Society in 1930s Stalinist Russia

The HSC Modern History National Study for Russia and the Soviet Union can pose a challenge for Modern History teachers due to the sheer breadth of content that begs to be covered. Aside from the best essay responses on the subject revealing a broad and in-depth contextual knowledge of Bolshevik Russia, it's also a fact that any half-interested History teacher will find it difficult to resist the magnetic pull of Stalinist Russia's more fascinating asides. 

For example, Stalin's second wife Nadezhda was 17 years old when she married the 43 year old Joseph Stalin. And as if that wasn't creepy enough, she was the daughter of one of Stalin's friends and Stalin had known her since she was 4! 

Of course, this is largely irrelevant if your student is faced with an essay question about collectivisation and Stalin's attempts to close the industrial gap between the USSR and the rest of the developed world. But how can we ignore the juicier bits of Russian history when it helps engage our students with the wider narrative surrounding the madness of Stalin's Soviet Union? 

My weakness with this topic is, undoubtedly, the 1930s. I tend to spend the larger slice of time teaching students about the Bolshevik consolidation of power in the 1920s and the move towards the Five Year Plans. The part that I have more trouble disseminating is the various aspects of living in Stalin's totalitarian regime - there just seems to be so much to cover, and I get so fascinated by each and every facet of this intense society that it becomes a bit of a Hobson's choice trying to work out the ones that should make up the narrative that's taught to the students. 

In addition to this challenge, I have to be careful not to ignore the skills-based part of the course. It's very appealing sometimes to just stick to the content and travel through the narrative but Year 12 students need to be able to sit down at the end of the year and write a series of essays in the pressure-cooker that is the HSC. It's sometimes assumed that Modern History students are au fait with structuring essays because the subject is so academic, however, as I've probably mentioned elsewhere on this blog, my Modern History classes tend to range from students who do Advanced English to those who do English Studies. With that in mind, I need to ensure that I'm teaching enough of the skills to support all of my students in being able to communicate what they've learned. 

This means teaching one of the key Super Six Comprehension strategies; summarising. It's easy to associate the Super Six with just primary school and Stages 4 and 5, but it can be dangerous to assume that Stage 6 students are experts at comprehension. Because, well, they often aren't. 

It's never too late to teach literacy.

Here's a resource on society in 1930s USSR: Stalin's Russia. 

And a graphic organiser to go with it: Graphic Organiser for Russian Society.

Get your students to read through the resource and use the graphic organiser to summarise the various aspects of Soviet society under Stalin. The graphic organiser is fairly straight-forward and isn't particularly different to a series of comprehension questions, however, by arranging the information in this fashion students can get an idea on how to separate their ideas. It also acts as a scaffold towards hopefully engaging the kids in creating their own summaries of documents.

Pre-Contact Aboriginal History

Map sourced from https://ears2theground.wordpress.com/about/

A lot of stuff I've been posting lately has been related to more senior subjects, like Modern History or Stage 5 English, so I thought I'd reach back into my earlier years and put up something from when I taught Year 8 History.

Contact and Colonisation is a fascinating and significant area of History, and continuing research into Indigenous history means our perspective of Australia's deep cultural heritage is always developing. Getting Stage 4 students to engage with the Aboriginal side of our country's history is not only relevant but incredibly valuable in terms of teaching cross-cultural pride as an intrinsic part of the Australian identity. 

The PowerPoint below deals with pre-contact Indigenous history in Australia. It's a four-slide PPT accompanied by a sheet. I haven't taught it for a few years due to not having had a Year 8 History class, but I do recall that it was sufficient enough to fill an hour-length lesson with a mixed ability Stage 4 group.

It's a pretty self-explanatory PPT, just put it up on the screen and move through it with the students. The blue text represents the activities that the students need to do, and the sheet goes with the middle slide (there's a picture of the sheet on said slide). 

Pre-Contact Aboriginal History PPT

Different Perspectives sheet

I'd love to teach more in the way of pre-contact Aboriginal history but I sometimes find it hard to source material that's accessible to Stage 4 students. How do my fellow History teachers approach this area of history, especially since it's something that isn't tied so closely to written accounts?

English Textual Concepts Framework - What Is It?

With English, we can analyse EVERYTHING! Look at this great advertisement.

I will just say this first, up front - I love the English Textual Concepts. I want to turn them into a blanket and wrap myself up in them, or throw it all into a smoothie that I can drink every morning. The English Textual Concepts framework makes English into a clearer subject in terms of teaching and learning, crystallising a seemingly infinite subject area into 15 broad but separate concepts and 6 concurrent process. 

English can be a 'slippery' subject (Eva Gold's words, not mine!) so a solid framework on which we can hang the subject is manna from heaven for English teachers. That aforementioned slipperiness is reflected in everything from the blank look on a student's face when expected to respond to a question about their favourite TV show, to the discipline's extensive use of impenetrable holistic criteria to assess student work. It's in that moment when a kid finally cracks, and exasperatedly exclaims, "I hate English, sir, I don't get it!" or another student remarks, "What do we even need this for?" (that old chestnut!) 

I used to struggle with explaining to laymen what English was even about. It's tempting to sometimes say 'books' or 'reading and writing' because that's what most people see it as, but as any English teacher (sadly?) knows, books are a very small aspect of the subject. And in contrast, reading and writing is every teacher's job - literacy is a concern for all subject areas, not just English. With more experience under my belt, I now quickly tell students and parents, "English is about thinking". 

But whilst that is true, it's still a bit nebulous - slippery - for some folks to get their heads around. So that's where this English Textual Concepts framework comes in, transforming a difficult key learning learning area into something much more solid for everyone to get their heads around.

