Creating complex learning intentions?

Many schools have been doing "AtoL" which has involved teachers writing "Learning Intentions" and "Success Criteria" on the board every period for students to see so they understand what they are actually meant to be learning. When I first heard about these I cringed because it seemed an incredibly prescribed way of framing teaching and what might happen in a lesson. Prescribing learning intentions seemed to be true blue behaviourism all over again (if it actually ever left us).They seemed to offer no sense of 'play' or to use complexity jargon they did not allow the learning to be on "the edge of chaos" - just enough structure to allow for new possibility and creativity, and not too much to kill it. But do learning intentions have to be like this?

Milligan and Wood (2009, Journal of Curriculum Studies) have talked about the need to think of conceptual understandings, and by association learning intentions as "transition points" rather than end points. This is very close, if not identical, to the complexity idea of "liberating constraints". A liberating constraint is where enough boundaries are in place in order for something to begin its essential unfolding - or, as mentioned above, the so-called edge of chaos. LIs need to be "localities for exploration" rather than "unyielding progress towards imposed goals" (Brent Davis, 1996).

Writing learning intentions from a complexity thinking perspective relies, then, on the teacher having a theory of learning that is highly responsive to the contingencies of real classrooms and real students and a teacher who is always looking for ways to open up spaces for consideration of new possibilities. To construct learning. I like the metaphor of a conversation to describe teaching when a conversation is defined as a "reciprocal engagement in a topic of mutual concern" (Davis, 1996). So, what might a complex learning intention designed to foster conversation actually look like? Here is an example of what one wouldn't look like from a recent activity I ran in my classroom. Technically proficient, in terms of standard social studies pedagogy reasonably sophisticated, but at the end of the day a pretty static truism. Students know this. And if they didn't, I think it would take only a few examples to explain it to them.

I don't really know what a complex learning intention would look like but here are some key questions I have at the moment:

• Would it be written on the board?
• How closely should it relate to the nature of the discipline?
• Should it be controversial/contested?
• To what extent should it be developed with students?

If we don't want to turn learning intentions into static end points which serve the interests only of a managerial, technocratic and highly bureaucratic system, rather the real young people in our classrooms, we teachers need to think quite carefully about these questions.

Some issues with integrating around Natural Disasters

We have just finished our second attempt at an integrated unit which I was full of hope for. It didn’t work in quite the way I had anticipated but as a learning exercise it was very useful. All core teachers seemed to see how we could integrate with the theme of natural disasters. However, I had Dewey (1910) ringing in my ears when he said:

“Instruction in subject matter that does not fit into any problem already stirring in the student’s own experience, or that is not presented in such a way as to arouse a problem, is worse than useless for intellectual purposes”.

Our first hurdle to overcome was that ‘natural disasters’ was not a theme or topic that emerged from stimulus material and interaction between students and teachers; we had imposed the topic so if it was going to work I was going to have to present it in a way that “aroused a problem” in the minds of students. What we had planned looked as if it was going to mostly be what the diagram refers to as a multidisciplinary model of integration. I’ll explain how we could have changed that shortly but first a very quick overview of the unit.

The learning intention for the unit was based on a level 5 AO but tailored to some reading I had done in the last school holidays on disaster studies. It was “we are learning that natural disasters are made worse through social, economic and political conditions”. Disasters studies academics define two broad approaches to the causes of disasters although the one in the “causes of natural disasters” diagram used three. As far as learning about society and how it functions is concerned, the radical/structural approach is the most interesting and critical one and in all my diagnostic assessment not one that students automatically consider. In fact, at first they actively resisted it. To look at events which disrupt society from a radical/structural perspective requires an orientation to the world that is different from all mainstream messages from media and what is usually considered commonsensical. It proved very hard to show students the crucial difference between a natural hazard and a natural disaster, a natural hazard being a potential threat and a disaster when that threat affects society in catastrophic ways. Conveniently there was a huge earthquake in Fiordland at the time of the unit that had very little effect on society. I used this as an example to explain that had this same event affected Wellington, for example, it would have been a disaster (the NZ geography syllabus apparently uses different words to differentiate between hazards and disasters, and “disaster” is not a word they use at all. However, actual geographers and anthropologists use words such as hazard, risk and disaster).

