Sometimes history is seen as something fixed and static. What is past, is past. This year, I took the first unit in Year 9 seriously. Theoretically, we should readdress the issue of what is history and how we make it. I decided to spend three lessons dealing with historiography. Actually, this was the last step. First, I introduced students to multiperspectives in intepretations with another activity. In this lesson, I wanted to show them why historians can say different things of the same event.
As a starter, I asked them to sort the odd-one-out from the following rulers: Napoleon Bonaparte, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Louis XIV and Adolf Hitler. I asked each student who he/she thought should be ruled out and note it down. Then I asked each one for their reasons and also wrote them on the board. One Year group came up with seven categories, the other one with eleven.
This means that they found at least eight different ways of ruling someone out. In general, it was the same person (CFK) but for distinctive reasons: she is a woman, she is alive, she lives in South America, etc.
After that, we plunged into different historiographic lines of thought (with the basic example of the French Revolution). By the end of the lesson, many students could make the connection between the starter and the rest of the lesson. They stated that the reason for doing the first activity was to realize that depending on what we pay attention to, we will write history in different ways. It was magical. Spontanenous. Incredible.
To introduce the course, I always try to surprise my students. Also, I devote one or two lessons to history itself, so that students remember that we do more than listing facts (actually, this is the least that we do). To introduce Year 9 to interpretation, I came up with an activity that worked really well.
The main topic this year is Argentina in the 19th century, but this is by no means dislocated from European history thus we start with a revision of the French Revolution and we plunge into Napoleon's rule. But, since I first want to deal with historical practice per se, I planned to mention some historiographic lines of thought (liberals, materialists, romantics, positivists). So, to connect Napoleon to historiography (i.e. different interpretations of history), I thought of the following activity, which I do not remember if I invented it myself or got it from someone else. Here it goes:
I called one of the students to my laptop and showed him/her this picture (due to copyright reasons, I will not publish it here). It shows Napoleon Bonaparte fleeing a battle. So the student would describe it and the rest would draw. It is really funny to see them try to describe what they see and the others trying to get what he/she says. In the end, I showed them the picture and, after they made some comments, I ask them if what they have drawn is the same or not. They usually answered "yes but no" which is great because you can dig with more questions: How come they are the same? Look at them! or Are not your drawings based on the same description? How come they are all different? and you can get to the concept of different ways to see/understand/interpret history.
In year 7 I used Taboo Words as a starter, then we did some other activities, and finally, as a last task and plenary, students designed their own Taboo Words cards. This is a great opportunity to assess students thinking skills. It is great to observe what idea they connect to which event/person/place.
In this case, the context is an introduction unit on the transition between Middle Ages and Early Modern times. Here are some examples of the cards they designed:
As you can see, there are several concepts and several ideas connected to them. This activity helps them make that connection and, thus, learn that ideas/events/processes in history are not isolated from one another but rather linked by places/people/time/artifeacts/etc. It is very interesting, for example, how one student connect the Jews to the book they have read last year: Number the stars by Louis Lowry. This is not necessarily a historical connection but it suits the aim of the activity and it definitely suits the student.
I believe it is of utter importance to let students make their own connections and organize their own study, without imposing any of our own.
This is a great name to play in class both as a starter or a plenary. I always have a deck of cards I made myself because whenever you have 10 minutes to spare, they come in quite handy. Last year, when I started introducing this game to my lessons, I made a 'general' deck with taboo words such as Europe, New World, Reformation or Pope. You write the word that the rest of the class have to guess in boldand the words that the student cannot mention beneath it. For example:
NEW WORLD
Cristopher Columbus
America
Discovery
The student that describes the taboo word cannot mention the words beneath it. It is great to revise new concepts such as depotism because students have to use their own vocabulary to define it. Enjoy!
Looking for some sources to introduce the Napoleonic period (and the whole school year), I ran into this site. It is a digital collection of cartoons on the Napoleonic Era, some of French authors and some from other countries (especially England). There are 83 satirical cartoons or caricatures which you can zoom in. All of them have a transcript of all the captions (in original language and in English), a brief historical contextualization and a short explanation of the drawing, together with all the data (author, year, source, type).
