The teaching of (African) History through political-curricular options: A multiple case study emerging from the PALOP countries

ABSTRACT

This multiple case study aims to show how the official curriculum documents of two Portuguese-speaking African countries (PALOP) frame the teaching of History (of Africa). A certain dimension of the educational reality in Angola and Cape Verde was explored. These countries were selected because they had access to History curricula for different levels of education on the internet and because of the authors' prior knowledge of them. Without interpreting the results as being generalizable to other national contexts, the data collected allows us to make considerations about specific privileged content, historical thinking skills that may be enhanced by the teaching of the History of Africa outlined, the articulation between this broader perspective and local or national history and, also, the guidelines that refer to the citizen and identity formation of young students. This research reveals differences between the two countries, in terms of the knowledge selected and the educational goals pursued, corroborating the relevance of contextualized official documents, but also similarities related to the intention of countering the Eurocentric view that tends to prevail when telling the History of Humanity.

Keywords:
curriculum documents; History of Africa; historical learning