Teachers’ troubled interactions with prescribed school history and its national imaginaries: the case of post-Mugabe Zimbabwe

Abstract

Drawing on the under-researched case of post-Mugabe Zimbabwe, this article explores the intricacies of teachers’ engagement with official curricula and their inherent national imaginaries within prescriptive and constrictive political environments. The article investigates history teachers’ interpretation and enactment of curriculum reform and textbook revision in historically marginalised regions of Zimbabwe, centring representations of the country’s contentious anti-colonial struggle. Our findings illuminate educators’ sense of moral and professional injury in the face of conflict between the values of academic history they acquire through teacher education and their classroom practices, favouring a nationalist collective memory approach, compelled by the spectre of potential sanctions and by high-stakes centralised examinations that act as technologies of control. We conclude by drawing attention to the implications of policy constraints for teachers’ wellbeing and for societal vulnerability to the abuse of history, and by calling for further investigation into the feasibility of implementing critical historical inquiry in classrooms where systemic barriers prevail. Ultimately, we warn against unrealistic assumptions about normative, one-size-fits-all approaches to history education that fail to take into account realities on the ground and point out the need for the field to search for effective strategies in support of teachers working in constrictive contexts.