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.