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.