In Their Words: Educator Reflects on Facing History in the UK
Martin Spafford is a history teacher at the George Mitchell School, a secondary school in the Waltham Forest area of London. Here are his thoughts on the difference Facing History and Ourselves can make in the classroom.
LONDON - Ours is a small secondary school in a multicultural, working-class area of East London where incomes tend to be low and unemployment is rising fast. The student body is varied, with students tracing their family origins to countries like Pakistan, Turkey, Somalia, Mauritius, West Africa, and Ireland. We have students from the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, and recent refugees from the Middle East and the Congo. Recently, a 14-year-old Afghan student told his classmates about his journey to London – how he lost his entire family and arrived here as an unaccompanied minor. For our students, the issues addressed by Facing History and Ourselves are their recently lived experiences.
Nathalie Chambers, who teaches Citizenship and RE1, and I first encountered Facing History at a Schools History Project conference in 2009. The work of Facing History resonated well with much of what Nathalie and I were already doing in the classroom at George Mitchell, but it also offered key opportunities for us to further develop our teaching to enable our students to connect history with their own moral choices, in particular the choice to participate in preventing violent abuses of human rights. We then attended the 2010 international seminar, an annual Facing History workshop that brings educators from around the world together in London. The materials and ideas were rich, the passion and commitment of the facilitators was inspiring, and the opportunity to be in conversation with educators working in areas of conflict around the globe was important as Nathalie and I prepared to teach this material to our students. Later, we partnered with Michael McIntyre, programme coordinator in the Facing History UK office, to explore how the organisation’s materials and methods could fit into our curricula. Michael ran a series of workshops with our department, sharing resources and generating wide-ranging discussions among teachers. With Michael’s help, we piloted a unit with one Year Nine class that drew from the resource book Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior.
We wanted our students to get a very different feeling from this unit. From the start, we encouraged them to reflect on their own responses and choices and to engage personally and we focused the content on the themes of perpetrator, bystander, and upstander behaviour today and in history. We abandoned exercise books and gave each student a small journal in which they were encouraged to write their own thoughts, ideas, and feelings as the unit moved forward.
Facing History resources such as the poem The Hangman, readings from Elie Wiesel, and the case study on the French headscarf controversy generated meaningful classroom discussions in which the students were able to connect history to their own life experiences. How should you respond to gun or knife crime in your community? Should you intervene if you see someone being bullied on the bus? Why do young people join gangs? After two months, the students created final projects that demonstrated what the course had meant to them. Some students made a film and others taught a lesson to younger students. Some created a play. One female student sang as her friend told classmates about the time one of his friends was murdered in a knife attack. The atmosphere in the room was charged and powerful.
We are so enthusiastic about how the pilot went that we will be using it with all of our Year Nine classes in 2012. Currently, over 20 of our Year Nine students are participating in a project funded by City Bridge in which they are discussing the 2011 summer riots in London through the Facing History lens.
How significant is Facing History for these young people? I think these students feel as though they have been on a journey together, sharing thoughts they hadn’t voiced, opening themselves to the wider world and to what history can teach us about the way we live our lives with others. Some recognised this at the time. Others found they could identify with the lessons of the past in ways they had not realised before and have moved on to be far more confident, self-examining, and inquisitive. Still others have become teachers themselves, leading other groups in discussions about these issues. Nearly all of them have chosen History or Citizenship as their GCSEs2 option. How far has it changed the way they will act in their own lives? Who knows? I suspect that in some cases, the effect may be deep.
Facing History enables us to collaborate, take risks, connect our subjects with our children’s lives, discover powerful stories to share with young people, consider new activities and – hopefully – influence the choices they may make in later life. It works.
***************
Learn more about our work in the United Kingdom.
***************
