Professional Learning Seminars on the Australian Curriculum: History

Community and Remembrance: Year 3

Jo Hawkins, PhD Candidatewww.historypunk.com@History_Punk

What’s your name? Where do you teach?

What is your teaching background?What do you want to get out of today?

“History is what it is. We should know the truth about it and we shouldn't allow it to colour our present and our future.”

Christopher Pyne, Shadow Minister for Education, July 2013.

“To say that ordinary Australians who are part of the national community today do not have any connection with the shameful aspects of our past is at odds with our exhortations that they have connections to the prideful bits.”

Noel Pearson, lawyer, academic, land rights activist

Two parallel worlds exist in the universe of history education in Australia.

One is the ideological world of politicians and journalists whose chief concerns are which history should be taught in schools and whether the agenda to construct the curriculum has been set by the radical-socialist left or the ultra-conservative right.

The other is the world of professional curriculum developers and practising classroom teachers who are faced with the everyday challenges of how to teach history in an engaging way to Australian school children in the compulsory years of schooling.

Dr Louise Zarmati, A history of misinformation, The Conversation, 25 July 2012

All history is local. It happened here.1. Explore the history around you. People, events and processes of change.

2. Place this history into context. Local, national and international.

3. First hand access to historical evidence. Photos, artefacts, field trips, oral history.

Community

Remembering/ Forgetting

Remembrance

“National commemorations use the events of history but the stories they tell are determined more by the politics of the present than the ideals of the past.”Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, St. Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 2000.

Remembrance

Remembering the First World War in Western Australia.

https://vimeo.com/29598334

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfxrTD-kPps

“Australians will stand beside our own to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.”Andrew Fisher, Australian Prime Minister (1908-1915)

Gallipoli

56,600 Ottoman Empire34,000 British9,800 French8,700 Australians2,700 New Zealanders1,370 British India

More than one quarter of the Australian soldiers chosen to land on Gallipoli were from WA.

Four years later, only one in four of them had escaped death or severe injury.

War memorials that honour ordinary soldiers are a modern invention…

Boulder War Memorial

Midland Railway Workshops

Anzac Cottage, Mount Hawthorn

Honour Avenues

Geraldton

Mandurah

Canberra

10 questions to ask at a historic site1. Can you say when this site became a historic

site? 2. Can you say who sponsored listing of the site? 3. Can you say who was/is the intended audience for

the site? 4. What, if anything, does the site ask you to go and

do? 5. What story about the past does the site tell? 6. Who is left out? 7. Are there problematic words or symbols that

would not have been used today, or by other groups?

8. How is the site used today? 9. How does this site fit with others that treat its

era? 10.What do you think might help to promote a useful

public understanding of this site?

Resources and ideas for the classroom

The Year 3 curriculum provides a study of identity and diversity in both a local and broader context.

Moving from the heritage of their local area, students explore the historical features and diversity of their community as represented in symbols and emblems of significance, and celebrations and commemorations, both locally and in other places around the world.

Key concepts:• sources• continuity and change• cause and effect• perspectives• empathy • significance

Key inquiry questions

• Who lived here first and how do we know?

• How has our community changed? What features have been lost and what features have been retained?

• What is the nature of the contribution made by different groups and individuals in the community?

• How and why do people choose to remember significant events of the past?

Field trips

Online archives

Other resources

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2TaLGlj6ig