Learning empathy through school history textbooks? A case study

Abstract

Historical perspective-taking or learning empathy are important skills that the South African history curriculum wishes to promote in schools in its quest to heal the injustices and divisions of the past. A set of chapters in six recently published Grade 11 textbooks serves as a case study to analyse how empathy is mediated in legitimatised educational materials. The topic is that of ‘nineteenth century race theories leading to genocide’. First, the concept of empathy is interrogated and contextualised within the wider debate about the incommensurability between the ontology of ‘history-as-past’ and ‘past-as-history’. Thereafter, the data from the six books is grouped under two related thematic headings, namely ‘seeing different perspectives’ and ‘using primary narratives’. While there is considerable variation in how each of the textbooks mediates empathy, one of them stands out as an exemplar of how to do this well. This book relies on primary textual sources, presents different perspectives as well as diversity within those perspectives and shows how personal, individual choices play a role in the unfolding of the narratives about the past. All these are helpful for mediating empathy through connecting to learners' own lives. The article contributes to an understanding of how empathy as a concept can be understood in the wider study of history and educational media.

Keywords::

• textual mediation
• history textbooks
• empathy
• primary sources
• holocaust
• history-as-past
• past-as-history

Notes

^1. See Knowledge in the Blood by Jansen (2009) on how this works with ‘race’ in South Africa. There is also a vast knowledge base on how this inheritance is manifested among the descendants of those involved with the Holocaust (victims and perpetrators). See, for example, Die Decke des Schweigens/Breaking the Veil of Silence by Bittner (2013).

^2. The injustices of the national education system or how the nation-building project is working out ‘on the ground’ with teachers, pupils and school experts, were not the focus of this study. For a thorough exploration of political transformations in terms of Outcomes-Based Education, curricula and apartheid education in the school subject history, as well as how the nation building effort is materialising within South African classrooms and schools, see Hues (2012, in German). See also McKaiser (2012) on race, sexuality and other uncomfortable South African issues.

^3. The ‘new’ curriculum, or Curriculum and Assessment Policy Document, is not really new in the sense that it is something totally different from what preceded it. There have been a few tweaks and adjustments, mainly in terms of sequencing and pacing, but for the purposes of this study these minor changes have little or no bearing, given that the core aims, together with the subject matter of the analysed chapters, remain the same.

^4. This Foundation made their immense archive of about 52,000 video interviews/testimonies of survivors of (and others related to) the Holocaust available, for the first time outside of the USA, through cooperation with the Freie Universität Berlin. For more information see www.zeugendershoah.de and www.cedis.fu-berlin.de/cedis/.

^5. This article does not focus on a comparison between apartheid and Nazism because this has been done elsewhere (see Morgan 2012).

^6. I use ‘black’ and ‘white’ in this article not because I endorse race-thinking, but because these categories are still part of official discourse in an attempt to redress the injustices of the previous system.

^7. This applies to photographs and other iconic representations as well. For example, Keilbach (2009, 54) shows how through the frequent reproduction of photographs in a given subject matter – she analyses Holocaust photographs – they are transformed into symbolic images that can be removed from their specific context and in this way come to signify abstract concepts such as ‘evil’. In other words, photographs – as a form of language – define reality. They do not correspond to it.

^8. It could be argued that occasionally it is necessary, as an artistic/creative/literary device, to disrupt coherence. However, that would presume a type of coherence to begin with, which many of the sampled text simply did not have.

^9. There is a general argument about how only ‘whites’ can be racist. For an analysis and critique of this argument see McKaiser (2012).

^10. And of course the big difference between the German and the South African history is that, unlike in South Africa, by and large Germany's (and Europe's) destroyed people are not here anymore to contest or advise on how to best construct their history in school textbooks.

^11. I must stress that the designers of these classroom materials make a point of cautioning potential users that they are not meant to act as a substitute for ‘facts’. For example, they say that the DVDs should in no way enable a comprehensive treatment of a subject like ‘resistance during Nazism’. The interviews are an ‘individualisation of history’, as they call it, and should be treated accordingly. It must also be noted that these educational materials are also recommended for use in language education (German and English).

^12. This has also something to do with the generally poor literacy levels of children and adults in the country.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katalin Eszter Morgan

Katalin Morgan is currently a lecturer in the curriculum division of the school of education at Wits University. She has a background in sociology. Her working experience spans across a diverse range of fields, including high school teaching, academic publishing, web design, writing coach and media analyst.