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Using a historical memoir to improvecurriculum coherence in teacher education:
The case of Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime 13PB
e-ISSN 2309-9003
Using a historical memoir to improve
curriculum coherence in teacher education:
The case of Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime
DOI: hp://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2223-0386/2022/n27a1
Andy Carolin
University of Johannesburg
Johannesburg, South Africa
andyc@uj.ac.za
0000-0001-5869-8876
Taryn Bennett
University of Johannesburg
Johannesburg, South Africa
taryn@uj.ac.za
0000-0003-4208-2609
Abstract
Two of the recurring concerns identied in teacher education are a lack of curricular
coherence and a schism between content and practice. In this article, we discuss a specic
intervention that was aimed at addressing these two challenges as they relate to English and
History specically. We argue that through the use of a carefully selected historical memoir,
much tighter coherence between these subjects can be articulated in ways that facilitate
students’ mastery of core concepts and skills across both these learning areas, as well as
a richer appreciation of their implication for teaching practice. For the purposes of this
article, we dene curricular coherence as an experienced sense of connectedness within
and across modules. Focusing on the use of Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime (2016),
we argue that engaging with a single historical text across multiple modules can improve
curricular coherence and oer a more integrated approach to engaging with wrien texts
and historical resources. With close reference to the Department of Higher Education and
Training’s Policy on the Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualications, we
reect on our experiences of integrating this memoir into an undergraduate Intermediate
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Phase (IP) teacher education programme at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). We show
how this memoir was integrated into four modules that form part of the second year of the
degree, namely English for the Primary School, Social Sciences for the Intermediate Phase,
Teaching Methodology for English, and Teaching Methodology for the Social Sciences.
Keywords: Curricular coherence; English literature; Close reading; Teaching
comprehension; Teaching literature; History education; Literary studies; Born a Crime;
Primary school; Teacher education; Social Sciences; South Africa; Life writing; COVID-19.
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Introduction
ere are several challenges facing teacher education in South Africa. ese include
insucient coherence across degree programmes (Seligman & Grave, 2010; Flores,
Santos, Fernandes & Pereira, 2014), supercial content knowledge (Taylor & Taylor, 2013;
Taylor, 2019), inadequate preparedness for the demands of academic literacy in English
(Kruss, Hoadley & Gordon, 2009; CHE 2013; Khumalo & Maphalala, 2018), and a lack of
integration between content and teaching practice (Grave, 2012; Yeigh & Lynch, 2017;
Barends, 2022). While various important strategies have been developed to address these
challenges, they have sometimes risked side-lining more complex and abstract conceptual
critical thinking skills in favour of a narrowed down notion of teacher education (Kruss et
al., 2009). In this article, we discuss a specic intervention that was conceptualised by three
lecturers, which was aimed at addressing some of these challenges as they relate to History
and English specically. We argue that through the use of carefully selected historical
textual resources, much tighter coherence between these subjects can be articulated in
ways that facilitate students’ mastery of core concepts and skills across both these learning
areas, as well as a richer appreciation of their implication for teaching practice. Focusing on
the use of Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime (2016), we argue that engaging with a single
historical memoir across multiple modules can improve curricular coherence, oering a
more integrated approach to engaging with wrien texts and historical resources. In this
article, we reect on our experiences of integrating this memoir across four modules that
form part of an undergraduate Intermediate Phase (IP) teacher education programme
at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), namely English for the Primary School, Social
Sciences for the Intermediate Phase, Teaching Methodology for English, and Teaching
Methodology for the Social Sciences.
Graduates of UJ’s IP teacher education programme are expected to be generalists who
can teach multiple subjects across the curriculum. is is a recent shi away from subject
specialisations in the IP, given the reality that many primary school teachers will at some
point be expected to teach subjects other than what they would have specialised in (Bowie
& Reed, 2016; Woest, 2018). However, this poses multiple challenges. Given that students
in the IP programme are not required to have studied History up to Grade 12, many
students lack content knowledge of the subject. is is part of a wider problem in which the
public tends to have a very poor general knowledge of contextually specic historical events
and gures (Roberts, Houston, Struwig & Gordon, 2021), let alone an understanding
of the causal relationships between historical events that is necessary for meaningful
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History teaching. In a recent study conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council
(HSRC), many participants were unable to describe recent events, despite their seminal
place in South Africa’s past. ese included key events that feature prominently in public
discourse, due to their association with public holidays and major landmarks (Roberts et
al., 2021). Given the heavy demands put on an already full curriculum, university lecturers
need to develop an integrative approach to History education, in which historical textual
resources should be integrated across the curriculum. While the scholarship on curricular
coherence in relation to Social Sciences in South Africa has oen tended to focus on the
decision to combine History and Geography into one subject (Kgari-Masondo, 2017; Iyer,
2018), there have also been great successes in using topics in Social Sciences as key sites
for transdisciplinary coherence-building more broadly (Ferreira, Janks, Barnsley, Marrio,
Rudman, Ludlow & Nussey, 2012; Jarvis, 2018; Kruger & Evans, 2018; Liig, 2021).
e challenges around English language prociency are similarly concerning, given the
poor academic literacy levels among university students (Van der Merwe, 2018) and among
in-service teachers (Allison, 2020), as well as the insucient time aorded to English in
the teacher education curricula at most South African universities (Bowie & Reed, 2016).
