨论将发展为两种情况下的历史教师的专业发展播客。

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.