Decolonising Pedagogies for Values Inculcation in Secondary School History Teaching in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Values inculcation is one of the principal goals of the secondary school history curriculum in Africa generally and Zimbabwe in particular. The development of values in secondary school history education is essential to promote cultural awareness, influence the development of sound character dispositions and to shape the identity of learners. Thus, teaching history should develop values which are a cornerstone of the way of life of concerned societies. However, some African values have been rendered insignificant by Eurocentric historiography. This necessitates pedagogical approaches that expose learners to enriching learning experiences where they can openly and critically engage with historical concepts and challenge the skewed Western discourses and perspectives on African experiences and civilisations. This will empower history learners to reach a consciousness of societal values through making informed inferences on the experiences of both past and present societies. Using a critical pedagogy as a lens, this paper explores pedagogies that can be instrumental to promote values inculcation grounded on the decolonial perspective. A qualitative approach was employed to review secondary research on service learning, structured academic controversy, Indigenous games and folktales which are some of the teaching methods that are recommended by scholarship as having potential to foster values inculcation. Scholarship on debates on history education are reviewed to enable this paper to provide insights on how the mentioned teaching methods can promote a culturally responsive approach to values inculcation. Overall, the authors endeavour to advance an argument that pedagogy for values inculcation in the teaching and learning of history should speak to the lived experiences of learners to realise values internalisation.