English prociency is required to teach English to primary school learners, and it is also
the language of teaching and learning at the university. erefore, poor English academic
language prociency has a serious negative eect on students’ epistemological access and
their meaningful engagement with learning content across their degree (Petersen, 2014;
Millin & Millin, 2019; Ramsaroop & Petersen, 2020). is has particular salience in our
context, given that 75% of UJ students report that English is not their home language (Van
Zyl, Dampier & Ngwenya, 2020).
While curr iculum redesign is an ongoing process, the particular intervention described
in this article was occasioned by the sudden shi to remote teaching and learning due to
the COVID-19 pandemic. is shi foregrounded important issues in curriculum design.
For instance, while the English modules prescribe literary texts for close textual analysis,
students were unable to borrow copies from the institutional library. is meant that we
had an ethical imperative to ensure that textual resources could be repurposed across
multiple modules. In addition, students reported severe challenges in balancing workloads
and expectations for their dierent modules (Godsell, 2020; Fouche & Andrews, 2022).
erefore, we decided to encourage deep engagement with a single text of substantial length
rather than over-burdening the students (many of whom were still navigating challenges of
remote learning). Eorts to blend content in History and English are not new, given that
close aention to wrien textual resources is a crucial skill underp inning both subjects. e
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integrated use of content and language teaching oers a powerful resource for improving
language skills (Carstens, 2013; Godsell, 2017; Kruger & Evans, 2018). Stoller (2002:2) in
fact warns against seeing content simply as a “shell for language teaching”, and insists that
“as students master language, they are able to learn more content, and as students learn
more content, they’re able to improve their language skills”.
ere are growing calls to blur the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge in the interests
of decolonising education, which some have argued will foreground new transdisciplinary
epistemologies (Gray, 2017; Davids, 2018; Wassermann, 2018b; Godsell, 2019). While we
do not yet know where these debates will lead or what the outcomes of these interventions
will be in terms of school-level curriculum policy, we do know that we need to be preparing
our pre-service teachers to think outside of the disciplinary boundaries that have shaped
much of their education.
Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, uses the author’s own life and that of his parents to
map a broader history of apartheid and the transition to democracy in the early 1990s. As a
form of literature broadly classied as life writing, the memoir is something of a hybrid genre
that is simultaneously rooted in factual events but is nonetheless an aesthetically stylised
narrative. Ludlow (2016) argues for the importance of including biographical writing in
History education, noting the genre’s capacity to inculcate empathy, communicate the
complexity of historical discourses, and convey the everyday oppressions meted out by the
apartheid regime, which are sometimes subsumed under master narratives. Wassermann
(2018a) and Godsell (2016) also observe that pre-service History teachers oen tend
to think about South African history in terms of xed moralist binaries – good and bad,
moral and immoral. In this regard, Noah’s memoir oers a far more complex and layered
depiction of the country’s past, pointing to complexities that may have been occluded by
dominant historical narratives. ere is also a concerning trend among many students to
think about South African history as ‘ending’ in 1994 (Wassermann, 2018a), which negates
the centrality of history-making in the present, as well as the entanglements between past
and present. Erdmann (2017:14) writes, for example:
Contemporary relevance as a category of the didactics of history teaching includes not only
historical facts which might be deemed the causes of present-day problems and circumstances
but also those which, on the grounds of the values or ideas inherent in them, are identical,
equivalent, or contrary to present-day problems or notions.
Noah’s text – as well as the South African memoir genre itself – is signicant then for a
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number of reasons: not only does it map a history from the colonial and apartheid
periods to the present, but it also extends to the post-apartheid period and makes explicit
connections between the racist social engineering of the past and the ongoing legacies of
racialised inequalities in the present.
Curricular coherence
Although a lack of coherence in teacher education degree programmes is oen identied
as a concern (Seligman & Grave, 2012; Flores et al., 2014), dierent authors emphasise
dierent aspects of this coherence: for some, coherence refers to an alignment between
content, pedagogy and assessment (Bateman, Taylor, Janik & Logan, 2007; Sullanmaa,
2020); others emphasise the way in which content is sequenced (Davis, 2013; Sullanmaa,
2020) to ensure that the depth and complexity of engagement increases in logical
increments across years; some note the emphasis on coherence in terms of compliance
with policy guidelines and bureaucratic monitoring (Wood & Hedges, 2016), and still
others conceptualise curricular coherence more broadly in terms of the connections across
learning areas (ijs & Van der Akker, 2009; Flores et al., 2014; Barrot, 2019). For the
purposes of this article, and with this broader understanding in mind, we dene curricular
coherence as an experienced sense of connectedness within and across modules.
