The real highlight of this month was undoubtedly a workshop I was involved in for Yr 11 GCSE History students. They are just starting the OCR Depth Study Unit on Britain 1890-1918 - the Paper 2 unit which they often find difficult to get into. I think they find it hard to switch mentally from focussing on black civil rights in the USA to going right back to the beginning of the Twentieth Century. As this unit also involves using evidence, it seems to add an extra layer of difficulty.
I had decided to put together a workshop which would give students a real sense of time and place of what it was like to live in Britain as it moved into the Twentieth Century. I enlisted the help of 2 good friends that I had really enjoyed working with in the past: Tracey Clowes, Outreach Officer at the RCM in Truro and Chloe Phillips, Learning Officer for Cornwall Records Office. We worked together on the Civil War project last year and I know how brilliant they both are to work with.
Over the course of several meetings we put together a 2 hour experience which took them from 1891 to the outbreak of the Great War. Tracey got the workshop off to a great start by recreating a Victorian classroom and getting the students to play along with a 20-minute lesson including writing on slates, mental maths with pre-decimal money, inspection of hands and nails and even a singing lesson. The students quickly got into role and many of them were happy to dress up. Chloe had scoured school log-books to find some brilliant excuses for missing school which students read out as we did the register - my particular favourite was the boy who took a day off because a man in the village had just bought a car for the 1st time and he had to go and see it.
Chloe then took over and put the students into families by giving each of them a name and they then had to study extracts from the census to find out where they lived and who with. The fact that they were genuine entries from Liskeard really mattered to the students who were able to locate where some of the places were. Tracey had brought a huge number of artefacts along and students chose things which they thought their "family" would have used. To me, this was the best part of the day as students gathered informally around objects, investigating them, picking them up and asking questions about them - real hands-on history.
Chloe then produced some fantastic documents which showed early 20th Century solutions to problems such as old age, poverty and unmarried mothers - students were shocked to find out how easy it seemed to be to find themselves
in Bodmin Asylum.
We then looked at the impact on Cornwall of the Great War - again with some brilliant documents from Chloe from which students listed the huge number of changes they could see recorded in the documents. The session finished with the students creating their own army recruitment posters posing in costume for photographs.
We ran the session 3 times - each time the students were totally engaged and came away inspired. The evaluations from the students were stunning - you know you are doing something right when the only criticism was that it should have been longer.
I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions. To me this is what teaching History should be: students recreating a sense of the past, using genuine artefacts and documents and given the freedom to ask their own questions. It also proved the value of using outside experts to give students access to another voice. The great shame is that these opportunities are likely to become more difficult to set up. A few days after this event I learned that my AST role ends this year and restructuring at the RCM means this is probably Tracey's last outreach experience. We have to find a way to keep doing stuff like this. Education should be about creating special moments in young people's lives that inspire and excite them and give them something to remember for years to come.