It has crossed my mind several times the idea of teaching history as teaching to remember. This is a very recent concept, almost the official reason why history should be included in 21st century curricula. Administrations of different countries are of course interested in students remembering certain facts/processes. Nevertheless, as historians, we fight for objectivity and critical thinking and it is impossible for us to teach students one side of the story or, worse than that, one story (unless we do not seek to build historical thinking skills, which would mean that we lack them and our work as teachers would completely counterproductive).
I think that this issue is of utter importance and, at the same time, very dangerous. We history teachers are quite aware of the power that we have. We can teach a way of looking at world, a way of judging others, a way of fighting, of voting, of justifying. We cannot do either of these, we are at school to students to build their way of looking at the world, their way of judging, their way of fighting, voting, justifying, making decisions.
Having said that, I should add that in the same way that we can become dangerous, the government may also undermine what schools attempt to build. I do not mind having an "official" list of things to be taught, I do not agree with the fact that only those should be taught and/or from only one point of view. From were I see it, the Argentine government promotes this by enhancing one memory (one side of the story of the last dictatorship, by no means the only de facto government we had).
In spite of this, I believe that teaching to remember is to be done in our classrooms bearing in mind that we are helping students build their own individual and collective memory based on national identity. This is not a minor issue since technology, globalization and interactivity, as Graciela Rubio (Universidad de Valparaíso) put it her article, have dislocated time and turned it into absolute present tense therefore automatically forgetting the past and avoiding any possible future. On the other hand, in the information era it is much easier to build collective memories based on far more different individual ones, including a wide range of subjective memories. These concepts of pedagogy of memory, communicative memory and cultural memory were first developed in Germany to face the inheritance of past actions and planning a future taking into account this experience and collaborating with affected people. The tension lies, according to this author, on what we choose to remember, who to remember, how we remember and what for. Sometimes, this tension is snowballed by politically correct topics. I do not think we should teach on some issues just because it is acceptable to do it or not acceptable not to do so.
The last issue of Teaching History (n° 141) published by the Historical Association was devoted to the Holocaust. I think it is remarkable that British schools include this topic in their humanities curricula and, as the journal shows, that many teachers reflect on what they teach when they teach the Holocaust. In general, teachers are keen on enriching what happened (facts) with how people lived it. Many schools plan trips to camps and other German Nazi landmarks to make students face history. Others use original pictures/sources/interviews to bring history to the classroom. But I think the Holocaust should be an example of something, not an isolated episode in human history. There are other examples of torture and genocide (and I am not going to discuss the (mis)usage of these words) and what we should be teaching is that men are capable of those atrocities, including the Holocaust, and because of that it is important to remember. As we Argentines we put it: Nunca más (Never again).
Joaquím Prats (University of Barcelona) argues that memory is not the same as history and that in the case of the teaching of history, memory should be a tool to learn history and build knowledge. Memory feeds history, it is its fuel, but it is not scientific comprehension of the past. I think this point is very important because some teachers forget their key role in the classroom and merely list a bunch of facts to be remembered by students for an exam. These teachers think that history is only memory. When teaching, Prats states, we are challenged by need to combine micro and macro spheres in a way that one cannnot be explained without the other. Individual memory cannot explain history, let alone build knowledge of historical processes/events. This is why the subject History is key in the school curriculum: because historical knowledge is by far more revolutionary than recreating memories.
In Latinamerican context, Diana Veneros Ruiz-Tagle and María Isabel Toledo Jofré (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile) argue that guided visits to historical sites contribute to build relevance on the memory of a specific fact, affected, of course, by the interpretation of recent history. By means of these visits, they could bring about students' appreciation of history and their history. You can read all about this here.
For a view on Argentine teaching of memory, click here.
You can go to Readings to access some articles on teaching and memory. You can find some activities that worked here.
To round it up, here is a video on a group of Latinamericans that went to Germany to learn from their experience on historical memory:
