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What is the role of the school and the teacher in the context of democratic social transformation? How has it changed globally and in the South African context during the past fifty years? Is there room for optimism among teacher educators in the 21st century? I offer some modest reflections on my own career in the hope of provoking some debate from colleagues. "A life history is a life story located within its historical context." (Ivor Goodson)1 "I used to think that public school were vehicles for reforming society. And now I think that while good teachers and schools can promote positive intellectual, behavioral and social change in individual children and youth, [American] schools are (and have been) ineffectual in altering social inequalities." (Larry Cuban) 2 "Nearly half century of experience in schools and the sustained research I have done have made me allergic to utopian rhetoric." (Larry Cuban) 3 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) school history curriculum of post-apartheid South Africa is littered with sensitive and controversial topics. Many history teachers and their learners do not know how to confront these topics, especially in multiracial, multicultural, and diverse classrooms. Therefore, this paper explores how the idea of decolonial love (Sandoval, 2000; Maldonado-Torres, 2006) could inform alternative creative pedagogies or contribute to existing pedagogical frameworks that history teachers and their learners employ when engaging sensitive and controversial topics. In this paper I argue that decolonial love has the potential to enable both history teachers and their learners to engage with sensitive and controversial topics in history in ways that promote empathy, cognitive, social and epistemic justice, inclusivity, critical thinking, respect, love, and tolerance for others as envisioned in the CAPS document. This would, in turn, promote the transgression of knowledge boundaries for knowledge co-construction (Keating, 2013) and thus, enable a way of doing history that promotes pluriversal (situated) knowledges (Santos, 2014). Lastly, I argue that decolonial love can provide a useful pedagogical framework for teaching sensitive and controversial topics since it ties together different approaches to teach such topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the experiences of several learners in KwaZulu-Natal schools in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, focusing on the teaching and studying of various reportedly controversial historical issues in schools. It states that history was taught according to a positivist model during South Africa's Apartheid period. South Africa's National Curriculum Statement plan from 1994 is mentioned, along with educational philosophies and the roles that history teachers play in South Africa.

This paper analyses the history lessons produced by the History Workshop that were published in the Learning Nation section of The New Nation newspaper between 1986 and 1990. Specifically, I examine the rhetorical dimensions of these historical narratives, which not only provided readers with factual information about the past, but also offered black South Africans a new framework, a new 'conception of reality', to that provided within the Department of Education and Training (DET) schools of the apartheid era. This new framework provided by these historical narratives was significant for two reasons. First, it offered black South Africans alternative ways of understanding and analysing conditions in apartheid South Africa. Second, by examining the heroic acts of resistance by everyday people and prominent leaders in the past, these narratives also sought to provide inspiration and encourage continued acts of resistance during a very violent and fraught period in the anti-apartheid struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role might Holocaust education play in post-apartheid South Africa? What role might the teacher of the Holocaust play? This paper examines the considerations that have shaped the programmes developed by the South African Holocaust Foundation to support South African teachers teaching about the Holocaust. This programme is set against a society removed in time and space from the history of the Holocaust, but in which teachers, like other members of this society, have recently emerged from a traumatic past. Informed by the experience of working with history teachers from diverse communities across rural and urban areas of South Africa, this paper argues that, if teachers are to be active players in the process of social transformation, teacher training has to go beyond supporting the content knowledge and methodological skills of teachers. Training programmes have to facilitate not only the development of an understanding by teachers of what is meant by human rights, but more importantly, facilitate the process by which teachers can come to value human rights, and not see them as an obstacle in their path to teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines developments in film and history studies in South Africa. Overview of case studies including the representation of the holocaust and of apartheid on screen and the long-history of the war-film genre; Emphasis on the reception of cinema in colonial Zimbabwe; Factors influencing African cinematic tastes; African responses to cinema.