Anyway, “mother nature” is usually the reason given for natural disasters and they are also usually considered politically neutral because extreme natural events obviously don’t differentiate according to age, sex, class, ethnicity etc… I wanted students to be able to explain at the end of the unit, why it is that some people are more vulnerable than others to events such as floods, hurricanes and earthquakes. This is important, of course, because although we can’t stop most natural hazards we can ask questions about why some people are more vulnerable than others (and often times we can even prevent natural hazards and disasters themselves – such as when corporations deforest areas making people - usually poor, rarely white - vulnerable to landslides as took place in Taiwan towards the end of the unit).

What happened during the unit was that we four teachers, when it worked, used the theme to frame what we were probably already intending to do. The whole project fitted fairly squarely within what Bean calls the “multidisciplinary” paradigm and hence – didn’t engage students to the extent they could have been. Part of the problem, I think, is that what I was teaching them in social studies was some quite good ideas about how society works – but it didn’t succeed in implicating students in society as active citizens and therefore demanding some kind of response. The “ideas about society” aspect of social studies has to come after something else, after some kind of social action which students genuinely perceive as a problem worth exploring and perhaps solving. This is where place-based projects and action-oriented techniques aimed at including and empowering youth are essential for the social studies teacher.

Student centered education

This week has been one of those when you really wonder WHAT the heck social studies is, and how on earth it is possible to teach it without a Masters degree in every social science discipline and a PhD specialising in about 5 areas of educational theory. The "Shifting the Focus - the consequences of now" topic has fallen by the wayside a bit. I couldn't help but feel that all the concerns and questions the students had given me were firstly, too many to form a coherent course of learning, and secondly, not all were very related to student's lives. Finally one student asked: "if New Zealand went to war, would we have to fight?". This was the first question that really seemed to have some genuine meaning behind it so I am in the process of developing a unit from the bottom up based on this question, (using the social inquiry model) which will lend itself to a future focused topic as well as a conflict topic, both of which James Beane recommends as being consistently successful for a student centered, integrative curriculum. Students gave me some great material to work with after a series of provocative questions I threw at them based on this question. Now it is a matter of turning this into a sustained and meaningful unit. Hopefully it gets easier and more manageable because only one of the two year 10 classes asked this question! The other class decided that all the things we had brainstormed about the future were simply too depressing and they wanted to do something 'happier'. This wasn't quite the same cue as the NZ draft question but I have taken the fact that New Zealand was the first country to enfranchise women as a start and I will try and get them to organise a rally - 1 pro suffrage and one anti suffrage, based on the information and evidence I give them. Then we'll have a period looking at women's changing role over the 20th century and how they are 'represented' in the 21st century. After that, I'm not too sure. Perhaps New Zealand's nuclear role. It isn't quite gelling though. And again, the time it takes to put together.... My main concern though is that integration has gone out the window. I guess you don't always need it and the reality is that there are only so many hours in the day to meet and think with other teachers.

The main problem with my approach this term has been the lack of stimulus material. Had I had some better stuff before asking them the question about their concerns and questions of the future, something coherent could have come from it and they would have taken more ownership of the topic's title. As a complexiy theorist would say, I didn't create enough internal redundancy, there was no common learning experience that we could all relate to and learn from together. Perhaps that way both classes would be on the same page and I wouldn't need to be doing completely different units with them!!

Assessing the AOs "authentically"

In the lead up to students completing their exhibition I had been working with the Level 5 AO "understanding how economic decisions impact on people, communities and nations". However, the way to check if students understand a concept is if they demonstrate the use of it in a non-contrived way. But if in an integrated programme 4 teachers all tell students that their exhibition displays have to involve the demonstration of concepts set out at the outset, it is sure to kill any creativity through too much structure. As a complexity theorist would say, the constraints would be far from enabling.

So instead my students did what they wanted to do for their displays and I turned the AO into a question for them to answer in a test situation. Very few, understandably, actually bought into it. The exhibition diplays were not done with any particular attention to their social significance, or backgrounding in depth and detail the social issue, or any real consideration of values and perspectives. And as for involving a social action, I have written about that else where. So to summarise, the problem is that students didn't have a clear understanding of what we do in social studies education, which meant they were not able in any systematic way to strive towards them. And although they were all familiar with the Achievement Objective I was teaching them, the assessment of it was contrived and almost none used their exhibition to demonstrate conceptual knowledge of it.

