From the coming of the knights to EU membership. An innovative Maltese history textbook based on history thinking skills and evidential work

From the Coming of the Knights to EU Membership An innovative Maltese history textbook based on history thinking skills and evidential work Vella, Yosanne. „From the Coming of the Knights to EU Membership: An innovative Maltese history textbook based on history thinking skills and evidential work.“ Eckert.Beiträge 2010/11. http://www.edumeres.net/urn/urn:nbn:de:0220-2010-00524. Eckert.Beiträge 2010/11 Yosanne Vella Diese Publikation wurde veröffentlicht unter der creative-commons-Lizenz: Namensnennung-Keine kommerzielle Nutzung-Keine Bearbeitung 3.0 Unported; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.de Vella – An Innovative Maltese History Textbook 1 From the Coming of the Knights to EU Membership ; an innovative Maltese history textbook based on history thinking skills and evidential work. Dr. Yosanne Vella Senior Lecturer Faculty of Education, University of Malta Introduction From the Coming of the Knights to EU Membership is a new Maltese history textbook for 13 to 15-year olds choosing history as their special option subject in secondary school. This textbook was edited and part-authored by the author of this paper and published by the Maltese History Teachers’ Association in October 2008. This textbook covers the main historical events that are proposed in the state secondary level history curriculum for history special option groups, referred to in Malta as the SEC Syllabus. The first school leaving national examination based on this curriculum was held in May 2009. I have been working in history pedagogy for over 20 years, but up until now I have avoided writing history textbooks. For years there have been many complains about the lack of history textbooks in all levels in Maltese schools, however I have resisted the idea of being involved in the writing of one because I suspected that in some ways the absence of a book was a blessing in disguise. Throughout the years I have as a teacher educator been privileged to have watched some history lessons given by my B.Ed and P.G.C.E. student history teachers which have been absolutely brilliant. These wonderful history teachers involved their students in effective tasks and activities which truly engage historical thinking. I have often wondered would these history lessons have occurred had there been a textbook? The temptation to follow slavishly the official history textbook might have been too great to resist, and excellent history lessons might have been replaced by mediocre ones. The last thing our secondary school history students need is a textbook to be learnt off by heart. That is not how good history learning works. Students need to be bombarded with a variety of teaching approaches where the focus is on active learning involving understanding historical knowledge with a focus on primary history sources and analyses of different perspectives and interpretations. I am not the only one who believes that textbooks are not necessarily beneficial; this is what Christine Counsell has to say: “Teachers who are learning to lead discussion, to devise activities that will support discussion with younger or weaker pupils, teachers who are thinking hard about their discipline (the fact that it is provisional and contested) need support They need nurture. They don’t need fixed or single textbooks! This can only close down historical discussion in the lesson and inhibit challenging professional thinking among teachers.” Counsell:2004:29 urn:nbn:de:0220-2010-00524 Vella – An Innovative Maltese History Textbook 2 Contesting established norms in history textbook writing in Malta However, with some caution it is possible to avoid the pitfalls of traditional history textbooks. Therefore as the editor/writer of this textbook I was very careful to make sure that the objective of From the Coming of the Knights to EU Membership would not be to create an all encompassing coverage of the SEC syllabus, something to be regimentally followed by the class teacher. On the contrary this textbook is meant only to offer a supplement to the syllabus to be used in conjunction with various other activities. The practical examples found in this textbook purposely only touch a few of the sub-topics in the syllabus. I co-ordinated and edited this book however I wrote it together with nine other writers. All these writers are experienced secondary school history teachers and most of the exercises we contributed are tried and tested tasks we created and used with our own classes and which produced exciting results. These tasks are really meant to act as templates, on which teachers can build similar interactive activities. This textbook was purposely structured not to upstage the teachers who must continue to be the innovators of active history learning. When I approached the History Teachers’ Association with my proposal for the creation of a history textbook for history option classes, the Committee immediately welcomed the idea and gave me their full support. I explained that this was not going to be a normal history textbook based on narrative but rather a totally new approach in history textbook writing in Malta. This project, for indeed one can call it a project rather than a mere book, was going to be a team effort. I wanted the writers to be all practioners in the classroom, history teachers who were interested in history thinking skills and working with sources. The pedagogical principles behind the teaching approach in this textbook are not based on Maltese traditional history teaching approaches which rest on the assumption that history is a ready product; the writings of historians, and therefore should only involve transmission of information and facts. The emphasis of this book is on the 'what' to teach not the 'how' to teach. The teaching approach behind this textbook is different from traditional approaches in that besides the historical information the exercises involve source analysis and focus on specific history thinking skills, what R.Ben Jones outlined back in 1973 as a history teaching method that "lays less emphasis on content and more on the process of learning". (p.14) urn:nbn:de:0220-2010-00524 Vella – An Innovative Maltese History Textbook 3 Pedagogical principles behind learning objectives of textbook The teaching approach adopted for this textbook has proved to be highly successful and effective in history teaching (Scott, 1978; Shemilt,1987; Harnett,1995; Lee, Peter, Dickinson, Alaric & Ashby, Rosalyn ,1996; Vella, 2004)). It is an approach which challenges students’ thinking and produces higher order thinking, all perfectly possible