Michael - My Blog

Social studies is all about the critical understanding of relevant social issues. Social studies units about these issues should be underpinned by a "conceptual understanding" or a "big idea" about society. Students used newspaper clippings to come up with the overall theme of "Apocalypse Theories" which meant that they were engaged from the beginning which was great. But it took weeks of me reading and researching and a social sciences faculty meeting to develop a conceptual understanding that would have better tied everyone's exhibits together. As a faculty the social sciences teachers came up with "How societies use apocalyptic thinking helps us to understand their cultural values". Had I been thinking along these lines earlier we could have looked at a real social issue, such as the way some fundamentalist Christians require certain conditions in Israel to take place before the Apocalypse and Second coming and the potential consequences for Palestinians of this kind of support. In depth exploration of this sort of solid, real-world issue could have served as the vehicle for the conceptual understanding above.

Students have learnt a lot about inquiry but next time I will work on developing a more focused social issue at the heart of the unit, instead of fairly traditional social studies lessons on, for example, the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. This way, even if students aren't successful with coming up with a great exhibition display, at least I can still be sure they have developed their conceptual understanding of an important social issue. Next year it will be good to exhibit students' learning on a website instead of an open evening for parents. They could advertise a launch date, and have a goal of the number of hits to the site.

Students have spent the week working on their proposals. They also had to complete a progress report ready for Monday outlining their inquiry question, what they have done so far, their next steps and any problems they have encountered. It has been good seeing the vast majority self-organise and manage their time, especially since we have a double period of two hours. Some students have demonstrated more engagement in the last 4 periods than all the year's classes combined.

My next entry is going to be after some thinking about what Michael Young calls "Powerful Knowledge" and how it might apply to what my students are doing in class at the moment.

I designed an "Apocalypse Theories Exhibition Proposal" booklet for students to fill in which included making "SMART" goals for three periods. Upon collecting them in there are still very few students who have got to a position where they have practical things to carry on with. Making an action plan is a very hard task and one they will still need lots of help with. There is lots of potential in many of their proposals and also evidence of what looks like a completely wasted 90 minutes of social studies for others. Is it because we have taught students to become so dependent on teachers that they are struggling so much? It is all very interesting anyway. Shifting the division of labour away from me so we are all active participants working towards a common goal is going to require a cultural shift in our class, but one that I am sure they are all up for. I have written in a whole lot of feedback on their proposals so the next test is to see the extent to which they take it on board.

What I am enjoying is the beginnings of the "French Pass Effect". At school camp, for 6 awesome days it feels like everyone forgets who is supposedly more intelligent than anyone else. There is an appreciation that everyone has different strengths in different contexts and no one is "smarter" or "less intelligent" than the next student. All ideas about "gifted and talented" fly out the window where they belong (apparently giftedness is innate, which implies, of course that the opposite, extremely low intelligence is also innate, an assumption based on simplistic and populist myths that ignore everything cognitive science has to say about the nature of the human brain and intelligence).

Anyway, what I really want to write about is Zombies. A bunch of students still really want to do zombies so I have said they need a water tight proposal before I accept their idea. After a short google search it does seem like a perfectly plausible topic. I have found one blog article which refers to the cranberries song "Zombies" in the following way:

"I think this music video is very telling of both the influence of zombies into modern popular culture and on the principles that zombies represent. The band decided to name their hit song after the famed ghouls because they portray the militants in Ireland, being told to patrol violently and following orders without regard for humanity. In this way, zombies often come to mind when thinking of people blindly doing things, whether violent, like Nazis, or whether innocently, like following the trends of consumer culture (such as the representation of the mall in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead). I thought this was really interesting to see how zombies in America have evolved from being simply flesh-eating monsters to entire symbols of mindless following."

Such an approach could easily lend itself to a sensible contribution to an exhibition on Apocalypse theories. I also found a great guardian article in the science section titled 'Zombie ants' controlled by parasitic fungus for 48m years. It is pretty amazing and I guess it would involve some science to explore if this could happen to humans, or more to the point, I expect, why it couldn't. There is also evidence that our culture's obsession with zombies also stems from early encounters between European explorers and Caribbean voodoo cults.

This morning the main learning intention was to have students create a plan of action for the next 4 periods using the learning wall and all our ideas on it. In short, they needed to outline how they would start the inquiry process. Well it was a bit scary because not much seems to have transferred from the guided inquiry process of Decide, Find, Record, Select, Present and Evaluate. From the action plans of some students the exhibition will be ready for visitors late Friday afternoon!

This is a bit of a hurdle and I am not quite sure how to overcome it because if we go into next period on the basis of the current action plans chaos will surely ensue.

Most students don't have a clear idea about why we are doing this exhibition I think which makes it hard to appeal to an audience. The idea of an exhibition display actually teaching the visitors something is a hard one; perhaps many students don't even fully realise what it means to be "taught" (that's ironic). Maybe we need to deconstruct this further too. Perhaps "provoke" or "make them think" would be better words. Brainstorming synonyms for teaching could be an interesting little exercise.

I guess one thing that will help is getting a few students to survey our potential audience. We really need to do some market research here. A few students visiting some exhibition designers and reporting back will also be of use and we are hopefully going to Te Papa this week too.

Perhaps they all need to do an individual research proposal where they write down their "rich question", a statement about why they think it is of significance or actually important to invest time into, key sources they will draw from, a statement about how their topic will juggle the hope and despair aspect of apocalypse, and a rough time line for completion. Based on today's time line this will be hopelessly inaccurate but it gives us something to reflect on.

Today was an interesting experience. There were a few things going down in the year 9 class and I could feel that a lesson of high-trust, openness and difficulty was not quite going to cut it. I played them a documentary about New Zealand's anti-nuclear position so the have been introduced to a whole lot of ideas about different apocalypse theories which they will need to choose from next week. The level of engagement with the documentary was amazing - I only wanted to play 10 minutes but we ended up going for the whole 50 minutes or so. The period after lunch was the one that they really needed some clear parameters around though.

I had an activity ready with a learning intention something along the lines of "We are learning how to use sources to construct a story about what a nuclear holocaust might be like".

They had to select key information that would help them to write a creative story from the testimony of a Hiroshima survivor, some Hiroshima and Chernobyl photographs and some information from a secondary source giving a broad overview of the Cold War and nuclear bombs. Using this selected information they need to write a one page short story about what a nuclear apocalypse might be like. These of course will be displayed as part of the exhibition. Students need to choose a perspective to write from, such as a male or female, child or adult, a tense, and a time period, either on the first day of the event, a week later or 10,20 or 50 years later. Probably what we need to do is take a look at some really good quality short stories and have a read and integrate that into our own stories too. The English teacher is doing some great debating stuff with them on our topic so I might need to go this alone when otherwise it might have worked to have him look at short stories. The great thing about our integrated learning programme though is that we work closely together so sourcing some short stories from the English Faculty is going to be no big deal at all.

Using the complexity theory idea of providing "enabling constraints" students also needed to include a child's toy, a friendship and a sign of hope in their story. And, of course, it needed to be a story based on some evidence.

Well today that was just the activity they needed. On Monday morning we'll go back to the hard stuff but having this activity up my sleeve prevented a lesson turning into a disaster. God only knows what the dramas were about but they were certainly being a bit weird.