- Title
- Enacting the curriculum: Ghanaian teachers’ epistemic understanding and pedagogical practices of History teaching
- Creator
- Sosu, Edmund Selorm
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- The contemporary consensus underpinning History education is to apprentice students into the discipline of History. Although in Ghana, there are elements of these contemporary trends in the History curriculum (MoE, 2010), this study suggests that History teachers’ practices often do not align with these trends (Oppong, 2012). This study seeks to understand how a group of Ghanaian History teachers reflect on and approach their History teaching, and explores the challenges and barriers they face in effectively implementing the curriculum. Grant’s (2003, 2005) and Husbands’ (2011) knowledge bases for History teachers’ practice and Mathis and Parkes’ (2020) epistemic cognition model were used as the conceptual and theoretical frameworks for this research. The interpretative phenomenological design aspect of qualitative research was used. Purposive sampling was used to select twenty-four (24) History teachers. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were used to collect general information about how teachers reason and approach their curriculum, while classroom observations and document reviews were used to obtain additional data on teachers’ reasoning and pedagogical practices. The resulting data was entered into a computer-based software package, QSR NVivo 12, and analysed using a thematic analysis approach. It emerged from the study that Ghanaian teachers understand History as working with historical evidence so as to have a tool by which to facilitate interpretation of the past. Nevertheless, school structures and administrative requirements influenced teachers’ appreciation of historical evidence and its role in understanding and interpreting the significant writings about the past. Teachers who taught only the Ghanaian History curriculum saw History as an objective account and regarded historical evidence as facts sourced from authority textbooks. On the other hand, teachers who taught both the Ghanaian and Cambridge History curriculum perceived History as an interpretive and subjective account, which relied on and was influenced by multiple sources. As well, a majority of the teachers had a limited understanding of the necessary concepts for understanding writings about the past. In term of the purposes of History, most of the teachers regarded History as a conduit for understanding the past in the light of the present; promoting nation-building tendencies; inculcating moral values; preservation of societal memories; and lastly, development of critical literacy skills. In terms of practice, only two teachers’ instructional activities reflected a constructivist approach to History teaching. The majority of the teachers (86%) adopted a more traditional approach and this was found to have been influenced by a range of factors, such as high-stakes examinations, lack of resources and school community expectations about what History teaching in the schools should be. This study concludes that the lack of clear and consistent expectations between the Ghanaian History curriculum and external assessment contributes to teachers’ narrow understanding of History. The result is the promotion in schools of a transmissive or grand narrative approach to teaching History. This study recommends the articulation of a clear and consistent instructional purpose between the Ghanaian History curriculum and the external examination. The instructional purpose should be to encourage students to interpret historical evidence with an emphasis on the existence of multiple perspectives in how they view historical events and actors.
- Subject
- epistemic understanding; Ghanaian teachers; private and public schools; History education; pedagogy; curriculum; historical thinking; historical consciousness; contemporary trends; effective teaching; examination
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1504779
- Identifier
- uon:55573
- Rights
- Copyright 2022 Edmund Selorm Sosu
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 98 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 164 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |