Apocalypse Theories Post 10

Social studies is all about the critical understanding of relevant social issues. Social studies units about these issues should be underpinned by a "conceptual understanding" or a "big idea" about society. Students used newspaper clippings to come up with the overall theme of "Apocalypse Theories" which meant that they were engaged from the beginning which was great. But it took weeks of me reading and researching and a social sciences faculty meeting to develop a conceptual understanding that would have better tied everyone's exhibits together. As a faculty the social sciences teachers came up with "How societies use apocalyptic thinking helps us to understand their cultural values". Had I been thinking along these lines earlier we could have looked at a real social issue, such as the way some fundamentalist Christians require certain conditions in Israel to take place before the Apocalypse and Second coming and the potential consequences for Palestinians of this kind of support. In depth exploration of this sort of solid, real-world issue could have served as the vehicle for the conceptual understanding above.

Students have learnt a lot about inquiry but next time I will work on developing a more focused social issue at the heart of the unit, instead of fairly traditional social studies lessons on, for example, the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. This way, even if students aren't successful with coming up with a great exhibition display, at least I can still be sure they have developed their conceptual understanding of an important social issue. Next year it will be good to exhibit students' learning on a website instead of an open evening for parents. They could advertise a launch date, and have a goal of the number of hits to the site.

Apocalypse Theories Post 9

It has been a long time since the last post and this Thursday is the big day. Students have been working pretty hard and it has been interesting to see which groups have survived and which haven't; also which ones have used presentation to delay in-depth research. I can totally relate to them doing this, but in the end an inquiry has to result in a high quality product.

Inquiry is a disposition, an attitude towards knowledge and I think that everyone, even if what they produced is not that complex, will be able to do some really good critical reflection on themselves after the exhibition. Here is a quote that I have often thought of for this inquiry:

"A phenomenon will persist until the effort required to maintain it exceeds the effort required to revise it" (Davis, Luce and Sumara, p.108)

This is an idea central to constructivism. I have especially noticed this with students' note-taking. I have given workshops on how to do this and explained that if their research is to be complex they will have needed to read and noted potentially useful information from many sources, as they search and revise their inquiry question and the only realistic way to do this is to take good notes. Very few students actually believe me. If this quote is to be taken seriously the teacher's job is to create the conditions whereby the effort to maintain this anti-note-taking mindset is too much. Perhaps for some of them this assignment has helped them get to that place, but this is the only way students learn. It has been interesting to observe students continually updating and "construing" (the better translation from the French word construct") their understandings of the world. It took one student 15 weeks to admit he couldn't really do research. That is a valuable 15 weeks if you ask me. Some people never arrive at that conclusion. If they do it before year 11 more's the better.

The student's last inquiry was done with booklets with 6 inquiry steps. This was a useful exercise in many ways and the language of the steps has also helped students with this inquiry. But if students can only do inquiry if we provide them with booklets they haven't actually learnt anything significant. The school's quided inquiry process is for many students very useful but if they don't learn that inquiry is an attitude, an orientation towards knowledge, they haven't learnt anything significant at all.

Many students I think are starting to realise this; as the quote suggests about learning, they are realizing that their preconceived ideas about "research" don't really work and they could do with updating. That has probably been the highlight of this whole exercise. Piaget was on to it.

If we were to do it again I would need to think how I could better incorporate a central idea about society. I have struggled to work out how to have a really strong inquiry running alongside a really strong social studies curriculum that is based on an issue that students have participated in developing. This last thought will be the topic of the last blog.

Apocalypse Theories Post 9

Students have spent the week working on their proposals. They also had to complete a progress report ready for Monday outlining their inquiry question, what they have done so far, their next steps and any problems they have encountered. It has been good seeing the vast majority self-organise and manage their time, especially since we have a double period of two hours. Some students have demonstrated more engagement in the last 4 periods than all the year's classes combined.

My next entry is going to be after some thinking about what Michael Young calls "Powerful Knowledge" and how it might apply to what my students are doing in class at the moment.

Apocalypse Theories Post 8

I designed an "Apocalypse Theories Exhibition Proposal" booklet for students to fill in which included making "SMART" goals for three periods. Upon collecting them in there are still very few students who have got to a position where they have practical things to carry on with. Making an action plan is a very hard task and one they will still need lots of help with. There is lots of potential in many of their proposals and also evidence of what looks like a completely wasted 90 minutes of social studies for others. Is it because we have taught students to become so dependent on teachers that they are struggling so much? It is all very interesting anyway. Shifting the division of labour away from me so we are all active participants working towards a common goal is going to require a cultural shift in our class, but one that I am sure they are all up for. I have written in a whole lot of feedback on their proposals so the next test is to see the extent to which they take it on board.

What I am enjoying is the beginnings of the "French Pass Effect". At school camp, for 6 awesome days it feels like everyone forgets who is supposedly more intelligent than anyone else. There is an appreciation that everyone has different strengths in different contexts.

Anyway, what I really want to write about is Zombies. A bunch of students still really want to do this topic so I have said they need a water tight proposal before I accept their idea. After a short google search it does seem like a perfectly plausible topic. I have found one blog article which refers to the cranberries song "Zombies" in the following way:

"I think this music video is very telling of both the influence of zombies into modern popular culture and on the principles that zombies represent. The band decided to name their hit song after the famed ghouls because they portray the militants in Ireland, being told to patrol violently and following orders without regard for humanity. In this way, zombies often come to mind when thinking of people blindly doing things, whether violent, like Nazis, or whether innocently, like following the trends of consumer culture (such as the representation of the mall in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead). I thought this was really interesting to see how zombies in America have evolved from being simply flesh-eating monsters to entire symbols of mindless following."

Such an approach could easily lend itself to a sensible contribution to an exhibition on Apocalypse theories. I also found a great guardian article in the science section titled 'Zombie ants' controlled by parasitic fungus for 48m years. It is pretty amazing and I guess it would involve some science to explore if this could happen to humans, or more to the point, I expect, why it couldn't. There is also evidence that our culture's obsession with zombies also stems from early encounters between European explorers and Caribbean voodoo cults.

Apocalypse Theories Post 7

This morning the main learning intention was to have students create a plan of action for the next 4 periods using the learning wall and all our ideas on it. In short, they needed to outline how they would start the inquiry process. Well it was a bit scary because not much seems to have transferred from the guided inquiry process of Decide, Find, Record, Select, Present and Evaluate. From the action plans of some students the exhibition will be ready for visitors late Friday afternoon!

This is a bit of a hurdle and I am not quite sure how to overcome it because if we go into next period on the basis of the current action plans chaos will surely ensue.

Most students don't have a clear idea about why we are doing this exhibition I think which makes it hard to appeal to an audience. The idea of an exhibition display actually teaching the visitors something is a hard one; perhaps many students don't even fully realise what it means to be "taught" (that's ironic). Maybe we need to deconstruct this further too. Perhaps "provoke" or "make them think" would be better words. Brainstorming synonyms for teaching could be an interesting little exercise.

I guess one thing that will help is getting a few students to survey our potential audience. We really need to do some market research here. A few students visiting some exhibition designers and reporting back will also be of use and we are hopefully going to Te Papa this week too.

Perhaps they all need to do an individual research proposal where they write down their "rich question", a statement about why they think it is of significance or actually important to invest time into, key sources they will draw from, a statement about how their topic will juggle the hope and despair aspect of apocalypse, and a rough time line for completion. Based on today's time line this will be hopelessly inaccurate but it gives us something to reflect on.

Apocalypse Theories Post 6

Today was an interesting experience. There were a few things going down in the year 9 class and I could feel that a lesson of high-trust, openness and difficulty was not quite going to cut it. I played them a documentary about New Zealand's anti-nuclear position so the have been introduced to a whole lot of ideas about different apocalypse theories which they will need to choose from next week. The level of engagement with the documentary was amazing - I only wanted to play 10 minutes but we ended up going for the whole 50 minutes or so. The period after lunch was the one that they really needed some clear parameters around though.

I had an activity ready with a learning intention something along the lines of "We are learning how to use sources to construct a story about what a nuclear holocaust might be like".

They had to select key information that would help them to write a creative story from the testimony of a Hiroshima survivor, some Hiroshima and Chernobyl photographs and some information from a secondary source giving a broad overview of the Cold War and nuclear bombs. Using this selected information they need to write a one page short story about what a nuclear apocalypse might be like. These of course will be displayed as part of the exhibition. Students need to choose a perspective to write from, such as a male or female, child or adult, a tense, and a time period, either on the first day of the event, a week later or 10,20 or 50 years later. Probably what we need to do is take a look at some really good quality short stories and have a read and integrate that into our own stories too. The English teacher is doing some great debating stuff with them on our topic so I might need to go this alone when otherwise it might have worked to have him look at short stories. The great thing about our integrated learning programme though is that we work closely together so sourcing some short stories from the English Faculty is going to be no big deal at all.

Using the complexity theory idea of providing "enabling constraints" students also needed to include a child's toy, a friendship and a sign of hope in their story. And, of course, it needed to be a story based on some evidence.

Well today that was just the activity they needed. On Monday morning we'll go back to the hard stuff but having this activity up my sleeve prevented a lesson turning into a disaster. God only knows what the dramas were about but they were certainly being a bit weird.

Apocalypse Theories Post 5

It is going pretty well with our exhibition. We have started to develop a wall with everyone's ideas and shortly we will start allocating tasks and sorting groups out. Students keep volunteering their own or their family's expertise so we need a section where they can put this up. Lots of different "jobs" are emerging too which should go on our learning wall. For example, at least two students have parents who work at Massey University and Te Papa and would have some useful advice about how we could do our exhibition. I want some interested students to go and talk to them, perhaps take some photographs of the classroom space, and then report back to the class. A lot of students are interested in this part so today I asked them to write a justification as to why I should choose them. It may be a case of choosing the best justifications to talk to the adults but then taking the whole class to Te Papa to look at the techniques used for engaging visitors.

Speaking of the audience, this is a really important part of the whole exercise. They have identified who they want to come but I also want them to do their market research. What would teachers/older students/parents want or not want to see at an exhibition about apocalypse theories? An important job will be for a group to find that out and report back.

One student raised an important point - some of the stuff about apocalypse theories is incredibly depressing. He was right - we need to balance a sense of hope with the reality of some theories. I played a 10 minute clip of a documentary about the possibility of a meteorite strike and then asked, if someone was to do this topic, how could we achieve the balance? The same student suggested it could be about "the circle of life". The reason we are here is because the dinosaurs were made extinct through a meteorite strike. No species lasts forever - this is what makes our existence possible. Well, that was pure genius.

I want students to curate this exhibition and decide where displays go and why. Perhaps the team that goes and speaks to the Massey lecturer and Te Papa expert could do this. And we will need an editing team to look at people's text when the time comes.

The Legacy of Waitangi

Keith Barton sent me a draft copy of what he has written about student’s understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi and it brought up a couple of key things. I had asked students what they thought New Zealand was like in the 1830s and we did an activity to deal with the misconceptions, but I didn’t ask them why they thought the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. Barton has found that when asked cold New Zealand students say it was because Maori wanted peace between the races and the Europeans wanted to rip Maori off. Both positions are overly simplistic and, according to Barton, make learning about the Treaty an unpleasant experience for all. Maori students come out thinking that their ancestors were powerless with no agency (of course there is no recognition that not all Maori did in fact sign the Treaty with this interpretation) and European students are made to feel guilty. All other students didn’t have ancestors there so it really is an irrelevant topic for them.

My students have been making posters on the Treaty of Waitangi and the key differences between translations and Maori and European reasons for signing it. Although we had done a class role-play which highlighted a more complex understanding of the event than the two commonly held assumptions, some of the imagery and that they are producing in their posters would suggest that this was a crucial step requiring some carefully chosen sources and activities. For example, one group’s poster had a Maori and Pakeha hand clasped together; a nice idea by two very able students – but missing the true nature of the event.

There are two ways to get around this. First, talking openly about the fact that we are learning about something controversial which we all recognise is often taught badly has proven quite successful so far. So, I have turned Barton’s short draft article critiquing the way the Treaty is taught into a resource which we will read together with lots of rhetorical questions for us to discuss. Secondly, we have touched on enough sources to expose some of the complexity surrounding this event that when we come to evaluate the posters together with my historical thinking rubric, we will be able to undo some of the damage my lack of knowledge has created. It would have been great to have had the historical thinking discussion before we made the posters – the exercise would have been much more of a learning experience.

Apocalypse Theories Post 4

In the last entry I said I had chickened out with giving the power to the students and this would happen only after some more directed teaching. After a lunchtime discussion with a very experienced educator interested in what I am doing, I have decided to trust them. The "more directed teaching" is important, but only in response to an actual need - "never ask unasked questions"! I need a pedagogy of radical trust, although that goes against every teaching instinct. I think it stems from a deep seated fear of young people and "losing control" over them.

Another couple of classes had created an exhibition for the parents the night before which was impressive. We took one class down to see it during period one. Being somewhat dim-witted it only slowly occured to me that "Apocalypse Theories" would make a fantastic exhibition. Fully appreciative of the fact that Alfie Kohn, the legendary crusader against behaviourism, would surely disagree, I appealed to their sense of competition (In my defence, the original meaning of competition is "getting fit together"). I said "I know it's not a competition, but...."..."YES IT IS!!!" they shouted, "we can do much better than that other exhibition!" I had to show the other class photographs rather than take them to view it, but their response was the same.

Back to the lunchtime discussion, the point was made to me that asking students to come up with "activities" they could do was not the best approach. It is an incredibly loaded term. Instead, it was suggested I ask them:

What actions do we need to take to get there?

Who would be our audience?

Why would this be an important exhibition? (who cares?)

What would it look like?

They were pretty keen to get stuck in and although asking them these questions was done on a complete whim - I was going to finish the activity we had started and then try this - we spent the next hour brainstorming ideas. It was a hot, stuffy afternoon in a classroom that would make tinned sardines weep, and all a bit messy - but that's life, not to mention democracy. Their ideas were really good, and as time goes on the participation will get better. Like anything, participation needs to be practiced.

For the four questions (my input in bold)their responses were:

What actions do we need to take?

- We need to find what resources we might need
-We need to work on it at home potentially suspending the homework challenges
-we need to think of the questions we need to answer
- we need to have a brainstorming wall where all our ideas go on it
- We need to take the stuff of the wall that is already there
- We need to get into groups
- We figure out what problem/fear we are actually addressing eg, how to stop it, background info, what happens in it.

Who would be our audience?

Year 13 – address them at assmebly
Parents – send an officail letter from the class, tell them to come.
Voters – posters on the street?
Teachers – personal invitations, hand written names

Other year 9s.

Why would this be an important exhibition?

People are naturally interested in how the world and their own lives might end.
To educate people how to survive or why they they shouldn’t worry eg, what is the science behind 2012?
To educate people how to stop it

What would it look like?

- It would have interaction
- Elis is making a model suitcase nuclear bomb
- Displays need to be 3D like a model
- We need tour guides, exhibition maps
- We could have different areas for different types of apocalypse
- An underground bunker
- We need to address human ‘s primal fears
- We should decorate the narrow hall way up to the classrooms
- We could have an online website for the exhibition that lasts longer than the temporary one

Apocalypse Theories Post 3

We have been working on this unit for about a week now. Before we made our final decision I had the classes evaluate the questions from the previous blog. For one class it went really well and we were able to draw constant parallels with the realities of a real democracy. For example, some students made the point that the process would have worked better if some people had participated in the decision-making process better. The committee was elected from one class and appointed from the other and these 10 students took a whole period to decide on the final topic. They had a bunch of justifications that the class had produced which they needed to consider and I gave them the following brief to follow:

Your job is to choose the topic that you think will serve the class’s interests and educational needs the best. You will need to discuss and debate the 4 choices and look carefully at the pieces of paper you have been given.

Your job IS NOT to convince the rest of the committee what YOU want. As representatives of the class your job is to serve.

You need to justify your response in a short statement and give it to me at the end so I can read it to both classes.

You have the right to ask somebody to leave if you think they are not participating in a way that is in the spirit of democratic decision-making.

They seemed pretty focussed but I was with the actual class rather than the committee for most of the time. It would have been good to have observed more closely how they came to the decision, which was Apocalypse Theories. I don’t know whether they actively discussed and deliberated the options or if they just used some kind of voting process. But at least we now have a topic which only took 4 periods to come up with.

I was all keen to do what James Beane suggests and let them loose on a series of activities such as the following:

•Prepare a report comparing theories and explaining which is the most likely and why
•Write a letter to a politician campaigning about the danger of Nuclear Weapons
•Survey people at WHS or create a FaceBook page finding out what peoples’ fears are – tabulate and graph data for the class blog
•Make a documentary using the Flip Cameras on the science and predictions behind global warming’s worst case scenarios
•Sculpt a monument to our global civilisation for aliens who discover earth after an apocalypse
•Find out what happened during the black-death how did people react? How did it impact society?
•Make a timeline of apocalypse theories, past and future.
•Prepare a presentation or podcast or documentary about the cold war, the Cuban Missile Crisis and how close we came to nuclear apocalypse in the 1960s

In the end I have chickened out – although I will get some students to do the FaceBook option. The Maths teacher could do some good stuff with the data that this might generate. I have categorised “Apocalypse Theories” into Human, Natural and Religious ones. I’ll definitely let them choose from some of these activities for an inquiry, but I want to first take about 6 periods or so choosing a case study from each category and be a bit more directed in my teaching. The risk with this topic is also that it induces a sense of despair and helplessness which is pretty counter-productive to citizenship education. So I have formulated 5 key questions that if we answer them well it shouldn’t fall into another example of debilitating “disaster studies”. They are:

• What apocalypse theories are there?
• What happens in them?
• What evidence are they based on?
• How likely are they?
• What can we do about them?

The first case study is Nuclear Holocaust and I want them to understand that a Nuclear Holocaust is a real and present danger but one that we can do something about. We will look at what might happen in a nuclear attack by looking at primary sources from Hiroshima and Chernobyl, who has Nuclear Weapons now and how many, what New Zealand’s historical position towards them is and what people are doing to stop the proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The next case study I might do a super volcano or meteorite strike, although I am hoping my Science teacher might be able to jump in here too. Perhaps even the Mathematics teacher if they were to look at predictions, probability or orbits. There is so much good literature on Apocalypse theories too for the English teacher. Nevil Shute’s “on the Beach” for one. My final case study will be a religious one; we might compare religious ones or do the Christian Rapture. Finally, this kind of teaching which involves students can go catastrophically wrong without a strong theoretical framework. Lots of the boys want to learn about Zombies – this simply isn’t going to be allowed. Students learning about Zombies is “constructivism” gone mad.

Apocalypse Theories Post 2

The other class also successfully develop two topics: teen pregnancy and whaling so now we have 4 to choose from. I still don’t think students are really serious about choosing a topic. For example, lots of boys voted for teen pregnancy because they thought it was funny. Not because they really cared or wanted to investigate it for a term. Maybe they are simply not used to schools being places where you actually explore something that is genuinely interesting and important. Or maybe they didn’t believe that they had a right and responsibility to participate in the decision making process. I’m not sure, but it didn’t go quite as well as I had hoped with this class. However, taking the 4 issues I created a mind map of related ideas and possible activities. On Monday I will give a copy to the class and they will need to make a statement about what they think is the best one and any other activities they think would be good. I am then going to appoint a committee from members of both classes to decide which one we go with.

Then I want students to reflect on the following in their blogs:

“True democracy is when the people most immediately affected by the decisions made, participate themselves in that decision making process”

1) Describe the steps we used to decide on the topic
2) What was good about this process?
3) What could have been done better?
4) Which steps could have been made more democratic?
5) Does democracy have to involve always letting the people decide, or does it sometimes require a leader to make the decision? If so, when did this happen in our process?

Apocalypse Theories Post 1

Based on the assumption that schools are democratic institutions where students come to learn about the both the nature of democracy as well as the nature of the traditional disciplines I wanted to plan this term’s curriculum in a way which involved students as much as possible. I started out by asking them what concerns they had about the world and about their own lives. We used these concerns as the basis for deciding a topic of study for the term. Then I handed out packets of newspaper articles I had been collecting over the last 6 weeks and arranged them into general categories such as conflict, health, natural disasters, local politics etc… Using a sheet I had made, each group had 10 minutes to skim through the articles, choose one that fitted with a concern that was raised or a new concern and to write the social issue it represented.
We now had 25 students with 4-5 possible topics. In their groups I gave them an A3 worksheet which they used to choose the top three that they thought would 1) be worth exploring 2) That they could take action on. So now we had the list down to about 18, but I wanted it down to the top two. They were given a list of the following decision making processes:

•Methods for deciding:

–Teacher dictates
–Class vote for the top three
–Outside judge decides according to some criteria we give them
–A committee is elected to decide for us
–We draw it out from a hat

Using a vote, most students elected for a committee. Furious discussion ensued as they decided which person from each group would be the representative on the committee. Finally it was decided and 6 students went outside the classroom with the sheets groups had used to decide on the top 3. The rest of the class watched 10 minutes of a documentary while the committee decided. They came back with human rights abuses and apocalyptic theories. Now I just need to do the same thing with the other class and we need to choose from the top 4.

It is quite a good way to demonstrate different decision making processes. When explaining the different methods I related them to, referenda, dictatorships, representative democracy etc…And like any democratic process there was an element of messiness. Because there are two classes to get one topic of inquiry for, I have about a period where I don’t have a confirmed topic to think about diagnostic assessment. Perhaps this is partly what videos are for – otherwise I could spend a bit of time finding out what they know about democracy and dictatorships.

Does historical knowledge about the Treaty of Waitangi influence students’ beliefs about its role today?

In response to some interesting (and I think valid) criticism in the media from Peter Adds and Richard Manning regarding the lack of New Zealand race relations history taught in New Zealand schools, and the equally valid accusation that history teachers “avoid” it because it is controversial, I decided to flag the Israel/Palestine topic for term three and look at how land is contested in New Zealand. Having never properly taught the Treaty of Waitangi before, I decided I needed a decent research question to make it more interesting.

This topic also comes at a time when some of the Wellington History teachers are organising the NZHTA conference, and for the first time, as far as I know, actually going to meet Te Ati Awa. Short of Manning’s suggestions that an official relationship and memorandum of understanding be established between Te Ati Awa and Port Nicholson Block schools, I am launching ahead, although not in the kind of place-based manner that this kind of topic actually deserves. The historical GIS maps put together by Te Ati Awa look amazing – such a geographical approach towards the past is surely the way of the future if we are to start engaging students, especially Maori ones. I have no more history internal assessments left thanks to our addiction to the “rigour” of external assessment and am using an internal, Level One social studies assessment on values exploration and have called this unit of learning “The Legacy of Waitangi”.

Naturally students were not jumping out of their seats to be doing this topic so we started with a method I have Andrea Milligan from Victoria University of Wellington to thank for. Called a “Collective Biography” it was a great way to acknowledge that student’s prior experiences of learning this stuff has been quite negative as well as the fact that students’ own cross-cultural experiences tend towards the negative too.
Asked to describe a story in their life about a personal memory or experience with the Treaty of Waitangi or Maori and Pakeha relations, we shared this while sitting in a circle. I started with a few examples, and we went around a few times so those who passed at first could get ideas or have a memory triggered from someone else’s story. It is really interesting what you find out about your students doing this.

99% of students came up with something and we wrote them up and put them on the wall as in the picture. Following this, students responded to the prompts in a free writing exercise and came up with some varied responses. It was a good way to break the ice and it definitely wasn’t “boring”. There was a bit of discussion and disagreement and lots of acknowledgment that this topic is generally taught very badly. Which is a little scary – if I don’t deliver I will be another example of how education can screw up student’s appreciation of an important issue. The generally negative experiences from the collective biography expressed in an undeniable way that New Zealand has a problem. So my next question was “can history help?” which is a pretty fascinating question. There was some difference of opinion about this, (students claiming that if we don’t know anything about it that will mean we don’t have anything to disagree with) but by and large they agreed that some historical knowledge would at least help them to participate in a conversation about the role of the Treaty of Waitangi in the 21st Century. Incidentally, this is the final assessment task too. They need to:

Explain, in depth, why people hold differing values positions on the role of the Treaty of Waitangi today.

Describe, in depth, consequences for society of people holding differing values positions on the role of the Treaty of Waitangi today.

The next task worked well; a pretty basic diagnostic assessment task but one that generated information that I am actually using. Students filled in “The Treaty of Waitangi pre-assessment chart” and we stuck them all on the wall, half of which are evident in the photograph. For students who have ‘done the Treaty’ and ‘hundreds of times’, there was a whole lot of critical stuff that they didn’t know and which they thought they needed to know in order to “have an intelligent conversation about the role of the Treaty today”, which was great, because that assessment wall is serving as my unit plan.


A lot of students wanted to know a bunch of factual stuff as well as why it was signed so the first lessons have been a fly through the 1830s. We brainstormed what they thought the 1830s might be like and then read a text and watched a state service commission CD rom . From this we got a whole lots of key concepts and I listed artefacts that could potentially relate to those concepts. For example, the 1830s were a time of European lawlessness and an associated artefact could be a broken piece of glass. Students had to choose an artefact, make or find it, and write a 60 word summary linking the artefact to the big idea. We then put them all on the table as an exhibition and using the historical thinking rubric of evidence, agency and perspective, critiqued what this exhibit on the 1830s told us about New Zealand in this time and what it didn’t tell us. My knowledge of this era is woeful but know I want to learn everything I can about this decade. There is heaps of really critical important information about why the Treaty was signed that they aren’t going to get from me this year, for example we should look at the 1831 Chief’s petitions, the relationship between the 1835 Declaration of Independence and the Treaty and Normanby’s letter to Busby. They have the basics though about life in the 1830s and why the Treaty was signed. It goes to show how important teacher’s knowledge is though for it to be done really well. After that we will look at what was actually in the treaty and then they are doing a mini inquiry in the library where they need to report on an event between 1840 and 2010 where the Treaty of Waitangi was either honoured or breached.

And then it is into the present day stuff and my research question starts to come into play. I have online discussion forums, anecdotal comments, their history journals and their assessments which I can use for evidence. I have also developed a series of perspective cards on the treaty with their key assumptions. For example:


Biculturalism

–The Treaty is New Zealand’s founding document.
–The Treaty symbolizes a unique relationship between Maori and the Crown (the Government) and is what gives Pakeha the historical right to be on this land.
–The Treaty should serve as the basis of an ongoing partnership with rights and responsibilities for both parties.

Social Justice perspectives

–Educational, health, employment and crime statistics show that Maori are more vulnerable than Pakeha, a clear breach of the Treaty of Waitangi, especially article three.
–New Zealand society today is inherently unequal between Maori and Pakeha due to the massive confiscation and alienation of Maori from their land.
–Historical understanding of New Zealand’s colonial history is absolutely critical to solving today’s problems.

Treaty as contract

–Maori ceded their sovereignty (political authority) with the signing of the Treaty.
–Injustices towards Maori have occurred in New Zealand and need to be researched and addressed through the Waitangi Tribunal as soon as possible.
–The Treaty should have no role as a “Partnership” between Maori and Pakeha.

Treaty as irrelevant

–What happened 170 years ago cannot possibly have any real bearing on the present.
–The treaty has no legal standing, it is a “legal nullity”.
–The “Treaty Industry” is bleeding the New Zealand economy and leading to separatism between the races.
– Just like William Hobson said “he iwi tahi tatou”, we are all one people and there should be one and the same system for all.


These are not perfect and I also want to look at the “Beyond Biculturalism” arguments and multiculturalism as a perspective on the role of the Treaty today. We will use this to discuss the views of people like Don Brash and the Orewa speech and responses to it, Robert Consadine’s 2006 Waitangi Day speech and Te Ati Awa beliefs about the role of the Treaty. Long term it would be great to have a “perspectives card” that was developed with Te Ati Awa. In the meantime, for this we will use what secondary sources I can find, especially the land claim on their experiences of colonisation in Wellington so more history will be required here.
So that has set the scene – further posts will relate directly to the research question unless anything particularly amazing takes place and needs commenting on.

Memorial Posting 7

I am doing quite a lot of reading at the moment about the controversy surrounding the establishment of war memorials. Most had a local committee and these had to think very carefully about how they wanted their fallen soldiers remembered. There was a lot of debate and careful consideration with many groups in society voicing their opinions on what the final sculpture should look like.

The reason many of my students found it so hard to do this exercise are varied, but I think the main thing that needs to be simulated is that "committee" process. Next time I am going to put students into groups and allocate them a perspective, defined in New Zealand social sciences curriculum documents as a worldview or ideology. I could give one group a nationalist perspective, one a non-violent perspective, one a trade unionist perspective etc and have them discuss what a war memorial might look like when designed by a group with this political leaning. Our faculty uses "perspective cards" which name the perspective and then have 3-4 bullet points which summarise what sort of questions a group or person might ask of a social issue. These will provide the necessary scaffolding for this exercise I think.

I am presenting at a teacher's conference in October and might try running this exercise with them. At least that would use up the left over clay. I still like the idea of students sculpting a memorial of the person or event they have researched but this might get more students on board with the idea that memorials are always selective reminders of the past.

Memorial Posting 6

This week my students have been working on their sculptures which has been an interesting process. One key thing to come out of this is just how difficult it is to sculpt an abstract idea. Representationist theories of knowledge are pretty hard to shift! Many students found it hard to seriously think about what they knew of the person or event they had studied and then take a stand on how they should be remembered today. Some just designed the person that they studied - there was no real interpretation going on. I suspect it is something they are asked to do so little and that it just needs some practice. Perhaps I could have some more discussion and debate around the memorialisation of something controversial to get them thinking about the politics of monuments and public memory.

As the photos below start to indicate, many students did understand the thinking involved in creating a genuinely intelligent design which was really great.

I think we need to have a talk about historical agency. The classic example was the hate crime of Joe Kum Yung, shot in a street 5 minutes walk from the school by a deranged racist in 1905. Many read newspaper accounts after the crime which gave a step by step account of the incident and, not surprisingly didn't inquire into any kinds of causes, or question the attitudes towards Chinese at the time. Some papers even published the views of the murderer. Quite a few students wanted to sculpt JKY, either dead or dying - simply another Chinese victim to the currents of history and European racism. Alternatively, some students simply tried to find a symbol which represented, for example, "the Chinese" and sculpted that. A lot of those symbols were of course maintaining stereotypes about the very people that they had researched and had been victims of quite intense suffering. Next time I might build in a bit more planning and thinking into the process before handing out the clay.















The questions I got them to write about in their history journals were something along the lines of this:

What did you enjoy about this activity?

What aspects of the person or event remembered in your chosen local memorial did you have to consider when creating your own sculpture?

Do you agree that memorials are "selective reminders of the past"? Why? (See posting 5 for the article this question relates to)

Where in the city would you put this memorial and why?

How could this activity be made better next time?

So, onwards and upwards now. That's it for memorials until next time apart from when we discuss agency in relation to the photographs of a select few memorials. Now we are working on the Origins of World War Two. It would be great to approach this from a place-based, historical thinking perspective but I haven't got time to do all the thinking necessary for a really good job. I'll have to muddle through and try and spend the next summer holidays doing all the deep background reading to make it really good.

Posting 7

Students all gave their speeches this week and then each class voted on their favourite. I don't know if having a vote was necessarily the best way to go about choosing but there you have it. One class chose local pollution of a nearby stream and beach and global warming as an issue, closely followed by the decision to put a bus lane through Manners Mall. The other class chose Graffiti/Tagging/vandalism, followed closely by smoking/drugs and the bad things about McDonalds and fast foods.

I was going to run two separate inquiries for each class but realized this was going to be far too hard. But a compromise was to run with each issue with both classes, starting with graffiti and later moving to the environment issue.

So now we need to investigate the issue before we decide what we will actually try and do about it. Their first lesson on graffiti was in maths - which was awesome. They developed some questions that would produce statistically interesting data and next week the maths teacher and I will take them into town to ask a whole bunch of Wellingtonians what their opinion on the questions are.

I really want to get into the social anthropology of graffiti. There is lots of interesting stuff there about an issue I have thought very little about and yet which the students think is important. Even if not all chose graffiti/tagging as their final option for class investigation, pretty much all of them took photographs of it when they were using the digital cameras.

Memorial Posting 5

Students have been working pretty solidly on their research projects for the last 3 weeks. It has been great to have so many students using primary sources for their research questions. I think many now have a clear understanding of the difference between evidence and information. The Study for the Center of Historical Consciousness had a really good explanation of the difference between the two:

Information = what you find in the phone book when looking for a number
Evidence = footprints in the snow at a crime scene.

Evidence is a part of a puzzle. There is still lots of work to be done on what counts as evidence though. There is a tendency for students to take information that is vaguely related and note that down without seriously taking into account whether or not it helps with the question.

Next week students will hand in their research and be asked to create their own memorial to the person or event memorialized with 500gms of clay. I have developed a series of questions for them to respond to in their history journals which I will put up here next week - I really want to see if students have developed an understanding that memorials are selective reminders of the past and, as such, deeply political and therefore worthy of consideration.

Next year I will do this project slightly differently. For a start I will investigate each of the 5 key memorials close to school a lot more. Both the story of their construction and the background to them, collecting as many primary sources related to each as possible. Then I will push the start date of the assignment out slightly and spend more time introducing students to each of the sites - maybe a week on each one. And perhaps most importantly of all, I'll try and use each site as a site of dialogue. It is amazing that Queen Victoria, of all people, has a monument that is completely inaccessible, sandwiched between two busy roads. That says a lot about historical significance and change over time. What is it about Victoria that makes her so irrelevant for most people today? What would it take for her to come back into fashion. This question requires a "contextualisation of the present", what Barton and Levstik (2004) describe as the most difficult form of perspective recognition.

It would be interesting to talk with students about the ways we interact with memorials and the people and events they represent to make them "living". This is especially the case with war memorials. Few memorials are "living" in the way war memorials are. I guess memorials are only part of the constellation of cultural markers and tools we use to maintain memory and understanding of the past. I don't know of any interaction with the Parihaka memorial, (perhaps there should be something done on November 5th?) but we have exhibitions, songs and peace festivals to Parihaka. The permanent reminders inherent in a memorial of stone are the most interesting to think about though.

Memorial Project Posting 4

Here is an article from this week's Dominion Post. It's a pity it didn't come out earlier because no one chose the Parihaka sculpture. It is talking about exactly what we are exploring in class at the moment.

Posting 6

We are at the stage where students are preparing their speeches to justify why their personally preferred topic should be the one which we explore together. I started off by asking them what a really good, "excellence" speech would look like. They have a high standard of themselves, which is great, suggesting that a good speech would include the following:

Good presentation

A clear voice
Looking at the audience
Not talking too fast

Good content

An interesting opening
An explanation of why the issue is important
What they could do about it
Good structure
Suggestions for what we could do to make learning about the issue interesting
An explanation for how it relates to them

I don't think we need any rubrics here! They have set the bar at excellence - why would you want to aim for less? Our obsession with 'grading', 'marking' or 'scoring' - all violent metaphors, is bizarre. I do like the idea of asking students after they have done their speeches who they thought gave the best ones and why. And, of course, it would a useful exercise to have all students write about how they thought they went at reaching the bar they set. I also think it would be good to extend their ideas about what a good speech entails, eg, good use of supporting illustrations, weighing up options, predicting possible consequences of certain actions. Today one class spent the first 20 minutes silently free writing about their speech and the other class the first 30 minutes, when I had asked for 5 minutes. Maybe all that work with the cameras paid off after all...?

Students are still having trouble with finding a focus though - I don't yet know how widespread it is. For example, one group wanted to tackle littering. After a few questions they talked about how there is so much rubbish around the war memorial. Suddenly we had a manageable problem; the disregard people hold for the National War memorial. That could lead to documenting the problem, learning about why the Memorial is important/what it represents etc and ideas for what we could do about it. That kind of thinking though is really hard. It is the disposition of inquiry and requires more than a technical, strategy-based, step-by-step approach to develop, as useful as some strategies are.

Posting 5

I think it would be fair to say that the criteria we developed did not exactly lead to much more critical thinking. I'm not quite sure why. But we do have a big list for each class of potential issues and I have asked for students to prepare a speech to convince the class of the one they think we should go with. I don't know if this is moving away from the photovoice technique too far or not but it seemed like a good idea and it would be nice to get them writing something. And they are all pretty happy with the suggestion. It will make it easier when it comes to deciding on the final topic. But I think it would also be fair to say that we haven't come up with any burning issue - overall I was disappointed with the way students just took photos of "things" which they didn't really seem that keen on doing a big exploration of. But we'll see what comes of what we have got. Certainly tagging and graffiti is a big theme that has come across. Perhaps it would have helped had I gone out and taken some photos of things that I cared about and wanted to change and put those into a PowerPoint and then annotated them. The selection stage is really crucial and I missed it out due to time for the second round. Maybe that was part of the problem. Here are some of the photos students have taken:







Some example issues raised are graffiti/vandalism, bad use of space, environmental pollution of the town belt, and the possibility the flyover and new tunnel will effect the Basin Reserve area.

Memorial Project posting 3

This week I have been taking students on several walks around five different monuments close to school. It took much longer than I thought and thank goodness for double periods. The teenage gait is incredibly slow. We visited the William Wakefield memorial at the Basin Reserve, the National War Memorial, the Memorial to the prisoners from Parihaka, the Greek memorial which has a stone in it from the battle site of Thermopylae which students thought was pretty cool and the Haining St site where Joe Kum Jung was shot at the beginning of the 20th century. I had hoped to get to Queen Victoria but I had to be content with showing photos in class. It was a good mixture of memorials that remembered past injustice, great white men and women, a relationship between countries, heroes and an aspect of war.

I found myself doing a lot of talking at each spot when what I really wanted was to use the site as a space for discussion and deliberation. While at the Wakefield memorial, Keith Barton, the visiting US academic who is back in town for a week, found us and I asked him how might I extract historical thinking from a memorial. His first suggestion was to ask students what the places are evidence of. Memorials, as historical interpretations, tell us far more about the people who constructed them than the actual events or people that they portray.



I tried this after lunch with varying success - I'll need to pick Keith's brain some more I think. The statue of Victoria has some really nice panels on the side of it and one was of the signing of the treaty of Waitangi. What this panel is evidence of is that society at the beginning of the 20th century thought that the relationship between Maori and Europeans was completely unproblematic. Maori had ceded sovereignty and Queen Victoria had reigned benignly. This, of course seriously misrepresents history! It was interesting talking to students about this panel and the fact that it tells us almost nothing about the Treaty of Waitangi itself. If we want to know who signed it and why, who didn't sign it and why, what was promised and what wasn't and what the consequences of the Treaty were we would have to go to a different source.