Our focus in this article is on coherence at the level of text, indicating how a specic
historical resource can forge a sense of connectedness across concepts, skills and
disciplines. Following Ruszyak (2015), our conceptualisation of curricular coherence
is informed by the ve domains of teacher learning set out in the Department of Higher
Education and Training’s (DHET, 2014) Revised Policy on the Minimum Requirements for
Teacher Education Qualications (MRTEQ). is policy calls for an “integrated and applied
knowledge [which] should be understood as being both the condition for, and the eect
of scrutinising, fusing together and expressing dierent types of knowledge in the moment
of practice” (DHET, 2014:9). e policy distinguishes between ve domains of learning,
namely disciplinary learning, pedagogical learning, practical learning, fundamental learning
and situational learning. Disciplinary learning, according to the policy, includes specialised
content knowledge that is necessary to teach a specic subject. Practical learning refers to an
awareness of and competencies for actual teaching practice – “learning from and in practice”
(DHET, 2014:10). Pedagogical learning focuses on “specialised pedagogical content
knowledge, which includes knowing how to present the concepts, methods and rules of a
specic discipline in order to create appropriate learning opportunities for diverse learners,
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as well as how to evaluate their progress” (DHET, 2014:10). Fundamental learning, in turn,
“refers to the generic knowledge and competencies that are not teacher-specic, but might
be useful in the day-to-day work that teachers do” (Ruszyak, 2015:11). is includes digital
literacy, academic literacy, and English language prociency. With reference to situational
learning, the policy notes that while “all learning […] should involve learning in context,
situational learning refers specically to learning about context” (DHET, 2014:11). In
particular, this aspect of learning mandates a consideration of social justice issues such
as poverty, inequality, racism, diversity and the ongoing legacy of apartheid. As we argue
below, Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime, provides a exible textual resource around
which these core aspects of teacher education can be facilitated.
Image 1: Domains of learning - Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education
Qualications Source: DHET, 2014. Adapted by authors.
English for the Primary School
e purpose of this module, according to the ocial institutional curriculum, is “to guide
students in developing their own English language competence and the requisite subject
knowledge in English to enable them to support English language learning in the primary
school classroom” (UJ, 2021: 42). While there are six English content modules in the
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students’ undergraduate degree programme, the focus of this second-year module is on
how childhood is represented in African literature. e main outcomes are to improve
students’ academic literacy, critical thinking skills, and English language prociency. e
module explores dierent literary genres, including poetry, short stories, the novel and the
memoir. e three weeks that focus on the memoir explore dierent aspects of the text:
• Week 4: Language and identity in Born a Crime
• Week 5: Genre, intertextuality and audience in Born a Crime
• Week 6: Gender in Born a Crime
Teaching in this module took place online and consisted of pre-recorded lectures,
worksheets containing probing questions for online WhatsApp tutorial discussions, and
various formative assessments in which students received individualised feedback on
paragraphs and essays. e module was grounded in inquiry-based learning. A large body
of scholarly literature exists on the specicity of inquiry-based learning, which is broadly
conceptualised as a student-led process in which students use and analyse available evidence
to respond to particular questions – whether action-based problem-solving or responding to
analytical prompts that require independent ideas – allowing them to formulate responses
that are grounded in that evidence and connected to disciplinary knowledge (Khalaf & Zin,
2018). e memoir was used to explain this pedagogical approach to students, drawing
their aention to Noah’s (2016:82) assertion that:
If my mother had one goal, it was to ee my mind. My mother spoke to me like an adult,
which was unusual. […] She was always telling me stories, giving me lessons, Bible lessons
especially. She was big into Psalms. I had to read Psalms every day. She would quiz me on it.
‘What does the passage mean? What does it mean to you? How do you apply it to your life?’
at was every day of my life. My mom did what school didn’t. She taught me how to think.
By using inquiry-based learning and the textual strategy of close reading, this module
emphasises three of the ve domains of learning identied in the revised policy: disciplinary
learning, fundamental learning and situational learning.
In terms of disciplinary learning, the unit on Noah’s memoir allows students to revise
and apply their prior knowledge of core concepts in the study of narrative texts. is includes
elements of storytelling, such as characterisation, seing, themes, narrative perspective,
as well as the critical vocabulary necessary to teach gurative language, such as irony,
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hyperbole, symbolism and similes. Signicantly, the memoir genre invites a particularly
focused study on the relationship between narrative perspective and characterisation, which
problematises notions of a singular and objective truth. For example, one of the questions
included in the weekly worksheets for tutorial discussions illustrates the signicance of
using a narrative genre that is simultaneously historical and stylised as a literary work:
A memoir is a creative work, and therefore we can analyse the wrien text to see how a
character is developed over time. Remember that even though the book is based on the
author’s life, he is still just a character in the book. Look at the given extract and consider the
simile that is used. Explain the comparison and consider how this gives us insight into how
this experience … made him feel.
