- Title
- Teachers' language and critical literacy awareness in the history classroom
- Creator
- Naidoo, Nerinjeni
- Subject
- Historiography - Methodology, History teachers, Language awareness
- Date
- 2012-09-10
- Type
- Mini-Dissertation
- Identifier
- uj:9873
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10210/7273
- Description
- M.Ed., This study is located in the context of educational transformation. With the demise of apartheid and the enactment of the new Constitution, South Africa is rapidly becoming a democratic society. Schools are currently in a state of flux with radical curriculum reconstruction being the norm. A recent curriculum initiative has been the continuous assessment portfolio for Grade 12 students. History students are required to write research essays as part of the portfolio. The purpose of this inquiry was to capture the learning experiences of a group of teachers in an action research project in which the intervention was a workshop for teacher development. This workshop was designed in response to History teachers' difficulty in mediating research essay writing. This inquiry has been designed to simultaneously teach essay-writing skills and to collect data that would capture teacher participants' competence therein. This investigation was conducted using an action research (AR) format because it was aimed at gaining an understanding of, and changing the social reality using this research design in which change is both facilitated and researched. This study was conducted from the position of the interpretive and the critical paradigms of social science inquiry. In the interpretive paradigm, research describes reality as multifaceted and socially constructed. In the critical paradigm, research evokes and addresses issues of oppression and solidified social structures. Such research is aimed to emancipate participants who were teachers in this instance. In this study the aim was to provide a workshop in which teachers could become aware of language in the research essay, with a view to promoting their own literacy and pedagogy. Data were collected using three main methods in order to understand the social reality from different perspectives and to triangulate data. These methods were artefacts from the workshop, observation and interviews of teacher participants. Data were consolidated, reduced and clustered to trace emerging themes. The emergent propositions constructed from the data revealed that History teachers engaged in pedagogy without much language awareness. History teachers also focused on content rather than on language skills as foundation for the essay. The group work format was an activity medium that supported the emergence of argumentative discourse. These findings were confirmed by triangulatory evidence from the interviews. Findings therefore indicate that the teachers had little language awareness and writing composition competence in History essay writing, and yet they were expected to mediate this aspect of the continuous assessment portfolio. Findings also reveal that teachers' lack of argumentative discourse knowledge can be explained in terms of world-view, language and culture of education. The workshop was successful in raising language awareness and provided the context for the emergence of argumentative discourse. I argue that teachers need to be "workshopped" on aspects of innovations that require epistemological and methodological shifts, and that teacher development initiatives accompany educational paradigm shifts. Based on the success of the intervention, I propose that History teachers in all grades be "workshopped" in language awareness and argumentative writing skills.
- Contributor
- Prof. E. Henning
- Full Text
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