Many students thought the Haining St plaque was a bit lame given the viciousness of that hate crime. One pointed out that a similar plaque in the Basin Reserve commemorating the record number of 6s hit in a cricket innings was quite a lot bigger. On Keith's advice, I asked them what it would tell a class in 100 years time about people today (the plaque is a very recent addition to the memorial landscape). That generated a bit of interesting discussion. I thought it might represent the move to apologize for past wrong doings. Whether that be for the treatment of aboriginies, Maori, Chinese, Samoans, slaves etc... What does that say about us today? Using history to contextualise the present is a really good thing to do but it is also probably the hardest. Both groups pointed out that on the plaque to Joe Kum Yung the "Absolutely Positively Wellington" logo appeared ironic given what was being remembered. One even pointed out that the logo was bigger than the name of the man killed. One perceptive comment was that might be due to contemporary commercialism.

After the trip all students received their 1.1 research assignment and now they are about to start researching a memorial. Several have rejected the 5 I suggested which is great - and some have started to develop some really good other ideas. This is a remarkably easy way to get students interested in New Zealand history and social history too. Over time it will be good to develop a resource bank of primary sources relating to the events/people remembered as well as stories of their construction. I am especially interested in the story behind the Parihaka memorial. It would be great to use this as a starting point to teach about Parihaka in the manner Richard Manning describes in his recent PhD "Place, Power and Pedagogy: A critical analysis of the status of te Atiawa histories of place in Port Nicholson Block secondary schools and the possible application of place-based education models". There is some pretty interesting stuff in this thesis which I will need to spend a lot more time on.

Long term I would like to have some year 11 students researching the historical context of a particular memorial and explaining the memorial in light of the times that it emerged from. There are definitely year 11s who can do this. What would also be a bit more complex would be to have students researching the story behind the construction of a particular memorial. There will be many memorials for which that hasn't been done and it would involve students engaging in some genuine primary research. Somewhere like Hypercities would be a great place for students to publish this kind of research.

Memorial Project posting 2

It has been the end of another week working up to the student's first major project on memorials. I think it was Karl Popper who said "never answer unasked questions". There has been a bit of me asking unasked questions this week and there hasn't been quite the same sense of momentum as, say, my social studies class where every activity has seemed to unfold from the previous one and into the next lesson in a way that my social studies teaching hasn't quite cohered before. As one of my students pointed out, we need to get our teeth into something. There has been some interesting discussion about the nature of history and memory and how the past is remembered. It has also been good to see that students in their journals are starting to notice memorials a bit more and reflect on their role as cultural markers. However, in my attempt to underpin the classes with "historical thinking" it has come at the expense of having a real reason to do this.

But you live and learn. Keith Barton, the U.S academic is back in town this week to do some research in my classroom and a couple of other schools. We have asked him to inquire into students' understanding of Agency, Perspective, and Evidence and to see if there are any changes in students' understanding of these concepts over the year before he comes back towards the end of the year. That should keep me on my toes. I kind of want there to be some discernible difference! My probings so far have revealed some interesting ideas about the past, for example:

- People in the past didn't think as much as people in the present
- Learning about racism in the past might actually make it worse today
- And there is a real sense that the criteria for something to be of historical significance requires it to be about "people who have made a difference" and political events.

I would really like to do a topic on the everyday life of a community completely different from our own and in the students' journals there is an interest in ancient Rome and Medieval Europe. When I lived in Germany on a student exchange I learnt more about New Zealand than I did Germany in many respects. I wonder if the same can work in history. If we learn about a way of life really different and look for similarities and differences, perhaps we can better understand and evaluate society today and the kind of world we want to live in. The main thing I want to discuss with Keith is the difference between history and social studies. Identifying a "problem" or "social issue" seems easier when it is occurring today than for history and I don't want history education to be solely about understanding the roots of contemporary events, as laudable as that goal is.

Anyway, memorials. The intention was to go and visit the five I have selected and I would tell them a bit about the person or event that it represented to try and get them thinking about which they might choose - if any of them. Unfortunately it rained so only one class got out so I only got to the Parihaka Prisoner memorial and the National War Memorial. Earlier in the week I had found a section from Jock Philips and Chris McLean's book on NZ war memorials and there was a really interesting section from someone who was writing shortly after World War One about the disgrace in the way we make memorials beautiful when they should be hideously ugly to remind us about the true nature of war. This fits with Jay Winter's thesis that memorials are as much about forgetting as they are remembering. Many students agreed with the general idea - what would be important to get across next time is just how privileged that viewpoint is. Only in peace time and without the imminent threat of war or the pressure nationalist jingoism can we so easily reject war. It would be cool if some students looked at the agency of people who disagreed with the decision to go to war and the structural conditions they faced and that made their lives so difficult and, of course, the agency of soldiers who enlisted prior to 1916 conscription.

Most seem to be enjoying the field trips. Next week I will finish them and they will need to decide on a person, event, or issue to research that is represented in a local Memorial. Today 40kg worth of clay was dropped off on my desk. It is so great working in a school which can resource the kind of teaching I am doing. I am looking forward to the lesson when having completed the research they have to mold the clay to represent the person/issue/event in the manner they think more appropriate or at the very least, different. I like the idea of literally molding an idea into a form for others to see in an artistic sense. Looking through their journals, there are a lot of students whose favourite school subjects are art and drama. This I will need to use to my advantage....

Memorial Project posting 1

For this project I want explore with students the role of memory in society and the kinds of historical markers humans create to maintain certain memories in certain ways and not others. Jock Phillip’s idea that memorials are “historiography in stone” is a really provocative one. It seems that the way we remember the past says a whole lot about the values of people in the past and the present and the connection between the two. The role of legacy, which seems to be one of the more interesting and controversial concepts in history education becomes important. Our cultural landscape is strewn with the names of people and events, which represent attitudes, politics and beliefs that we would probably no longer accept as being particularly worthy. By us naming the landscape like this do we somehow perpetuate these attitudes and values? For example, it is very obvious that Queen Victoria and the Empire she represented was a very important person in Wellingtonian’s cultural psyche. We name a University, a large hill, a suburb and large a tunnel after Victoria and of course there is a fabulous statue of her on Cambridge Tce. Do we still support the colonizing values of an empire that subjugated so many people, alienated so many people from their lands, was absolutely convinced of their own cultural superiority and was complicit in trans-Atlantic slavery? These are quite interesting questions and one of my goals for this unit is for students to start noticing these associations and at the very least being able to discuss them in an informed manner.

I gave students the question “How do we remember the past in our local community” and sent them out in groups with a digital camera. They took photos of street signs, the names of tunnels, war memorials, a piece of local graffiti which commemorates a local musician and is repainted every time the council paints over it, an old Volkswagen car, old photographs and plaques of the school, a sculpture of a WW1 medic and his donkey, a memorial to some prisoners, a poster of the Treaty of Waitangi, a gate to a sports field with a name engraved into it, me (as a history teacher!), an old crest on Government house, the school name and a few more.

During lunch I downloaded their findings into a folder and next period students explained what and where the photo was taken and what they thought it said about the cultural values of people in past and present. That proved a little hard for all the photos and we needed to discuss their findings in relation to what counts as historically significant. We also need to develop some criteria for that. For example the unofficial graffiti, while it may have an entry on Wikipedia, is significant only with in a small circle of people. And the plaque of the founding of the school may be interesting to an historian of the school but ultimately it isn’t all that interesting. We did get some good discussion and one student made the comment that once you start thinking about how the past is remembered you start to see examples everywhere. We talked about the different types of memorials, for example, unofficial ones, ones to specific people and events or to what an event represented. It was interesting talking about whether or not there should be a memorial to a local teenager who was murdered by two people who objected to his sexual orientation. Overall the discussion was quite good but with lots of potential for more sophistication and complexity.

Then I asked them to write a short statement explaining how the past was remembered in the local community. Some students just listed the different ways, for example, memorials, street names and plaques. So I asked them to do this in relation to some questions I had given them on the assignment sheet, which asked “whose stories are remembered and whose are not”. That helped. One student said people who are powerful, men and those “further up the social hierarchy” are remembered. Another made a comment that this is because the way society is and it is unlikely that the people who didn’t make a big difference would be remembered in the way these people were. This suggests that their notions of ‘historical significance’ might be limited to political history and powerful individuals. I might need to explore this further with them. Social history and the role of citizen dissent and disobedience in society is an important issue to discuss. How likely would it be for a sizable memorial to be established near the National War Memorial (or as part of it?!) that commemorated the efforts of WW1 and WW2 conscientious objectors? What does the unliklihood tell us about the society we live in and our involvement and reaction to war? This could lead to a discussion about New Zealand sending elite troops to Afghanistan, also a war not without its controversy!

Last period I had my other history class which was much bigger and for a Friday period 5 on a stinking hot summer’s day much more unsettled. I hardly blame them! What better activity than to send them outside! And, in one of those great moments that you can’t predict, there was a big memorial service with politicians and representatives from Canada, the U.S and Australia taking place at the National War memorial commemorating 65 years since the end of World War Two. Many were really excited and one student raced back to say they might not get back at the time I said they needed to be. I haven’t seen what they took photos of yet – if they were at a service they might be of all the same thing!

Posting 3

Today I had the same lesson as yesterday but with the other year 9 class. It went ok, as a class there are a few characters in there which make it a bit trickier and it doesn't help being squeezed into a tiny classroom on a hot day. But right at the end of the double period I had a student ask "so how does this relate to social studies?". I think there are two issues here:

1)Probably what he has done in social studies before is so different to participatory citizenship that for all intents and purposes what we are doing is not social studies. Certainly when I asked them what social studies was no one said "it is about citizens taking action in the world to make it a better place".

2) Secondly,my suspicion with the language of learning intentions and success criteria (see posting on the geometry of learning) meant that I didn't make the purpose clear enough. I had hoped that with the nature of this assignment the learning intention was so inherent in the nature of the task it was obvious for all: we are learning to be active citizens. Davis, Sumara and Luce Kapler are instructive here. Firstly they think learning objectives (not quite the same as learning intentions) should be recast as "enabling constraints" where there is enough structure to produce creativity. Ie, there is not so much structure it is dead, and not too little there is chaos. They describe it as "opening possibilities by limiting choices". On page 193 of their book Engaging Minds (2nd ed) they give three examples of learning objectives:

A) "By the end of this lesson, students will demonstrate their understandings of some of the core elements of a poem by identifying the rhyme structure, the principal figurative devices, and the core themes of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" " (Too much structure).

B) "Students will write original poems in this lesson" (too little structure).

and finally on page 194

C) "Students will explore poetry-writing processes through involving characters and plots based on unfamiliar items and unexpected juxtopositions"

The authors give a really nice account of the lesson that took place with the third learning objective which worked so well and was so conversational. Their learning objective is slightly different to my learning intention because there was absolutely no reason to state the objective to students in their account of their teaching episode. It would have been a completely unnecessary and bureaucratic imposition on the learning that took place. It would be very interesting to know when the desire for stating learning objectives in unit plans turned into a desire to clearly state learning intentions to students. This is a really important question. When implementing new strategies such as AToL there is very rarely any discussion encouraged amongst teachers about the nature of teaching. Without this, the difference between behaviourist outcomes, learning objectives and learning intentions become almost imperceptable. Meanwhile, there is often still no real sense of learning in our classrooms, mine anyway. We teachers just shunt them through activities in a linear fashion. A good student is one who completes the tasks "to the best of their ability", as if ability is a static phenomenon. Of course our answer to all education's problems, especially literacy, is to do even more of this, without examining the metaphors we rely on to teach.

What I really object to is the belief that teachers who clearly state learning intentions are "more effective" than other teachers. It could well be the case, but I don't remember them in Sylvia Ashton Warner's classroom, or John Holt's, or Jim Neyland's or the authors of Engaging Minds. It is possible to have highly proficient learning intentions and success criteria in a class where no attention is being paid to the nature and purpose of the subject; no genuine conversation and engaged learning around a topic of mutual concern is taking take place, and students are uninspired. It is going to be really interesting using Photovoice to grapple with the tension between "enabling constraints" and "learning intentions" and the fact that my performance appraisal documents require the use of a technique based on principles I think are fundamentally flawed.

Which brings me back to the student who said "what does this have to do with social studies". My objective for this activity, formally written, would probably be something along the lines of "students will take photographs of issues and assets in the school's local community that they care about and will develop ways they might go about doing something about these,thereby exploring what it means to be a citizen".

I don't know what the learning intention would be or if I need one on the board for the students. I suspect what I did today and yesterday didn't provide enough of an 'enabling constraint'. What I should have done is engaged them in a discussion about the meaning of the concept of "Citizenship" prior to introducing the photography assignment. We could have discussed what makes a good one and what makes a bad one. There is also a great little typology of different kinds which I have included in this post. Maybe I could have asked students "what are the actions of a good citizen?" and then got them to compare their results with the Kahne and Westheimer categories. Perhaps had I done all this before setting up the Photovoice assignment the student wouldn't have asked me that question, and the whole exercise would have made more sense. I should probably do half of this stuff. If it is raining on Monday morning that is what I will do, otherwise we can do it when they have been out to take photos. Either way it will make for a pretty interesting discussion!

Posting 2

Today was the first day I met one of my year 9 classes and it was to good to get back into it after the summer break. I introduced students to the general idea of Photovoice by giving them the assignment sheet based on the suggestions of Bronwyn Wood, a New Zealand social studies educationalist. Essentially it explained that students would be going into the local community and taking pictures of things that they were proud of, made them feel like they belonged or things they would miss if they weren't there and things that made them sad/mad,wanted to change or do something about.

First I got them to list some opposing attributes such as clean/dirty, safe/unsafe, light/dark etc. Then I got them to get into a pair with someone they would like to work with and then I put the pairs together with as much of a gender mix as possible. Each group then had an A3 Google Map of the local area and using their own knowledge plus the opposing attributes brainstorm, plotted a 45 minute tour of where they could go to take the photographs. The engagement for this activity was really good. Every group was fully into planning their route and they were really excited at the prospect of being allowed to leave the school.

I then gave them a set of 6 suggestions for what makes a good photo, courtesy of Bronwyn. They were things like using light well, being quick, focusing on the thing to highlight etc...With a big pile of National Geographics they had to find some images that reflected these suggestions of a good photo which we discussed. Next time I would have some other types of magazine such as Time but this activity got them thinking about photograph composition.

After a brief run down on how the cameras worked, out they went into the playground to take 3 photos each of anything, as long as it was composed well. After 10 minutes or so we came back with only a few minutes of class time left.

I downloaded their photos after school and we will start the next period by reviewing their photos in light of the tips sheet. Some of them are really good for a 10 minute photo shoot. Next time I see them I will also send them out - hopefully the weather will be ok...It will be interesting to see if they take photos of things they genuinely care about or what they think I want them to take photos of. Many wanted to go to Cuba Mall. Hopefully to take photographs! But if that is a place they care about they might be interested in the Council's decision to remove a big section of Manner's Mall for a bus lane. I might also take a photocopy of the routes they have planned, to help me if something does go wrong. Obviously all parents have given their consent for this kind of activity. Students may need to plan two trips though to get a decent range of photographs. I also suggested they take pictures from around their own neighbourhood if they have a camera.

It was a great way to start the year's social studies. Hopefully the other class gets into it tomorrow as well.

Bishop, P., Downes, J, Engaging Curriculum for the Middle Years, in Curriculum Matters 4: 2008, Wellington, NZCER press ,pp.52-68.

Summary

The authors present a number of studies that show student engagement in years 7-10 is declining, especially amongst Maori boys. They suggest there is a mismatch between many middle school students’ learning needs and the schooling they experience. The school environment, they claim, doesn’t fit the socioemotional changes happening to adolescents. This looks like increased teacher control, stern disciplinary consequences, and a decrease in positive relationships and opportunity for student decision making in the classroom. Bishop and Downes argue that the new focus on middle years as a specific learning pathway in the new curriculum provides a rich opportunity to systematically revaluate what schools need in order to engage year 7-10 students more. They propose 3 essential characteristics necessary to achieve this goal:

Relevance

This characteristic requires students “tackling challenging problems based on their interests and concerns”. It is suggested that “a curriculum of topics and activities designed by committees of adults and implemented by adults” is not likely to enable the development of the Key Competencies, particularly Managing Self, Relating to Others and Participating and Contributing.

Negotiation

Negotiation is much more than simply ‘co-constructing success criteria’. Instead, it means that teachers draw on and understand students’ genuine needs, concerns and questions as the basis of curriculum decision making and preparation. Negotiation assumes that teachers know their subject well enough to have the confidence to go with the flows of genuine student interest and concern while still maintaining coherence and introducing new ideas...

Integration

Integration is described as the logical conclusion to relevance and negotiation. The authors define integration as “seiz[ing] on the non-linear development of knowledge typical of real world problem solving and participatory action. Information is learnt as knowledge-in-action as opposed to the knowledge-out-of-context found in most subject-centred designs”. It should be noted that integration is defined as much more than organising subjects around general themes. The authors also emphasis that for integration to be successful and not fall on the shoulders of individual teachers or teaching teams, systems, expectations and curriculum need to be honed with a coherent vision in mind.

Finally, Bishop and Downes recommend place-based education and service learning as useful frameworks to achieving a more engaging curriculum for students in years 7-10.

Some possible implications for the average secondary school

We wouldn’t teach ‘topics’ in quite the same way. The statement “what topic are we doing next” wouldn’t make sense if we took these ideas on board.
All teachers would need to be able to articulate what an engaging curriculum could look like; this can only happen when we reach a critical mass of teachers that realised that education was, as Jim Neyland describes, “autotelic” –worthwhile in and of itself and not intended for some future-oriented goal of passing NCEA or getting a job.

Potential Problems

We would need strategies for teachers for developing units around genuine needs concerns and questions of years 9 and 10 students.
Faculties would need to be open to fitting the curriculum standards to class interests, rather than trying to generate a class interest from an AO.
We would need a much more organic approach to resources. It is unlikely we would work through a text book or PPT. These would be used only as stimulus material or in response to a common question.

Teaching History for the Common Good

Barton, K.C, Levstik., L, Teaching History for the Common Good, Laurence ErlBaum, Associates, MahWah, 2004.

1) What is the book’s main idea?

The purpose of history education in United States schools is to use the past to provide a context for deliberating the Common Good, defined as a pluralist, participatory democracy, whereby students are equipped to take action in the present.

2) What is significant about this book for teachers?

This book forced me to think about why I do anything in the classroom. (Pity it took so long for that to happen - but again in the current system the why? is far less important than the how?) For example, I was going to send students off to research the history of a memorial. Reason: “it’s inquiry”. This isn’t enough. It has to be, according to Levstik and Barton for the common good. (See upcoming posting on History Memorial Project for ideas about this).

The Common Good (CG) helped me see how history concepts can add complexity to my social studies teaching. One problem with Photovoice projects done with young people (see posting on Photovoice project) is that students' basic theory of change is that “awareness raising” will change a situation. Some researchers have found that when students fail to make any difference on an issue they have attempted to change or improve they become even more apathetic and unengaged in society. CG talked about the importance of teaching about agency. Perhaps if social studies teachers attempting to help students engage in social action spend some time unpacking that "awarenes raising" (or fund raising) alone is unlikely to make much difference when there are deep structural conditions preventing change, students will have a more realistic understanding of what it takes to seriously enact change. Perhaps teachers could use historical examples of groups such as the women suffragists or slave abolitionists to explore what they were up against and what kind of commitment it took to create the climate for real, structural change.

3) What surprised you about this book?

That socio-cultural theory could be so important to a teacher’s daily practice. That this is surprising is no doubt a result of the hyper-behaviourist classrooms I was educated in at school and university. However, how society uses and remembers the past is pretty crucial to the kind of society we are (or are not). A couple of quotes are instructive:

"An assumption of sociocultural theory is that human thought and action are embedded in social contexts that extend beyond the individual”

and


“We need to pay attention to the kinds of history they encounter not only at school but in other settings that contribute to their ideas about the past. We need to know how history is represented in the museums and historic sites they visit, in the television programs and movies they watch, and in the historical literature they read outside school; we also need to know what kinds of historical information relatives pass along”. (p.17)


If I want to know why and how students think about the past and to mediate those thought and ideas towards deliberation of the Common Good, everything matters! What they watch on TV, how much time they spend with their grandparents, what their interests are, where they live, gender, politics, ethnicity, class, but also the level of contact they have with cultural tools - abstract ones such as “narrative” or concrete ones such as museums, songs, monuments, plaques, Che Guevara T Shirts, street signs, heritage trails, Labour Day, Waitangi Day, the media, Memorial halls, parks, swimming pools... Whenever we are teaching, considerably more time needs to be spent on attending to the knowledge and assumptions that students bring with them. This is pretty basic stuff really. It's a pity the assessment system does little to encourage this kind of teaching to take place with its focus on shunting students through NCEA so they emerge with their so-called certificates of achievement.

4) What don’t you agree with in this book, why?

I wonder if a socioecological analysis would have revealed something different, especially in regards to why history teachers fail so dismally to get beyond coverage and control.

Lack of personal teaching examples from the classroom, by the authors, also made them seem distant but it didn't really matter.

This book was all about time; in an academic climate of interdisciplinary collaboration, and explorations of non-western approaches to the traditional assumptions of academic disciplines, what about space? And unfortunately the book didn’t go into how other subjects that might complement history such as geography, anthropology, archaeology could contribute to the Common Good.

It was very logically structured but also a little clunky with the 4 stances, each with 3 parts, and 6 tools which were conceptually slightly different. This is not a very well substantiated comment but there was something about the structure that didn't quite flow for me.

My main critique is that while I would hope participatory democracy and the Common Good can be experienced in our nation's classrooms, for most of the time that is not where it happens. It happens, as the authors point out, in our churches, committees, clubs, local government, etc... History educators could take a more place-based approach to our teaching to really make our teaching democratic. Students could be doing and using history in places and with people outside of a classroom. But all the examples and evidence that I could see in CG came from inside classrooms. Perhaps a book called Teaching History for the Commons" might have been more apt had the authors gone down this line.

5) What questions does this book raise for you?

What narratives do we tell ourselves about the nation and the past in New Zealand? What evidence, or lack of evidence are these based on?

What is the difference between social studies and history?

Is the purpose of science and maths education the same as history? If so, what would a book like this one for those subjects look like?

If someone wrote a book like this with the focus on New Zealand, what would its conclusions be?

What role does history teaching have in place-based education? What are the purposes of each literature base? Where do they overlap? What can they offer each other?

Buber and Freire are said to embody different types of humanism. Interesting given a critique of Friere is that he appropriated so much of Buber. What is the story here?

Why did we not get a section in the New Zealand Curriculum on the Nature of History like the Science teachers got?

6) If you could ask the author of the book a question what would it be?

What is the most interesting critique of this book that you have read?

What chance does the New Zealand history curriculum have of helping teacher’s help students deliberate the Common Good?

The NZ curriculum has a focus on “significance to New Zealanders” which seems to be interpreted from a content level. Teachers are being encouraged to show how overseas topics can be related to New Zealand. Does this focus make it difficult for teachers to justify teaching topics about the Roman Empire or Medieval days, which could be a useful tool for understanding how we think today?

7) What books would you like to read that came from this one?

Tom Holt’s “Thinking historically”, James Percocco’s “A Passion for the Past”, David Kobrin’s “Beyond the text book”, Monica Edinger’s “Seeking History”. Peter Stearn’s “Meaning over Memory”.