Here are some solutions to the problem as I see it at the moment:

• Negotiate the theme with students as I have written about in the previous blog entry and based on this, decide which AO and conceptual understanding fits best to what emerges.

This turns some fairly traditional notions of planning on their head though. "Topics" wouldn't be known until the teaching had started, although the teacher would need a general idea about what might interest them to get the ideas flowing. And much of the planning such as the social studies inquiry template would need to be tailing the teaching. At the end this could be filed away as a record of what worked in one instance and could work in another instance with another teacher, but probably not without some considerable adaptation. Teaching and learning would have to be emergent from the specific conditions and interactions of the moment. We would have to be very well prepared for what arises, not well planned for what we predict.

• Tell students that the exhibition (or other performance opportunity) is a place for them to demonstrate an understanding of the concept under study. But if the concept focused on during the class time leading up to the performance opportunity really doesn't fit with their interest, they could discuss with the teacher another AO and conceptual understanding to demonstrate.

There is nothing in the curriculum document that says all the AOs must be taught, much less that they must be taught sequentially, or at the same time to everybody. Schools would need to have a system whereby teachers could keep a track of what has been taught and when. ERO will probably struggle with this level of complexity but there is no reason why anyone else should.

• Discuss with, or tell students which aspect of the social studies inquiry rubric (see image and previous blog) they will need to focus on for their exhibition or learning performance.

It would be great if towards the end of a two year teaching cycle and when students are very familiar with what we do in social studies, they could choose what aspect they wanted to be assessed on. Otherwise I think they use the key concept derived from the AO studied in class or personalised for them to "do" one of the aims as per the rubric. Another layer of assessment rubric will be too cumbersome. And if this doesn't happen, there should be numerous opportunities in social studies class time for students to demonstrate their conceptual understanding. Perhaps some more thinking is required here. The last thing students need is multiple layers of assessment rubrics! But in an integrated approach it is more than possible for me to assess anything they choose to learn about and perform for others for social studies, as long as what they do is related to some kind of real world issue.

Shifting the focus - the consequences of now

I tried an experiment in student-centered planning for a new integrated unit last week with some success. Floundering around at the end of last term with class discussions, provocative questions, free writing, watching and critiquing the film "The Pursuit of Happyness" had not led me to anything solid for this term's unit that we could integrate. So it was back to the books over the holidays to find some answers and James A Beane, or at least an article in a book he edited came to the rescue, as did a meeting with a Victoria University lecturer before school started.

Beane writes that there are some themes that are consistently successful in their ability to interest young people and one of those was "Living in the Future". This was exactly what I needed because it seemed to pull a few of the ideas students had raised together. But it was still not quite right.

This is where an author in Democratic Schools, edited by Beane and Apple came in handy. She suggested asking students to silently write their response to the question "What questions or concerns do you have for the future for you personally and the world generally?" Students then were put into groups and told to share and write down any similar concerns on a piece of paper. They then connected up any self and world concerns or questions that they thought were related some how. We then put these up on the board and they had to decide on a theme based upon them. They came up with two, shifting the focus and the consequences of now and after a vote couldn't decide so we put them together. The next step will be for students to brainstorm any activities they want to do that will relate to this theme and for the teachers to do this as well. I want to look at Utopias and dystopias as well as some best case scenarios and worst case scenarios. It will be fun to make a timecapsule for when students leave school but also one to be opened in 2045, when they celebrate their 50th birthday.

I'm not up to this step though, and I even wonder if it wouldn't be worth getting them to make a collage as a title page with some magazines with their interpretation of the theme before we do that. In the blog entry about the exhibition there is a picture of a person looking at the globe and I was worried that for this assignment there had been too much observing and not enough participating. I asked showed students this image and asked them if thy could think of one that would serve as one to demonstrate the participating aspect. This proved too hard. The next period I found three examples from the net on the Education for Enterprise and Education for Sustainability websites. We watched two videos of a student radio station, a student magazine that had involved the community and a project to get some water tanks installed into a secondary school. The students then had to create, for want of a better word, a "body static image" of participation in the world with someone to explain it to the class. Then they did three minutes silent writing on the question "what is social studies". I think a better question might be "what do we do in social studies" but we'll see. If students regularly answered this question it would be a great way to check your teaching. The more sophisticated the answers the better the teaching is going. Of course it depends on a deep or at least continuing knowledge of the aims of social studies education. In that regard I have been fortunate enough to benefit from an assessment schedule our department is using created by Andrea Milligan, a Victoria University lecturer which is in the image. It is based on the different aspects of the Social Studies Inquiry booklet and planning rubric put out by the Ministry of Education. It will be interesting so see whether or not student's suggestions for activities to do and learn about are affected by the lesson described previously and the different aspects of the , marking schedule, essentially and rubric explaining what the purpose of social studies is and which they now all have glued into their books.

