Teaching World War IDavid Hibbert, Cheney School

Jason Todd, OUDE

A collaborative task design project to support the design of schemes of

work taking a wider view of the war

• Where was the first shot of the First World War fired by a British Soldier?

Collaborative project

Task Design in History• Complexity- emphasis on the

contingent and use of evidence.

• Centrality of the Enquiry Question

• Centrality of the student; their affective needs, values, prior know.

• Providing student access to broader cultural enterprises.

First World War• My doctoral work• Limited sense of global

reach• Limited sense of

consequences• Limited connection-

relevance.

Challenge-Looking for complexity

• Revisit/revise your aims.• Enable a broader perspective of the FWW.• Enable an engagement with contemporary

cultural ref points critically.• Attend to diversity• Best enabled through collaboration.

What have we forgotten about World War One?

What do we remember about World War One?

How is World War One remembered in Ireland?

L/O: To put the impact of World War One within the context of Irish history.

How does it remember World War One?

How does it remember World War One?

Principles

PlanningAccess

• Where was the first shot of the First World War fired by a British Soldier?

It was on the Gold Coast that the first shot was fired by a British soldier in the last War. It came from a rifle carried by a dusky warrior whose name was Sergeant Alhaji Grunshi, and whose face bore the tribal scars of a people familiar only to the traveller who has penetrated into the hot savannah land north of the Colony of Ashanti […] Sergeant Grunshi was a member of the Gold Coast Regiment, West African Frontier Force, and was one of the contingent of troops which marched into the then German dependency of Togoland shortly after the war was declared. There was little show of resistance to this invasion, but at Lomesome miles from the capital, a few Germans, ensconced in a factory, opened fire on a British patrol. This fire was promptly returned by Sergeant Grunshi and the first bullet to leave his rifle (although neither Alhaji nor any ofhis companions realized it at the time) signalized the opening of four years of bitter hostilities in the course of which Empire was to lose more than 1,000,000 dead. During that war hundredsof Gold Coast men followed Sergeant Grunshi on active service inWest and East AfricaThe Times, The Gold Coast Mobilised, 25th March 1940.

http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/space-into-place/commonwealth-cemeteries-of-world-war-one/http://ww1centenary.oucs.ox.ac.uk/space-into-place/commonwealth-cemeteries-of-world-war-one/

Quakershttps://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=ztmNGmuUWfH0.k5FfbOPspjLI

What do we know about how First world war is taught? What is learnt?

• British Council report-Remember the world as well as the war• http://

www.britishcouncil.org/organisation/publications/remember-the-world

• http://ww1intheclassroom.exeter.ac.uk/• My own Doctoral research-students understandings

Recent scholarship

• ‘teaching the First World War with an emphasis on suffering risks blinkering pupils to the diversity of the war’s experience.’

• ‘more words have been written about the British war poets than about all the non-white troops put together’ (Das, p7)

• ‘IF women were being viewed they fit into this picture as the idealised volunteer war nurse… repository of grief.’

• The war, in fact, was far from a unitary experience, whether during the 1914-1918 period or in memory.’ (Watson, p2)

Challenge-Looking for complexity

• Revisit/revise your aims.• Enable a broader perspective of the FWW.• Enable an engagement with contemporary

cultural ref points critically.• Attend to diversity• Best enabled through collaboration.

Possible ways forward

1. Re-reading the familiar2. Increasing the range of sources3. Increasing the scope of analysis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hermann_Detzner.png

Spot the difference?

Letter from Violet Markham, Morning post July 22 1915"the use of khaki and the adoption of military titles strikes a wrong and jarring note, because women's activities hardly give women a claim to assume the uniforms and titles of men

Olive Dent wrote in her 1917 book, ‘A VAD in France’, that she had become a volunteer nurse because "defence was a man's job, and I, unfortunately, was a woman...

George Puckle, a soldier, told his sister Phyllis, a VAD, that she "must be very glad to feel "she was really doing something now."

If you are interested in this project…

This collaboration was stimulated by the ideas in Ian Thompson (ed) (2014) Designing Tasks in Secondary Education – with particular reference to the chapter by Jason Todd. A working group, including three schools (Cheney, Didcot Girls and King Alfred’s) has been developing the ideas together, thinking about appropriate schemes for Key Stage 3 and for GCSE. We had a one day workshop together and now meet occasionally after school. If you are interested in joining them please contact Jason Todd at the University of Oxford, Department of Education: jason.todd@education.ox.ac.uk