Notes on Contributors
Denise Bentrovato
(PhD History) is the founder and co-director of the African Association for History Education (AHE-Afrika) and a researcher and extraordinary lecturer in history education in the Department of Humanities Education, University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is currently also a research fellow in the History Department of the University of Leuven, Belgium, and a visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Social Sciences at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Goma in eastern Congo. Her research combines interests in history education, memory politics and identity formation, and primarily focuses on post-colonial and post-conflict societies in Africa, including Rwanda, Burundi, DR Congo, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Liberia and Sierra Leone. An important part of her work relates to examining educational responses to historical wrongs within the framework of nation-building and transitional justice processes. Throughout her career, she has worked both in academia and for international organisations and NGOs in Africa and Europe, including UNESCO. She was recently appointed Secretary of the International Research Association for History and Social Sciences Education and she sits on the editorial boards of its International Journal for History and Social Sciences Education and of Yesterday and Today, a publication of the South African Society for History Teaching.
Carol Bertram
is an Associate Professor in the School of Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg campus), where she teaches Honours, Master’s and PhD students. She is interested in questions of knowledge, curriculum and teacher professional learning, particularly from a social–realist perspective. She has published in the fields of history curriculum and knowledge, teacher knowledge and teacher learning. She has done research for Umalusi (the South African Council for Quality Assurance) for a number of years, leading the team which annually analyses the history National Senior Certificate examination papers and doing a range of history curriculum document analysis projects.
Jean-Leonard Buhigiro
is a lecturer in history in the Department of Humanities and Language Education at the University of Rwanda. He completed his PhD in history education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal; his master’s degree in Arts (History) at the University of Stellenbosch and a bachelor’s degree in Arts (History) at Université Nationale du Rwanda. He is also a Fulbright alumnus on American Civilisation (New York University). His area of interest is the teaching of difficult or controversial histories, and he has presented papers at national and international conferences on teaching the genocide against the Tutsi. Another interest is the history of international relations, and his published study was on the Changing Role and Identity of the Non-Aligned Movement (1955–1998). Other publications include “Revealing professional development needs through drawings: The case of Rwandan history teachers having to teach the genocide against the Tutsi” in Yearbook of the International Society of History Didactics. He also contributed to the general history of Rwanda, Histoire du Rwanda des origines à la fin du XXe siècle (2011), edited by Paul Rutayisire and Deo Byanafashe.
Annie Fatsireni Chiponda
is a senior lecturer in history education at Chancellor College, University of Malawi. She holds a PhD in history education from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Furthermore, she has a Master of Arts in Education (Curriculum and Instruction major) from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in the USA as well as a Master of Arts in African Social History from the University of Malawi, Chancellor College. Her research interests revolve mainly around questions of gender and disability, as represented in school textbooks.
Raymond Nkwenti Fru
is a senior lecturer in history and social science education at the Sol Plaatje University in Kimberley, South Africa. He has formerly served as lecturer and discipline coordinator at the University of the Free State and as senior lecturer of history education and Head of Department of Language and Social Education at the National University of Lesotho. He holds a PhD, MEd and BEd Honours from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a Diploma in Teaching from the Higher Teachers Training College of the University of Bamenda, Cameroon. His research interests focus on contentious representations in school textbooks, controversial discourses in history education and history teacher identity. He was awarded a fellowship at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in 2014. He has published articles and book chapters and has presented his research at national and international conferences.
Marshall Tamuka Maposa
is a senior lecturer in history education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Edgewood Campus), South Africa. He has nine years experience as a secondary school teacher and another nine as a lecturer at his university, from which he obtained a PhD in history education. His research interests are textbook research, history education (particularly historical literacy), African history and African consciousness. He has published articles and book chapters on these issues and has presented on them at local and international conferences. His research is conducted from an Africanist perspective, which explains his interest in representations of Africa in history. Among the awards he has received are the Top Emerging Researcher in the Humanities award at his university (2016) and the English Academy of Southern Africa’s Thomas Pringle Award for the Best Educational Article (2017). He is also the co-editor of the journal Yesterday & Today and an executive member of the South African Society for History Teaching.