Opening night

Well the students really pulled it off. Over the course of the evening if you include the students, parents, teachers, other invited people and little brothers and sisters there would have easily been 100 people there. Out of 58 students there were 4 who didn't produce anything although two of those were due to sickness and their display would have been great. The diversity of displays was very impressive. Cannibalism, fast food and advertising, religion, histories of food and food related issues, wild foods, battery hens, food chains, food and literature...But I still think next time we could do even better and our team has some ideas about what we can try. If all displays had started from a common, genuinely important question the whole exhibition would have been the workings of a learning collective. Instead we had lots of mini collectives. And the social action component which is so important to social studies and education in general wasn't quite there. The picture on the right serves as a good metaphor for much of education. We look at the world, we don't participate in it. But in order to participate in it well, we can't not engage in long and careful observation. The two go hand in hand and the best education can negotiate the role of observer and actor. Our exhibition informed the public which is a great start. There were a couple of petitions beside the displays and the whole exhibition made $60 in donations for an orphanage the school supports and is sending some senior students to in the holidays.

I also realise how lucky we are at my school. A teacher or teachers who can do what we did tonight at a school like the low decile, low literacy, low parent engagement one I used to work in are the really clever ones. It is easy to forget them in the new curriculum exuberance.

My schooling and the KC's

Thinking back over 5 years of schooling (four in New Zealand and 1 in Germany) it seems strange that I remember so little. It wasn't that long ago either. It was only last year I could finally say I was a decade older than my oldest students. What I do remember is almost exclusively project based work where there was an element of choice and creativity. This is all I can remember clearly from my schooling:

• A 6th form English project on World War 1 poetry
• A 6th form biographical speech of a family member
• A 6th form Chemistry project where we tested the chlorine levels in local swimming pools
• A 5th form speech where I talked about my childhood hero, Tintin and the history behind the stories and author.
• A 5th form "shaping activity" based on a futuristic book about a segregated society
• My 5th form workshop technology projects
• A 4th form story board about the life of the Mayans
• A 4th form book we read called Winter of Fire by Sheryll Jordan, also about themes of oppression and segregation.
• A standard 3 project on chocolate
  

And that is it. Each activity I really enjoyed and I want to write about a couple of them which I could have enjoyed a whole lot more had my school had a programme of curriculum integration and a sophisticated understanding of the key competencies (not that anyone was talking about these between 1994-1998). I should also add that all of these are essentially individual projects. Not once did I ever feel a part of a collective decision-making body working on a project of any real life significance. This is not to blame my teachers. On reflection, I was extremely lucky with almost all of them. But I don't think it would have taken a herculean effort to have taken what individual teachers were doing in isolation, put it together, and for some pretty incredible and unpredictable learning occasions to have emerged.

The first English project on my list involved us reading some World War 1 poetry. I can't remember what we did in class time but Wilfred Owen's words certainly captured my attention. For the project we had to do I photocopied a whole lot of WW1 images of death and destruction and glued them on to a piece of A2. At the time I was very interested in photography so I went to the local WWII gun emplacements and did a self portrait of me lying dead with the concrete backdrop and developed the photo in my darkroom (yes, this was an anachronism now that I think about it). This photo was enlarged and glued onto the middle of the A2 piece of paper. A line from Owen's poem which I think was "The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori" was glued over all this and coloured in red. Anyway, the teacher liked it so much she bought it from me! It was only a couple of years ago I met her again and she still has it. So, how could a programme of curriculum integration and an understanding of the key competencies have made this even better?

