Abstract:
This article uses Bernstein’s pedagogic device as a framing heuristic
to trace the shifts in the South African school history curriculum from
1995 – 2019. The article focuses on how the instructional and regulative
discourses have changed over the past 25 years. The instructional discourse
refers to the selection, sequencing, pacing and assessment of knowledge,
while the regulative discourse refers to the rules that create social order.
I map the curriculum shifts onto the broader policy discourses, such as
the competence framework of outcomes-based education (which informed
the South African curriculum from 1997 to 2011), the performativity and
accountability discourse which emerged after 2012 and the discourses
of decolonisation that strengthened after 2015. This article aims to tell
the story of how the history curriculum reforms reflect the broader
regulative discourses and to show the relationships between the official
and pedagogical recontextualising fields. The story is a detailed case study
of how curriculum design is influenced by selection logics that are both
internal and external to the discipline of history, which reflects curriculum-making as a process fraught with tensions and fractures.