In this way, the contingencies of narrative perspective are emphasised, and the focus
on characterisation (as a concept in English literary studies) gestures to the limitations
of authorial ‘truth’ that is so central to historical thinking (Van Eeden, 2016). What is
more, this module also shows students how to think about the purpose and audience of a
given piece of writing, which is an important idea set out in the national Curriculum and
Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) guidelines for English teaching in the Intermediate
Phase (DBE, 2011a). In this, the module facilitates advanced insights that contribute to
disciplinary learning by exploring questions of intertextuality. For example, students were
required to respond to writing prompts such as the following:
e narrator describes his iendship with one of the other boys in Chapter 4: “We started
talking and hit it o. He took me under his wing , the Artful Dodger to my bewildered Oliver”
(Noah, 2016:70). Many readers will not know who “the Artful Dodger” or “Oliver” are. Do
some independent research. You will discover they are characters om a famous novel. What
is the relationship between the Artful Dodger and Oliver in this other novel, and how does it
support the idea that the narrator felt “bewildered” here?
Similarly, students’ disciplinary learning was advanced by focusing on concepts such as
foreshadowing and non-linearity in narrative structure, as well as writerly strategies for
contextualising information for foreign readers. In emphasising principles of purpose and
audience when analysing wrien texts, students were asked to respond to short questions
such as the following:
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Noah (2016:33) writes that “[m]y mom and I used to go to Joubert Park all the time.
It’s the Central Park of Johannesburg – beautiful gardens, a zoo, a giant chessboard with
human-sized pieces that people would play”. Why would the narrator describe the public
space as “the Central Park of Johannesburg”? What does this suggest about who his intended
readers might be?
While disciplinary learning is embedded throughout the teaching of Noah’s memoir, the
module also emphasises core aspects of fundamental learning, including academic literacy
and English language prociency. is is done through ongoing tasks in which students
must engage in close reading of the literary work and write structured paragraphs and
essays in response to specic questions. Close reading refers to “the detailed analysis of
the complex interrelationship and ambiguities (multiple meanings) of the verbal and
gurative components within a work” (Abrams, 2005:189). Integrated throughout the
module are short writing tasks that require students to practise and demonstrate advanced
comprehension and composition skills. For example, in one instance, students were
required to respond to the following writing prompt:
Focusing on Chapter 9 of the memoir (“e Mulberry Tree”), write a carefully structured
paragraph … in which you discuss how Noah uses an anecdote about a childhood experience
to introduce a discussion of complex social issues. Your paragraph should make reference
to the chapter’s non-linear structure. You should engage with specic quotations om this
chapter to support your answer.
is type of question requires students to pay close aention to the wrien text, demonstrate
inferential analytical skills, and prepare a narrowly focused and well-structured response
to a question. In other instances, students are given short extracts from the memoir and
are required to pay careful aention to the communicative function of dierent language
conventions and examples of gurative language. Extended exposure to complex wrien
texts and guided strategies to encourage comprehension at both a surface and inferential
level are key strategies to improve English language prociency and precise academic
literacy skills.
While critical thinking skills are not explicitly named in the revised MRTEQ policy as
an example of fundamental learning, they surely form the foundation of all academic inquiry
and professional teaching practice (Fadel, Bialik & Trilling, 2015; OECD, 2019). With
particular reference to the importance of critical thinking as a key 21 century competency,
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Barrot (2019:148) writes that the concept “focuses on the ability of learners to collect and/
or retrieve information, organize and manage information, evaluate the relevance, quality,
and usefulness of information, and generate accurate information through the use of
available resources”. One of the core objectives of the module is to elevate ideas to a more
abstract level to encourage students’ critical thinking skills. Lectures on the relationship
between language and identity, for example, engage with these ideas in the abstract,
requiring students to consider how the memoir itself theorises these relationships. Identity
is approached through the seminal work of Stuart Hall, and students are required to think
about identities as being constructed “through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth” (Hall,
1996:213) rather than in xed narrow terms of racial, ethnic and gendered identities that
students so oen bring to the classroom. Students are guided in their analysis to show how
the memoir complicates and challenges static notions of identity. ese include prevailing
beliefs that multilingualism inevitably results in social cohesion, that Afrikaans is only
associated with apartheid-era white supremacy, and that hegemonic English is an apolitical
and neutral language somehow separated from colonialism and privilege. e relationship
between language and identity is thereby problematised, and students are required to nd
textual evidence to support their arguments. In this, the module aims to mitigate concerns
that teacher education sometimes subordinates complex conceptual thinking – what would
otherwise form the basis of a general liberal arts education (Dumitru, 2019) – in favour of a
“descen[t] into technicist professional training” (Kruss et al., 2009:96).
While close reading that foregrounds contemporary language politics is valuable to
facilitate fundamental learning, it is also valuable for what the revised MRTEQ policy
calls situational learning: that is, learning about context. erefore, while the memoir’s
exploration of language politics oers opportunities for students to improve comprehension,
composition and critical thinking skills, it also gives students contextual knowledge about
how language politics works in the context of South African schools. In a comparable way,
and similarly important for situational learning, close reading of the memoir gives students
opportunities to reect on the machinations of gender stereotypes as these play out in the
South African context. ese include representations of adolescent sexuality, fatherhood,
and gender-based violence. Even in this, though, the pur pose of the lectures is not to impart
information about gender in a utilitarian sense, but to encourage students to develop their
own interpretations of how the memoir theorises a more progressive and empowering
understanding of gender. In one writing task, the students were required to respond to the
following writing prompt:
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A dominant stereotype in society is that men are violent, aggressive and assertive. Identify
one character who conrms this stereotype and one character who contradicts it. Find at
least one quote to support your view in each case.
In this way, the module encourages situational insights at the same time as it models
practical ways to teach comprehension skills in the IP. As one of the lecturers points out at
the outset of the specic unit that focuses on Born a Crime:
As we work through the content for this unit, we should remember that our focus is on how
this specic memoir explores these ideas. Our analysis of gender in this book does not require
knowledge om other modules. It is how this memoir explores the theme of gender that is
relevant to our study. We are training ourselves to nd evidence in the text to support certain
analyses of the book.
In a more sustained formative assessment opportunity, the students were expected to write
an essay:
With close reference to Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, write an essay in which you agree or
disagree with the following statement: … Born a Crime shows us that it is essential for boys
to have male father gures in their lives in order to become responsible, respectful and caring
young men.
Almost without fail, the students wrote essays that argued that the memoir re-centres
Noah’s mother as a source of discipline, guidance and parental support. Given that the father
gures in the memoir are either emotionally absent or outright abusive and homicidal,
this memoir facilitated students’ situational learning about gender-based violence, toxic
masculinities and female-centred domestic kinship structures.
Teaching Methodology for English
Born a Crime was incorporated into the rst few weeks of this teaching methodology
module. is module pays particular aention to the practical and pedagogical learning
domains:
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• Week 3: Language across the curriculum
• Week 4: Language learning theories and language teaching methodologies
As part of a discussion of language across the curriculum, Noah was identied by the
lecturer as an exemplar when discussing the concept of translanguaging (Makoe, 2018;
Mazzaferro, 2018). is pedagogical learning is an essential aspect of pedagogical content
knowledge (PCK) for English language teaching. By this time, given their engagement with
the memoir in other modules, students would not only be aware of the communicative
possibilities of translanguaging – beyond the more limited notion of code switching and
bilingualism – but also, because of Noah’s pre-eminent status, see it as inspirational. As
part of this module, students were directed to a specic chapter of the memoir titled
“Chameleon”. While this chapter was examined in close detail in the module English for the
Primary School to facilitate comprehension skills, in the Teaching Methodology module
it was used to demonstrate how translanguaging works in practice. With reference to this
chapter, Noah was positioned as a positive language role-model, a highly successful person
who could leverage his multilingual abilities in dierent contexts. e discussion of the
PCK of translanguaging also contributed to the students’ practical learning, as classroom
discussions allowed students to identify the pedagogical possibilities of translanguaging in
their own IP classrooms.
Pedagogical learning and practical learning were further intertwined in a more focused
discussion of another chapter titled “Valentine’s Day”. is chapter was used to show
students how various literacy and communicative skills and activities can be developed
around a specic theme, and how a single chapter from a book can be used as the anchor
around which a series of IP English lessons can be developed. Students were shown how
to use the chapter to meet the requirements for dierent parts of the English curriculum as
set out in CAPS (DBE, 2011a). For instance, students were shown how to use the chapter
“Valentine’s Day” as a resource to teach vocabulary and comprehension skills, practice
transactional and creative writing skills, read and speak aloud, debate and discuss social
ideas, and compare and contrast genres of writing. is was visually demonstrated to
students by presenting them with the following extract from the Grade 6 English (Home
Language) CAPS document, indicating how many of the selected topics in the curriculum
could be taught by using one chapter from Noah’s book (Image 2).
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Image 2: CAPS for English (Grade 6, Term 1)
Source: Glietenberg, S. 2020. A very brief introduction to language learning theories and
language teaching methodologies. [Teaching Methodology for English lecture]. [Online].
University of Johannesburg, August 2020.
Social Sciences for the Intermediate Phase
e focus of the English and English Methodology modules reveal how all ve domains of
learning can be addressed using a single text. e same is true for the modules that focus on
History content and History teaching. While the English content module emphasises close
aention to the text itself, History teaching approaches the text dierently and emphasises
the entanglements between the authors and readers of historical resources, and the salience
of context in shaping these. As Godsell (2016:2) writes about teaching History:
When taught well, history as a subject should explain that we all experience the world through
the lens of who we are and where, and when, we live. is requires academic and analytical
literacy. Although students sometimes possess the basic interpersonal skills, these can falsely
indicate language and subject prociency. Students rather need deep comprehension that
comes with perspective taking, academic language and analysis skills.