If this had been a block course of a term, or at minimum a "three day episode" like Alfreston College,the opportunities would have been significantly better for me. Imagine if the English teacher did what she did. The history teacher taught us all about the horrors of WW1 and reasons for this war but also the changing nature of war in general. Somebody qualified, perhaps the English and History teachers could have both talked to us about contemporary issues of conflict (the Rwandan massacre had occurred only 3 years earlier and the Bosnian massacre would happen the year after) and perhaps got a guest speaker in. Then the English and History and Art teachers could have got together to organise a community hall to put on an Art exhibition about "the nature of war". The poster I made would have fit in here perfectly. The teachers would have had to really make us see why the nature of war is important to know about and we couod have been required to do some good research before producing a piece of art.

But I wonder if this would have been enough considering my last blog entry on our year 10 food exhibition. We could also have taken a stand on a conflict, and petitioned the government or United Nations. Perhaps that kind of thing would be even easier to do today with our technology. I think I would have remembered a lot more had something like this occurred.

The other instance of learning I remember was the chemistry project involving the collection of chlorine from different swimming pools. If we are to take the KC "participating and contributing" and really apply it to education the biggest question I have for this project is "so what?!". Who cares about the chlorine levels in swimming pools? It was "interactive" education for its own sake. Recently I have really started to notice the complete arcane nature of much of what goes on in schools. Which is a shame because all you need to do is connect a few subjects and philosophies together for some amazing things to occur. Even the arcane stuff can end up having considerable importance. If we were interested in water perhaps we should have been doing an integrated unit on water and looking at the quality of water ways and the social, historical and economic reasons for their degradation. Chemistry theory for chemistry's sake was a complete waste of my time. What's scary, is that I am probably wasting the time of a lot of my students. And time is short. There are too many real world problems, especially ecological ones that need the wisdom of our disciplines. Instead we waste time learning in reductionist, behaviourist, disconnected, and worst of all, dehumanising ways about nothing that really matters on its own.

Year 10 food exhibition

Later this week our year 10 students are putting on their exhibition. Most have some good ideas and most have worked really hard on it. I am worried that we have let them down a bit though. The exhibition isn't based on any kind of real world problem. Individual displays might be but the exhibition isn't really encouraging a "community of learners" across the whole class. The name of the exhibition is "Eat me! The controversy of food" which the students came up with. They have had to define an area using the context of food and develop some questions which their display answers, and which fits into the title of the exhibition. But it will mostly be a collection of individual or group displays rather than a collective attempt to try and inform visitors about a genuine real life problem.

This came to my attention with one particular student who chose to do religion and food. She has done some fantastic research on three world religions and shown what their beliefs are about certain foods. But there was a real element of So What? With her topic. She said that what seemed to pull all of them together was that the reason they didn't eat certain foods was because of beliefs of compassion and mutual respect. Taking this idea we talked about the heading for her display being "Is religion all bad?" laid over a whole bunch of photographs of religious conflict. She will have an opening statement explaining that in fact religions also promote peace and her way of doing that will be through their beliefs about food.

My worry is that we have let her and others down a bit. The "food" part is in one sense too restricting and in another sense allowing too many tangent exhibition displays that are not about real world issues. It is that old complexity thinking concept of "enabling constraints" again. We didn't quite hit it. What we need to do next time is decide from the beginning what the real world question is. Teachers use their subjects as vehicles for exploring, developing, engaging with that question some more. Then students brainnstorm what action they could take to solve that problem at a level manageable to them. The exhibition, then, is not the purpose or final product of the unit. It is a by product, an opportuinty for students to celebrate and share with their parents about their learning and how they attempted to solve a piece of the problem. This attempt to solve the problem is the more important part. That is when they are Participating and Contributing as the key competencies call for.

Anyway, I'm sure they will come up with something great on Thursday, notwithstanding the limitations I am afraid we have imposed on them. But next time it will be even better.

