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.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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