History and feeling are intertwined, even though some historians deny this and still hold onto the spectre of neutrality. The intertwining of thinking and feeling is perhaps even more true in History Education, where learners’ and teachers’ feelings spill from the curriculum into the classroom.
Iso Lomso Fellow, Sarah Godsell of the Wits School of Education at the University of the Witwatersrand, uses ‘historical feeling’ as an approach to unsettle the historical thinking framework’s cognitive underpinnings and to look at some of its contradictions. Her research explores the presence and role of emotion in history through the lens of the decolonisation of history teaching.
“My ideas are not new. I’m drawing from a range of theorists and using them to think through the South African history education space where they don’t always sit easily together. I teach history teachers, and I always come back to how thinking and feeling are intertwined in the history classroom," she said.
“Feelings always feel dangerous,” Godsell said. “But it’s impossible for history to be seen as neutral – it holds powers in who it upholds and who is invisible. All history has always contained feelings. Affective knowledge is historical knowledge in history classrooms – it lives in the immediacy of classrooms. It’s not about the indiscriminate use of feelings. But we need to understand what happens when we take affective knowledge seriously as a resource and not an obstacle," she said.
“Penny Strauss described our emotional lives as archives. I see the classroom as the point at which these archives encounter each other.”
New draft curriculum
Godsell described this as a specific moment in this area of work due to the unexpected release of the draft CAPS (Curriculum and Policy Statement) History Curriculum in March. “The release of the new curriculum fills me with both hope and anxiety,” she said.
In her seminar, she focused in detail on her own and broader reactions to the proposed curriculum, which was also the subject of a two-day workshop she held at STIAS involving teachers and history education students and academics, which centred around understanding what teachers and learners will experience with the new curriculum and what the history education community can do to support effective history learning within this new curriculum.
Godsell explained that the new curriculum is framed around the UNESCO report on history in Africa and what is known as the General History of Africa, which was originally conceptualised in the 1960s and relaunched in 2018, with new volumes incorporating new information and research in archaeology, anthropology and the humanities, as well as more recent (2025) digital additions.
She described the new curriculum as using an ‘African-centred’ approach to look at the long past, rooting a Global Africa at the centre of a global curriculum.
“This Africa-centred focus aims to shift how Africa is viewed,” she explained. “There is also a focus on archaeology and oral history as types of historical knowledge on the long past of Africa. It offers a change in the centre of gravity and aims to shift the conception of Africa as isolated and static before colonialism.”
But she emphasised that these shifts are limited.
“Even as it makes this epistemic shift, though, the framework remains rooted in historical thinking, limiting the change in the curriculum to a content shift, rather than one that impacts pedagogy and assessment, and so history education as a whole,” she explained. “While historical feeling is complicated in a country with a history and present, such as South Africa, I’m thinking through the potential of historical feeling as a resource in the classroom, rather than an obstacle, and something that the new curriculum, in its content, makes place for implicitly, if not in pedagogical foundation.”
She sees this historical-thinking pedagogical approach as emphasised in the curriculum's objectives for school history. She pointed to objective 7, which states “To demonstrate an appreciation that there are multiple ways of relating to the past – including cognitive, emotional, moral, political, material and aesthetic ways of doing so”.
“Here emotions are framed as a way of relating to history, but this is not actually borne out in the curriculum,” she said. “It also suggests they are not intertwined. They need to be integrated.”
The thinking/feeling split is therefore still evident in the document's framing. It doesn’t stress transformed pedagogy. Historical thinking skills are embedded, but there is no space for historical feeling. The document presents a cognitive approach to teaching history. So teaching is still rooted in a cognitive approach.
“The framework doesn’t fully capture what I see as the need for feeling and still reduces historical knowledge to the classroom,” she added. “I don’t think more textured history needs to be at the expense of thinking.”
Assessment and teacher training
Godsell also noted that although space is offered for different types of assessment, this is limited by the allocation of marks in a very content-heavy curriculum.
“Assessment holds power in any curriculum,” she said. “And it would be difficult to shift the assessment practices of just one subject – so this is a conundrum.”
Another area she stressed is around the production of resources for the curriculum. Although there is a lot more content inclusion from the continent, there isn’t a clear definition of what being African means in the curriculum or who is producing the knowledge and what the epistemic frameworks are.
She also noted that the curriculum has already faced criticism for the fact that apartheid history and the history of the black-consciousness movement are presented in less depth than previously.
She emphasised the huge importance of teacher training. “While the new curriculum provides an opening for historical feeling, unless it is explicitly covered in teacher training the potential won’t be realised and remains unexplored. Teacher training is almost written off as a tick box, but it will be where the new curriculum fails.”
Godsell stressed that teaching history in South African classrooms provokes pain and anger and means working with generational trauma in a setting where the socio-economic realities of apartheid still play out in the lived experience of children every day. It’s therefore important to understand what teachers are being asked to do in the classroom and to give them the appropriate skills and training to be able to do it.
“We are already asking teachers to do it but not giving them any guidance. It can’t be something that learners and teachers are left to deal with on their own. Teacher training will determine the limits of this curriculum.”
Article: Michelle Galloway
Photo: Curt Ruiters, Quickclick Productions