Integrated "food" project Week 5

It is now week 5 of term 1 and we have started the inquiry part of the food project. So far all 4 core teachers have used food as a common theme and taught their curriculum objectives from this context. I chose the level 5 social studies AO "Understand how economic decisions affect people, communities and nations". It is a great AO with lots of scope for problematizing the context of "food". The focus has mainly been on the decision to industrialise our food supply and the consequent effects. So we have looked at the relationship between the oil economy and oil products such as fertiliser on agriculture and watched the 30min doco "The power of community: How Cuba survived peak oil". This got them thinking a bit and we did a creative writing exercise just before watching the doco which I'll write about sometime. We have also looked at Free Trade and the Global Food Crisis and have touched on concepts like globalisation. Not the best concept to "touch on" really. I can't help thinking it is a concept that would make a great simulation game similar to Michael Wersch's example if you had the knowledge.

I started using the social studies social enquiry booklet and I must go back to it. The idea was to find out what they knew and give them some new information which hopefully they would find interesting and which they might build an inquiry around. A good idea in theory but the risk is that up until they actually start the inquiry, the teaching reverts to the banking metaphor of education. Closer attention to the social studies social enquiry model may help prevent this. It hasn't been too bad but I am very glad they can finally start their community exhibition display, which many have been jumping out of their skins to do. Their ideas are incredibly diverse and interesting but they find it very hard to turn an "issue" into a manageable research project.

Next week we will try and take them to Te Papa to critically appraise what is in an exhibition and what makes it successful. Then they can start to think more carefully about their display. The exhibition side of things is going to be very interesting. They have had to come up with a title of the exhibition which is still to be finalised and ideally all displays will reflect that title. Meanwhile, we have timetabled the next 2 weeks a bit differently. They have about 7 hours a week to work on their inquiry and I have 1 social studies period week to do whatever: keep teaching my AO, do some skills-based stuff that crops up from their research, or anything else I can think of. Despite "losing" three periods a week, it doesn't matter. They are utilising all different aspects of the key competencies. Having said this though, I don't see why all their displays shouldn't have a social studies component. Is it worth doing something in public education that isn't socially relevant and involves students participating as critically minded citizens? I think that is why schools exist. If a student has an obsession with butterflies, great. Read about them at home and develop a hobby. If students are to work together as a "community of learners", the butterflies need a social reason to be studied.

Interpreting primary sources

As an entry into the year 11 course on the Israel/Palestine conflict I have started with a whole lot of primary sources generated around and during the recent invasion/assault/slaughter/crisis of Gaza (depends which news agency you look at) and have asked students to interpret them to write 'a short history of the 'assault...' on Gaza'. The intention is to show that all historical narratives are based on the interpretations of primary sources and open to constant reevaluation. But also to teach them how history is an evidenced-based subject; if you are going to make a claim, have a good reason to make it. The other intention, of course, is to show students how you can't really understand this event without a much broader knowledge of Middle East history. I think I started with far too many sources which bamboozled a few of them, but there were some excellent discussions about what 'historical truth' is, and how to deal with conflicting sources. However, had I done this again I would:

• Have fewer sources - it was too overwhelming for some to select from a multitude of maps, photographs, graphs, newspaper clippings, internet printouts etc...
• Break down the task requirement more. The first thing they should have done is to decide, based on the sources, what to call their short history (was it a slaughter? Crisis? Assault? Crime? Offensive? Attack?) and to give reasons for this. It would have been a nice little exercise to hand in.
• Be more explicit early on with the difference between long term and short term causes. Perhaps have had a few long term causes in their primary source pack.

The other thing which I did too late was to show them what a "history" is. Sam Wineberg in "Historical Thinking and other unnatural acts" quotes someone who writes that all histories have a motive, actions and effects. Today we brainstormed what they had found from the sources and related this to these three ideas which gave them a reasonable framework with which to do their first piece of writing.

Pretty soon they are starting their research assignments where they have to show how history is important to the present. I am planning on a couple of periods per week for 3-4 weeks to be in the library with the other two periods carrying on with the long term causes of the Israel/Palestine conflict. It will be interesting to see whether this works without confusing them too much. I am hoping that together we can learn how an historical understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict is essential to understand the present situation which will at the same time provide a model for their own research. Some have some excellent ideas which I will write about once they have been firmed up. One thing that has become clearer to me than it has in the past, is that research, done well, takes a lot of time. They need time to decide on a topic, read around it, develop some research questions, do the research, take notes, possibly rejig a question, write up a draft, have it peer edited, write the final copy and have it published in an authentic manner as possible. Weeks of hard learning!