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us, while English and History lectures about the same historical text can facilitate
mutually reinforcing skills – broadly conceptualised in this article as fundamental learning
– History education requires that greater aention be paid to the context of the historian,
student or school learner. History should not only be thought about in terms of content, but
should rather be seen as the conuence of content, critical thinking skills and a recognition
of the positionality of both the authors and readers of historical resources (Godsell, 2016).
Noah’s memoir is incorporated into the teaching of this module over two weeks:
• Week 1: Working with historical sources
• Week 3: Leadership in historical contexts
Teaching took place through online lectures, weekly quizzes and WhatsApp discussions,
and was grounded in the principle of historical contextualisation. Van Boxtel and Van Drie
(2012) describe historical contextualisation as a large historical system that needs to be
described, analysed and evaluated in terms of its social, economic, cultural and political
context. e aim of historical contextualisation is to allow students to think and reason like
historians by looking at various sources of information from multiple perspectives. e use
of multiple perspectives encourages students to nd contradictory evidence about specic
events and to interrogate notions of truth.
e memoir was used as a resource to explore historical contextualisation. For example,
students were asked to consider the implications of Noah’s (2016:4) assertion that:
e genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn
on each other. Apart hate is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them
hate one another so you can run them all.
is quote was used as the point of departure for students to share stories about their
families’ experiences of apartheid, and allowed the students to compare these narratives to
research from other sources. Historical contextualisation was foregrounded, as the group of
students provided multiple perspectives, drawing on personal narratives as well as research
about economic, social, and physical features of apartheid – all the while blending both
factual disciplinary learning with an awareness of the contingencies of historical narratives.
rough the use of historical contextualisation, the history aspect of the module
emphasises two of the ve domains of learning identied in the revised policy: disciplinary
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learning and situational learning. Disciplinary learning allowed the students to revise their
prior knowledge and address misconceptions of core concepts in the study of South African
history. is includes the history of apartheid laws, the eects of Bantustans, historically
signicant places, the implications of language on history, and histories of citizenship.
For example, in a chapter titled “Run”, Noah introduces the topic of Bantustans, while a
chapter titled “Chameleon” conveys specic information about the statutory production of
racial categories and their material consequences. Chapters titled “Born a Crime” and “e
Second Girl” were used in the lectures to discuss Bantu education, which led to a discussion
of the Soweto Uprising of 1976. In this way, the memoir was used to examine dierent
topics that signicantly contribute to disciplinary knowledge about South African history
– such as dates, sequencing of events, and the specic implications of certain laws – and
to gain a general understanding of how apartheid manifested in the daily lives of people.
Students completed weekly quizzes in which they had to explain the historical factual basis
for certain rhetorical statements that Noah makes. For instance, one of the questions from
the weekly quizzes asks the students to use the concept of Bantustans to explain Noah’s
assertion that “You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you
can run them all” (Noah, 2016:4).
e memoir was also used as an entry point to discuss coloured identity. Linked to the
memoir’s problematising of the notion of a singular coloured identity, the lecturer sought
to model to the students how to make ideas that are expressed in historical texts ‘come
alive’ for learners. In one instance, the lecturer presented herself with four dierent hair
styles and textures (Image 3). is challenges students to think about how colouredness is
problematised in the memoir, and how this idea could be introduced in an IP classroom.
Race is explored to emphasise historical facts of legislated discrimination while also
pointing to a multiplicity of perspectives about the experiences that these laws produced,
thereby resisting any simplistic reproduction of racial categories in the present.
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Image 3: Screenshots from a Zoom lecture showing lecturer
Source: Benne, T. 2020. Born a Crime [Social Science for the Intermediate Phase 2B
Lecture]. [Online]. University of Johannesburg, 02 September 2020.
Disciplinary learning is further advanced through a critical discussion of leadership in
South Africa. Noah’s portraiture of Nelson Mandela is used as a point of departure for
this. e following quotation from the memoir was read alongside other sources to guide a
discussion on Mandela’s leadership aributes:
Nelson Mandela once said, ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to
his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart’. He was so right. When
you make eort to speak someone else’s language, even if its basic phrases here and there, you
are saying to them, I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me.
I see you as a human being (Noah, 2016:236).
