The Use of Film as a Pedagogical Tool to Enhance Historical Consciousness in South African Postgraduate Students

Given the evolving multisensory educational preferences of students of the contemporary digital age, History educationalists must endeavour to revolutionise their pedagogical tools. Accordingly, this study focuses on how the 2018 film, Black Panther, was used as a pedagogical tool to enhance historical consciousness among postgraduate students. The study included 32 honours students majoring in History Education at a South African HEI. To optimise the students’ preference for multimodal resources, this study entailed having them critically conduct a film study methodology of seven video trailers of the film, Black Panther. This study adopts postcoloniality as the theoretical framework, which is an emancipatory theory that encourages societies from historically colonised countries, such as the sample students involved in this study, to draw upon their personal experiences and generate their own ideas, consequently resulting in an enhanced historical consciousness. The study revealed that active engagement with the film resulted in multifarious views of the underlying significations and developing a postcolonial Africanised consciousness. The incongruous perspectives regarding the film, including Africa’s social, economic, and political cultural determinants, elicited class debates around the aforementioned pertinent issues in Africa’s past and present, indicating the active development of African consciousness.