The key competencies and teaching history

Having spent a year experimenting with the new curriculum and integrating the four core junior subjects with 3 other teachers in 2008 it has been interesting to see how that thinking has affected the way I approach the senior subjects. I have completely overhauled year 11 history, following Rosemary Hipkin’s advice to use the key competencies as lenses on the senior subjects to ‘see what happens’.

It was awkward reading Keith Barton and Linda Levstik’s book “Teaching History for the Common Good” over summer for two reasons. First, in four years as a history teacher it was the first book on teaching history I had picked up and second, because their description of the reasons for teaching history that plagues many (most?) history classrooms felt very familiar. The reasons they identified were: (i) maintain control, (ii) cover the curriculum. Below is what I have written for students to expect in the first term as a response to this situation:

Behind the headlines – using the past to make sense of current events

One of the most important reasons for studying history is the perspective that historical knowledge can bring to current events. Without understanding the historical roots of, for example, the Israeli offensive on Gaza in January 2009, it is very difficult to participate in reasoned discussion about what should be done or how nations, organizations and individuals should act. The “Behind the headlines” assignment gives you the opportunity to select and research any current event you care about and research how an historical understanding of this problem will better enable you and other young people to understand it. The research you do will be published in a combined year 11 history magazine for students at school. The exact nature of this publication will be negotiated between the two history classes and could involve multi media such as pod casts or video clips uploaded to YouTube with the link in the publication. To get the ball rolling this unit will start by all of us looking at what problems of world significance are present in the Middle East, most significantly, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. We will spend some time looking at how historical knowledge of this issue is essential for understanding before you can choose your own line of inquiry for the class newspaper.

Having spent a lesson with the students on what they know I have been surprised at what some students don’t know about the Israel/Palestine conflict. Not so much about the conflict in general, but about the Israeli invasion of Gaza in January. Perhaps I should be pleased that they weren’t paying much interest to the television network news, which barely counts as news, and I hadn’t expected them to be trawling through Israeli and other international newspaper websites, blogs and opinion pieces, or following the terrifyingly live Twitter updates on Al Jazeera’s website, but the experience highlighted how important my approach for term one is, assuming it works. It is essential to understand the historical context of current issues if we are to understand and take part in intelligent conversation, or respond in more active, participatory and democratic ways. I will just need to spend more time than I thought on teaching the actual current issues before the history than I thought. Ronald Wright, historian and author of "What is America: A short history of the New World Order" captures the importance of this perfectly:

"History is the best guide we have for threading our way through the frenetic video game of current events. As the game speeds up, with runaway technological and social change, the great risk is that both the old and the young become isolated, in different ways, by the parochialism of the present: one generation gets marooned, the next swept along without a ship's log or rudder." (p.14).

As a part of this assignment I also want to bring in some guest speakers, and my ideas had been to get in some interesting, local and opinionated people to talk and rark the students up a bit before we deconstruct the validity of their ideas. I met with a local rabbi for advice on how to approach this topic, and it was gently pointed out to me that it would be better to start with the middle ground with guest speakers, or at the very least have real Palestinians and Israelis talk rather than the plenty of people available with their own opinions, valid or otherwise. Focusing on the extremes, you teach students that the issue is about extremes (irreconcilable ones at that) and that history is black and white and essentially simple. This, of course, is anathema to the discipline of history let alone the understanding needed for democratic participation. History is nuanced, contextual, objective, and highly complex; none of which says you can’t take an ethical stance on an issue. Being “moderate” doesn’t mean you can't totally deplore the Israeli Defence Force's killing of 100s of civilian children and their parents in Gaza. The quote that stood out the most from Barton and Levstik’s book is “the ultimate purpose of history education, in our view, is to enable students to take action in the present”. So, a focus on understanding current events from an historical perspective, the product of which will be peer reviewed articles published together for other students is my initial response to the key competencies of Thinking, Using language, symbols, and texts, Managing self, Relating to others and Participating and contributing. It is scary but kind of exciting to start using history for real issues other than some nostalgic, humanistic idea that reading history is good for the soul - or instead a bureaucratic-technocratic purpose that you maintain control and have them pass the exam so students can cash the knowledge in for credits and later contribute to the economy. As Neil Postman says, such a purpose for education “mocks ones humanity” and should be a by-product, not a reason for education.