Presenting multiple sources that introduce students to Nelson Mandela as a contested
historical gure – beyond the sometimes one-dimensional idealisation in public discourse
(Hassim, 2019; Berninger, 2020) – is an important part of disciplinary learning, especially
because it is a prescribed topic in the CAPS guidelines for the IP Social Science curriculum
(DBE, 2011b). Signicantly, it is important for students to be able to reect on the historicity
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of sources and how specic authors construct Mandela on a textual level. e awareness
that Noah’s description is only one account of Mandela is important, as it foregrounds the
contingencies of narrative and the importance of identifying the multiplicity of perspectives
that is central to historical thinking. Noah’s own seemingly contradictory perspective
on Mandela forms part of this discussion. In one instance, Noah (2016:12) describes
Mandela’s “release [as] a crucial moment in the dissolution of apartheid because he was
one of the most prominent activists against the white supremacist regime”. However, later
in the memoir, Noah (2016:120) articulates the limitations of this view when he writes that
[c]olored people had it rough … You’ve spent all your time assimilating and aspiring to
whiteness. en, just as you think you’re closing in on the nish line, some … guy named
Nelson Mandela comes along and ips the country on its head. Now the nish line is back
where the starting line was, and the benchmark is black.
e emphasis is therefore not only on content knowledge but also on the ability to take
a critical approach to the textual sources of this knowledge. As Godsell (2016:2) writes:
“unless critical thinking is taught as a fundamental part of history as a subject, teaching
history can be counter-productive to students learning”. us, while the integration of
Noah’s text into the lesson on leadership was geared towards disciplinary learning, it is also
underpinned by a focus on independent critical thinking skills.
e module also contributed towards situational learning. is was done through
ongoing online discussions, where students had to be self-reective in relation to the
narrator’s experiences. Students debated how Noah’s memoir applied to their current
contexts. e following prompt was used to guide the discussion:
South Aica is such a diverse nation. ink about your family background and the themes
that have already been discussed. Does this quotation apply to the context of your life? “For
all that black people have suered, they know who they are. Colored people don’t” (Noah,
2016:116). Race and racism are still controversial concepts in South Aican history. ink
about the stories you heard om your families about apartheid. How have these stories
shaped your version of apartheid history?
Grounded in curricular contextualisation, this sort of activity prompt “helps students
[…] relate the educational tasks with their knowledge and everyday experiences”, which is
essential for making tighter connections between theory and practice on the one hand, and
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“allows students to give meaning and value to what they learn” (Mouraz & Leite, 2013:2),
on the other. is sort of discussion requires students to be reective about how they think
about controversial issues in history.
Teaching Methodology for Social Sciences
is module focuses on topics such as designing and delivering lesson plans, selecting
suitable learning material, the CAPS curriculum, teaching methods, barriers to learning,
and learning from and in practice. Noah’s memoir was used as a resource during two weeks
of the module:
• Week 2 and 3: inking like a historian through resources in History
Foregrounding theories of inquiry-based learning and experiential learning (Oxendine,
Robinson & Wilson, 2004), student teachers engaged with Noah’s memoir as a resource
to learn about the dierent historical skills that are required by a History teacher. Inquiry-
based learning simultaneously promotes historical content knowledge and historical
thinking skills by facilitating the discovery of knowledge (Van Drie & Van Boxtel, 2008;
Reisman, 2012; Voet & De Wever, 2017). e student teachers were required to blend
various sources for analysis in order to formulate and support their claims about historical
content. In online lectures and WhatsApp discussions, students were required to reect on
their own experiences and – in a far more explicit way than in the Social Science content
module – reect on how their experiences and these pedagogical approaches would inform
their own teaching. In one example, students were given the following extract from the
memoir to guide a discussion on the importance of History as a school subject: “Learn
from your past and be beer because of your past, but don’t cry about your past. Life is full
of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bier.” (Noah, 2016:66).
is statement is a striking proposition, and any lesson about colonialism or apartheid
will always be potentially emotionally triggering. However, teachers are required to prepare
learners to be democratically active citizens by voicing their opinions and engaging with
opposing views (Zembylas & Kambani, 2012). Furthermore, teaching controversial issues
in History is not only about how controversy is sparked in the content, but how procedural
thinking is introduced in the curriculum (Wassermann & Bentrovato, 2018). For instance,
the Social Science curriculum in CAPS emphasises the importance of concepts such as
multi-perspectivity, chronology, cause and eect, and change and continuity (DBE,
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2011b). e discussion about teaching topics related to apartheid modelled for students
how to become reective practitioners by expressing their opinions about apartheid, while
considering their own biases and inherited notions of history. Teachers are expected to
cultivate awareness of their own biases by reecting on their identities and perspectives,
and planning how to create unbiased educational environments (Nieto & Bode, 2007).
e pedagogical and practical learning domains were closely intertwined in this
module. e “learning from practice” envisioned in the MRTEQ policy’s formulation
of practical learning emphasises the selection and use of teaching resources as core
competencies (DHET, 2014:10). By using Noah’s memoir as a resource, the lecturer
demonstrated how a series of History lessons that link directly to the CAPS guidelines
could be created from one historical resource. What is more, the pedagogical strategy of
being a ‘devil’s advocate’ – a discursive mode in which one adopts a position that is counter
to the dominant perspective, in order to facilitate further discussion – was modelled for
students throughout the teaching of this memoir.
e memoir and other sources of information created multiple perspectives that
student teachers used to debate notions of truth, which they linked to their own future
classroom practice. e inevitable – though pedagogically crucial – result from the debate
was the realisation that while the memoir is based on actual events in history, it is only one
source of the past, and an avowedly subjective one at that. is emphasises the subjectivity
of historical narratives, which would later be reinforced by focusing on characterisation
and narrative perspective in the English content module. Given that it is essential to
include multiple genres in History teaching to emphasise the multiplicity of perspectives
(Bharath & Bertram, 2014), our use of the memoir across the module was not to elevate
Noah’s account above others but rather to model how to approach these historical texts as a
historian. A sustained interrogation of a single text also shows students how to think about
other genres of writing, such as the prescribed History textbook, outside of its assumed
status as an authoritative text – a recurring concern in History education (Hickman &
Porlio, 2012; Ramoroka & Engelbrecht, 2015; Wassermann & Bentrovato, 2018).