even with young pupils. Lee, Dickinson and Ashby (1996) showed that children’s thinking in history is far more sophisticated than previously imagined. After analysing children’s ideas on testing explanations in history, Lee, Dickinson and Ashby (1996) advise: “From the point of view of day-to-day classroom history teaching, our analysis so far suggests that we need to recognise that quite young children can begin to make sophisticated distinctions and develop powerful intellectual tools. We may need both to match such ideas with greater precision in our teaching objectives, and to increase our awareness of assumptions which hold some children back.” (p.19) For this to occur a history textbook should create a classroom environment which offers an active learning situation for the pupil, rather than one which presents the textbook as the giver of information. If we limit history to merely handing over one fact after the other, we would be missing the key objective of not just history teaching but of history itself. Kitson Clark (1967) says that good history produces people that think about rather than merely accept information: “What is your authority for saying this? And, as a particular question: How do you know that this happened? They are questions which both historians, and men and women who are not historians, ought to learn to ask much more often than they do.”(p.55) Therefore it is important to teach in history not just the factual knowledge, but what Bruner (1966) calls the ‘structure’ of the subject. Historical method involves historical thinking and it is the analyses of sources in particular, that provide the practice for a mode of thinking similar to what the historian goes through. This approach in history textbook writing is in fact based on constructivist teaching methods. Vygotsky (1978) emphasises the role of the teacher as facilitator and this textbook emulates this role. Absorbing skills and concepts on your own is a slow process however under structured guidance a higher attainment level is reached. It is hoped that the key questions found in the activities of this book students’ thinking will be supported and history skills and concepts in the learners start to emerge. urn:nbn:de:0220-2010-00524 Vella – An Innovative Maltese History Textbook 4 Evidence and Sources Primary sources provide evidence from the past, but sources and evidence are not one and the same, Hinton (1990) explains the difference between them in the following way: "The distinction between evidence and sources is an important one because sources are merely the raw material of an historian; only when they are appropriately interrogated will they yield evidence" (p.7) The chapters in this textbook start with a brief background summary of each topic but then this is followed by wide range of history source work on the particular themes. This textbook targets three types of primary sources; written sources, pictorial sources and oral sources. Written Evidence Written sources are what academic historians mostly worked on and in this textbook such things as documents, manuscripts, letters, lyrics, statistical data, newspaper documents and books were used. Written sources are generally recognised as important original sources which cannot be dismissed and ignored. As Fines & Nichol (1997) say "Through reading documents and working upon them, children come face to face with people from the past in their own words. A document forces the pupil to participate at first-hand in a dialogue with the past" (p.81). Jamieson (1971) quotes the authors of Archives and Education (HMSO, 1968) who describe the excitement and relevance of written documents: ‘the original letter or document is charged with an emotion, an urgency and an immediacy, to which the later printed record can never pretend. For a child to read of the torture of Guido Fawkes is one thing; it is another to see the firm signature to his examination of November 8th and the faltering halfcompleted effort of November 10th, written after the execution of the king’s warrant, to use 'the gentler torture first, et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur.' That Nelson really did lose an arm at Santa Cruz becomes emphatically clear when we see his rightand left-handed letters. At least for some – and probably for more than is generally imagined-the original document, letter or journal is the best door into the past". (p.28) Similarly the activities involving written sources in this textbook tried to capture this ‘door to the past’. The following are just three examples of written source tasks taken from the textbook From the Coming of the Knights to EU Membership: urn:nbn:de:0220-2010-00524 Vella – An Innovative Maltese History Textbook 5 Example 1 : Statistical data 1914 Example 2: Newspaper articles early 1960s urn:nbn:de:0220-2010-00524 Vella – An Innovative Maltese History Textbook 6 Example 3: Early twentieth century song lyrics Pictorial Evidence Pictures as historical visual evidence can be anything that shows an image from the past in some format. They are useful for depicting an image of a particular moment in time and pictures have long been used by teachers to teach various subjects not just history, however, pedagogically their importance in history textbooks goes way beyond merely showing something to children in an interesting and motivating way. In history textbooks, pictures can be used not merely as illustrations but as sources in their own right. Pictures appeal much more than text to our visual perception because less mental energy is needed and the way a person interprets pictures depends very much on his or her past experience, mood and interest. (Pettersson, 1989) They can be very exciting sources to use, for example with regards to portraits, Morris (1989) calls them "the gossip columns, newsflashes, party political broadcasts and family albums of the past" and says: “Portraits are therefore a bubbling mass of pent up emotions, events, comments and personalities" (p.3). In the case of historical political cartoons Harrison (1981) says that "the cartoon may help to secure attention because it is novel, because it promises fun". (p.110) This textbook used portraits, paintings, maps, photos, posters and political cartoons to create activities and tasks where pupils can analyse primary sources. The following are a few examples to illustrate how primary visual sources were used in From the Coming of the Knights to EU Membership: urn:nbn:de:0220-2010-00524 Vella – An Innovative Maltese History Textbook 7 Example 4: Sixteenth Century Maps urn:nbn:de:0220-2010-00524 Vella – An Innovative Maltese History Textbook 8 Example 5 : Eighteenth century portraits urn:nbn:de:0220-2010-00524