ChatGPT in the history classroom – a position paper of a township school teacher

Abstract

This paper focuses on my thoughts on ChatGPT and history teaching at the secondary school level. I am a history  teacher in a township school in Pimville, Soweto. The learners in the school come from severely disadvantaged  backgrounds, mainly from nearby communities such as Kliptown, Freedom Park, and Eldorado Park. Because of the  home language offered in the school where I work, we have learners who travel from as far as Vlakfontein and Lawley,  more than 30 kilometres from the school. Most of the places mentioned above are peri-urban areas, and many of the  learners are foreign nationals from Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. In light of the above, there are numerous  contextual factors, mostly social and economic, that impact on the use of artificial intelligence (AI). When one looks at  the initial stages of the implementation of crude AI, I would argue that the Department of Basic Education did not have  history as a subject in mind when they started their initiatives around the digitisation of curriculum content. The focus was primarily on mathematics and physical science because of the high failure rate and shortage of skills in these fields.  So, the initial phase of the implementation of an AI policy was focused on applications (apps) that would help through  scaffolding, moving from the known into the unknown. Many of those apps contained videos of different topics being explained. As these ideas progressed, the issue of smartboards was introduced to try and ease the teachers’ burden. I  cannot fault the thinking, but the problem was that many of us saw the smartboard initiative as something that, for a  large part, was the shifting of the burden of township teachers “from paper to the screen”. This is because,  conceptually, the idea of digitising teaching needs to include open-source educational websites and applications where  the teacher can set tasks and tests.