Student responses: A snapshot survey
Students’ responses to this intervention were overwhelmingly positive. While a more
detailed study of the eectiveness of this intervention is necessary, an initial survey was
sent to all students. While only about a third of students participated in the study (n =
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30), it provided promising data about how students experienced the use of Born a Crime
across multiple modules. While 60% agreed or strongly agreed that studying the module
had helped them see explicitly the connections between the English content and English
methodology modules – a gure increasing to 70% for the Social Sciences modules – an
impressive 100% of students agreed or strongly agreed that: “Studying Born a Crime across
more than one module has shown [them] how [they] can use a single literary text to teach
multiple learning areas in [their] own classroom as a future educator”. Given prevailing
anxieties about what was expected in their formal curriculum, especially during remote
teaching necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Dube 2020; Godsell, 2020; Iyer,
2020; Bunt, 2021), it is signicant that 90% of students agreed or strongly agreed that
they clearly understood what was expected of them in the four dierent modules where
the memoir was used. ey also acknowledged by a considerable margin (87%) that the
three lecturers who taught these modules used very dierent teaching strategies. is
suggests a successful modelling of teaching in practice – an essential component of teacher
education programmes (Urbani, Roshandel, Michaels & Truesdell, 2017; Acquah &
Szelei, 2018; Hunde & Tacconi, 2018) – as students were aware of the dierent ways that
the same historical and literary text can be taught, depending on the specic curricular
outcomes and lecturers’ individual teaching styles. is indicates that practical learning was
integrated into all four modules even where it was not identied as a priority outcome in
the original planning. Student teachers should be aware of the dierent teaching styles that
dierent people use so that they are beer equipped to navigate the diering demands of
the classroom, and to draw on a broader repertoire of strategies that are necessary when
they are in-service teachers (Romylos & Balfour, 2018).
In addition to the responses described above, which illustrate the successes of modelling
an integrated approach to curriculum design, the sustained use of the memoir by dierent
lecturers revealed that a historical memoir that is studied in depth can also contribute to
content knowledge about the history of South Africa that is not reductive (Godsell, 2016;
Wasserman, 2018a). Our teaching of the memoir set out to deliberately complicate binary
and simplistic ways of understanding the country’s past. For instance, the vast majority
of participants agreed or strongly agreed that studying Born a Crime had improved their
understanding of the history of apartheid (87%); that studying the memoir had “made
[them] realise that race is more complicated than [they] had previously thought” (90%);
and that studying the memoir “made [them] realise that the relationship between language
and identity is more complicated than [they] previously thought” (93%).
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Conclusion
e purpose of our intervention was to identify a single historical resource around which
dierent aspects of content and skill could coalesce. In this article, we have oered an
approach for curricular coherence that functions at the level of the text, prioritising an
experienced sense of connectedness. We have argued that through the use of a carefully
selected historical memoir, curricular coherence can be advanced in signicant ways.
Importantly, this particular memoir is grounded in factual details of the country’s past,
while also demonstrating aesthetic sophistication and stylistic complexity, thus lending
itself to analysis on the level of both historical fact and narrative style.
While we have focused our analysis on the use of Born a Crime, the use of one historical
text across multiple modules is not limited to this example, of course. In fact, some may feel
that Noah’s text specically has limitations for classroom practice because of its inclusion
of scatological language, for example. However, many historical texts blend historical
factuality with aesthetic stylisation in a way that can facilitate learning across modules.
We have argued that curricular coherence can be advanced across modules in a way that
addresses all ve of the learning domains identied in the MRTEQ. is is important,
given that one’s disciplinary knowledge and a sense of condence in being able to teach
that knowledge are both important for teachers’ professional identities (Romylos, 2021).
While disciplinary, situational and fundamental learning are advanced most explicitly in
the English and History content modules, and pedagogical learning is the focus of the two
teaching methodology modules, it is also clear that practical learning has been infused
across all four modules through ongoing modelling of diverse teaching practices.
Acknowledgements
e authors wish to acknowledge the contribution made by Sven Glietenberg, who
was the lecturer responsible for teaching one of the modules discussed in this article.
Ethical considerations
Permission to conduct this study was granted by the Research Ethics Commiee of the
Faculty of Education at the University of Johannesburg (Sem 2-2020-106).
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