Investigating pedagogic boundaries for enhancing history teaching

Abstract

This article examines the pedagogic boundaries in two grade 10 History teachers’ lessons, with the aim of analysing their effect on making the epistemology of History evident in the classroom. The study is framed by Bernstein's conceptualisation of pedagogy as the experiencing of instructional and regulative boundaries. The article offers a quantitative assessment of the frequency of stronger and weaker instructional and regulative boundaries in the pedagogic discourse of the teachers and a qualitative interpretation of the effectiveness of the boundaries for making the epistemic nature of History explicit. Data analysis showed markedly differing pedagogic boundaries that enabled or constrained visibility of the epistemic criteria of History. It shows that creating conditions for the learning of the epistemic attributes of History is facilitated by pedagogic boundaries that are purposively instantiated for the mediation of the epistemic attributes of History. This analysis has also shown that it is crucial to not only identify the strength and type of boundary but to also relate them to making evident the epistemic attributes of the discipline being taught. It suggests that teachers’ meta-cognitive awareness of instructional and regulative boundaries as conditions for making explicit the epistemic nature of History would assist teachers in creating conditions for epistemic access to History.

Keywords:

• Curriculum
• epistemic criteria
• History
• boundaries
• instructional discourse
• regulative discourse
• classification
• framing