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.