Paper short abstract:

South African teachers are tasked with discussing a very painful history in high school classrooms, classrooms which are often only superficially integrated. This paper investigates how History teachers struggle to facilitate this discussion while teaching the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is a compulsory section of the History syllabus taught in the final year of secondary school. As a subject, History has been positioned by politicians as a tool for reconciliation, nation building and social cohesion amongst young people. This paper challenges that view by exploring how different interpretations of the TRC can be deeply divisive among young South Africans. The History classroom can sediment these divisions because teachers highlight certain interpretations of the TRC at the expense of others. Self-reported accounts from History teachers demonstrate some of the constraints on classroom discourse that result in this asymmetry. Discourse is constrained by the demographics of the school staff, the institutional culture of schools, by teachers' fears of how learners might react, by curriculum stipulations and by the power relations of wider South African society. The teachers' accounts shed light on how they negotiate these constraints as well as how they experience learners' resistance to official narratives and interpretations. The final section of the paper outlines the implications of teachers' selective histories for reconciliation among the post-apartheid generation.

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