Selected teachers' pedagogical content knowledge of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans (TTEA)

Abstract

This paper presents teachers as the main source of secondary school students' content knowledge of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans (TTEA). It investigates what content knowledge teachers in select parts of the Atlantic world communicate to students; what informs the approaches they employ in their teaching; and how students respond to this knowledge at the affective level. The findings serve as a contribution to teachers' professional development for teaching the TTEA at a time when international attention is increasingly focused on the TTEA and its legacies. A thematic approach is used to discuss the historiography of the TTEA. Three geographic sites: the Americas/Caribbean, Africa, and Europe, provide the broad context of the study on which the paper is based. The UNESCO Slave Route Project and Transatlantic Slave Trade (TST) Education Project serve as its programmatic background. The conceptual framework for the interpretation of the findings relies heavily on Shulman's (1987) concept of pedagogical content knowledge, its emotional dimension as elaborated upon by Jerry Rosiek (2003) and Nate McCaughtry (2004); concepts of human development as proposed by the UNESCO International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, and Lorrie Shepard's (2000) reformed vision of the curriculum