Abdul Mohamud
has over 12 years experience in working with young people at schools in London and Abu Dhabi. He has been a Senior Teaching Fellow at University College London’s Institute of Education, where he tutored trainee history teachers. Abdul is a Fellow of the Historical Association in the United Kingdom (UK) and a member of its Secondary Committee; he has spoken at national and international conferences in the United States of America and Europe. He and Robin Whitburn founded Justice to History, an organisation whose aim is to help teachers and students explore relevant, and often neglected, diverse histories.
Sabrina Moisan
is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada. She adopts a sociocultural critical position in her research in the field of history and citizenship education. Her main areas of research include the study of the social representations, epistemological beliefs, and teaching practices of history teachers. Her research touches on diverse topics, such as teaching difficult pasts (the Holocaust and other genocides, human-rights struggles) and the integration of an inclusive approach in the teaching of the history of one’s own country. Her current research projects investigate (i) the goals, challenges and teaching practices about the Holocaust in Montreal Jewish schools (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)) and (ii) how historians and history teachers view the plurality in the “national” past and how they teach it in their own courses in high school and at university level (funded by SSHRC). She is also preparing teaching guides for the integration of minorities’ historical experiences (blacks, Jews, Arabs and Muslims) in order to challenge the master narrative of Quebec’s and Canada’s histories, and a separate guide on the teaching of genocides (projects funded by the Ministry of Education of Quebec).
Reville J. Nussey
is a high-school history teacher at independent schools in Johannesburg. Her interest in the field of history education and how we deal with South Africa’s difficult past as history teachers, was sparked by teaching at a non-racial school, St Barnabas College, in Johannesburg, prior to the shift to democracy in 1994. As a white woman, who lectured history methodology at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Education, this interest developed in the university’s setting post 2000, especially as the barriers of the past were so evident in the university’s lecture room. Given her commitment to social justice, this situation did not go unchallenged. It led to her embarking on a doctorate that aimed to develop a pedagogy to facilitate reconciliation, based on oral history, as a possible way to assist with decolonising history in the South African context. She has presented her research at local and international conferences as well as published in local journals. When this chapter was written, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Institute of Theology and Religion, University of South Africa (UNISA).
Nancy Rushohora
is a postdoctoral researcher of Studies in Historical Trauma and Transformation at Stellenbosch University. She received her PhD from the University of Pretoria with a thesis entitled “An archaeological identity of the Majimaji: Towards a historical archaeology of resistance to German colonization in Tanzania”. Her research focuses on the heritage, landscape and memory of the Majimaji War. Through her involvement in the production of a documentary film recording the voices of the victims’ descendants, she is currently engaged in the return of human remains taken to Germany during the Majimaji violence. This documentary will be used both in support of repatriation demands and as a teaching aid about the Majimaji violence in Tanzania.
Johan Wassermann
is a professor of history education at the University of Pretoria where he is also Head of Department of Humanities Education. He is the co-founder and co-director of the African Association for History Education (AHE-Afrika). His research interests include youth and history, life histories, history textbooks, teaching controversial issues in post-conflict Africa, and minorities and the minoritised in colonial Natal. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles and chapters dealing with both history and history education.
Robin Whitburn
is a lecturer in history education at the University College London’s Institute of Education. He is a Fellow of the Historical Association in the United Kingdom and has spoken at national and international conferences in North America, China, South Africa and Europe. Robin has 30 years’ experience of teaching at London high schools in a range of roles, including those of Curriculum Deputy Headteacher and Advanced Skills Teacher in History. He and Abdul Mohamud founded Justice to History, an organisation whose aim is to help teachers and students explore relevant, and often neglected, diverse histories.