Ways of seeing women's history: an action research study of student responses to a document-based lesson sequence centring black women in a historical narrative

Fish, Roslyn

Ways of seeing women's history: an action research study of student responses to a document-based lesson sequence centring black women in a historical narrative

Thesis / Dissertation

2025

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

School of Education

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This thesis investigates a document-based enquiry as a way of integrating the teaching of women's history in the classroom. This need arises given women's misrepresentation, marginalisation, and erasure by history teaching practice and curricula in high schools in South Africa and further afield. Existing research shows students resist valuing women's history when presented as token additions to the traditionally male-centred narrative. Gaps identified in the disciplinary and critical approaches to teaching history provide a theoretical framework for foregrounding the necessity of examining the impact of affect in enabling as well as in obstructing student learning. Scholarship on resistance to learning both within and beyond history education further facilitates theorising the importance of affect in impeding learning. In this action research study conducted in my own Grade 11 history classroom, I curated accessible documents centring Black women in events that secured the ending of bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1940s-1950s. Textbook extracts presented alongside documentary evidence allowed my eight students in their penultimate year at an all-girls school to interrogate the divergent narratives. To elicit students' enthusiastic participation and close reading of the material, I sequenced engaging pedagogical activities across ten lessons. Plenary and group discussions, constructions, and writing, along with individual reflections, were collected as data. My positionality is evident in my choice of Tetreault's feminist framework to analyse how the enquiry informed students' ways of seeing events in Montgomery, and reflexive thematic analysis is used to analyse how the enquiry informed students' ways of seeing the construction of textbook history. My findings indicate that the extended enquiry enabled all students to critique the textbooks' erasure and misrepresentation of women. Several students' affective engagement enhanced their capacity to enact sophisticated criticality and disciplinary learning that exceeded my expectations. By contrast, affect unconsciously partially impeded the learning of others, as their embedded notions absorbed from the social milieu they inhabit compelled them at times to resist using aspects of the documentary evidence consistently. In response, I contribute three reconceptualised disciplinary, critical, and psychosocial literacy lenses as interlocking pedagogical approaches to capacitate and enhance student learning in the history classroom. They would also assist teachers in noticing and responding constructively to students experiencing knowledge as discomfiting their sense of themselves and how they wish to be seen socially. My study highlights the dearth of research in history education that uses an affective and psychosocial lens to examine student learning in the classroom, and shows that this lens is essential to facilitating and enhancing student progression in this subject.

Keywords

Women's history

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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