Towards a Decolonized Assessment for History Teaching and Learning in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The 2015–2016 student protests in post-apartheid South Africa, dubbed the #MustFall protests, reignited calls for the decolonization/transformation/Africanization of the country’s education, especially the discipline of history. This is because part of the students’ critique of postcolonial education in South Africa, was its monolithic epistemic nature and alienating pedagogic cultures. Hence, much of the decolonial scholarship produced since then has been largely focused on how we can go about decolonizing pedagogy and content knowledge that inform history teaching and learning. Assessment as a crucial part of the teaching and learning of history has been barely covered. Therefore, using theories of assessment, theories of decolonization, and the enactment of Maton’s (2014) Epistemic-Pedagogic Device, we intend to contribute to the emergent literature that explores how assessment for history teaching and learning can be decolonized at the level of conceptualization, recontextualization, and implementation. We are aware that assessment cannot easily be detached from the content-knowledge, pedagogy, teaching, and learning resources, as well as teacher-learner relationships that shape any particular educational moment. So, we argue that history teaching and learning as the practice of freedom (in the Hooksian sense) should also acknowledge other different forms of doing assessment. This requires the urgent curation of other ways of doing assessment unmoored to racial capitalism, coloniality, and their contemporary modalities.