The framework is (in its most general terms) arranged into these domains:

Concepts

• Argument
• Author / Authority
• Character
• Code and Convention
• Context
• Figurative Language
• Genre
• Intertextuality
• Literary Value
• Narrative
• Representation
• Perspective
• Point of View
• Style
• Theme

Processes

• Engaging personally
• Engaging critically
• Understanding
• Connecting
• Experimenting
• Reflecting 

The concepts lend themselves to choice - as the teacher, you can look at a text and figure out which 2 to 4 concepts you'd like to concentrate on. The processes then sit alongside these - they're the skills that need to be taught in order for students to come to grips with the concepts. You could perhaps think of it in terms of the syllabus outcomes, with the concepts as your learn about outcomes and the processes as your learn to outcomes. But maybe that's oversimplifying a paradigm that has been constructed on its own terms as an entirely separate but complimentary framework. I guess there's a whole other blog in that discussion!

Here's a brief example of how the concepts can be used, with the poem She by Pedro Xisto:

That's the poem above. Neat, huh?

Anyway, today I attended some Professional Learning on the English Textual Concepts and this concrete poem by Pedro Xisto was used as an example by Ann Small of a potential text for Year 9 poetry. It's a poem that works quite well with looking at the concept of Code and Convention.

"Codes and conventions are prisms through which we interpret the world and ascertain our place in it". Well, yes, of course - but getting more specific, Code and Convention is about structure. At a Kindergarten level you start out looking at morphemes and letters, then as the students develop through primary school to secondary they look at:

• Verbal, visual and digital signs.
• Sentences and pictures
• Paragraphs, conversations, films, novels, genres... (whole texts, and whole meta-texts)

It's grammar. If you've been following this blog you'll know how truly fond I am of grammar. I feel very pleased that the concept of Code and Convention allows us to focus on this in an English context. 

 

Looking at this odd three-letter poem, we can address it in terms of Code and Convention quite easily. What interpretations can students come up with while looking at this poem? What do the letters represent? What conventions of layout are used and how does this influence meaning? Is there repetition of a letter? Is contrast used? What about the relative size of letters? Where are they placed?

In other words:

- At the letter level, what is being said? 

- As a picture, what does it represent?

- As a text, what is the message, and how do you interpret what the composer is saying?

I had never seen this poem before today but I can tell you now, I think it would be really fun to do with a class. Firstly, as analysis using the concept of Code and Convention, and then, secondly (as suggested by presenter Ann Small), a creative activity where students come up with their own concrete poem in the same style - followed by a written explanation of what they're trying to say in their poem.

It's fabulous. 

The USSR: Collectivisation Source Analysis

Propaganda poster showing the fist of Soviet Russia smiting the greedy Kulak (rich peasant). Kulaks were the enemy of collectivisation, and a ready scapegoat on which Stalin could blame the peasantry's many woes.

I'm right in the midst of teaching the Modern History National Study, Option G: Russia and the Soviet Union (damn, that name is so catchy) and have been chatting to my students about Stalin's Five Year Plans and the process of collectivisation. 

I've come to realise that it's worth spending at least a few lessons approaching collectivisation from a few different angles. In one lesson we did a role-play activity in which students moved through the stages of Marxist society - from feudalism/capitalism to socialism, and from socialism to collectivisation (adapted from a great activity by one of my colleagues, Ashlee Horton). 

In a more recent lesson, I gave the class some sources about collectivisation so they could practice their source analysis. In previous posts I talked about taking a more grammar-based approach to source analysis - here and here - and described the way text chain identification can assist students in building their ability to decode unfamiliar words in order to increase their content-specific vocabulary. 

Let's not beat around the bush, HSC Modern History is a difficult subject. And whilst Modern History is the sort of course that rewards students who work hard, read regularly, and have no major issues writing essays, it's also a course that attracts a diverse array of students with a variety of learning styles that don't necessarily encompass those skills. For some of these students, who may also be undertaking the non-ATAR English Studies course, extra support is needed to scaffold the skills section of Modern History. Conceptual approaches like OCMAP or COMBAT can elicit some great analysis from many students, but taking a grammar-based approach can help open the process up to students who need something else. 

The first source in the sheet below is a speech from Joseph Stalin about his motivations behind thrusting the Soviet Union into a brave new world of super-farms. Students start out by identifying some text chains in the source. A text chain is a string of connected words in a text that mean the same thing. Finding and linking these synonyms allows students to build their vocabulary in relation to the content, scaffolding the reading process in order to dissuade them from disengagement before they attempt whole-text analysis.

You can start this out by modelling one or two text chains on the board. Pick a word out, such as "slow down", and join it to "put a check on" and then "reduced". Students can then do this with any number of words in the text, building up their understanding of the whole source by creating meaning within and across sentences.

The next couple of questions then follow on from this understanding to get the students engaging with the content and the reasons for Stalin's choice of language. For teachers looking (or needing) to differentiate their work more substantially due to the presence of students with a wide range of learning abilities, this grammatical approach provides an alternative way-in for any kids struggling to get to grips with the usual methods for analysing historical sources.

After the Stalin speech there are some tables about production and collectivisation in 1930s USSR, and an activity where this information needs to be converted into a graph. I like this sort of stuff because it's a legitimately useful way to use numeracy skills in Modern History, and it can make the learning more concrete for those students who are more mathematically-minded. 

Anyway, the activities are all below on the sheet.

Resource:


A Source on Collectivisation

Engaging with Drama in the English classroom

I'm an English teacher but I don't really go to watch theatre all that often. I'd like to, but every time I try the dog eats my ticket and then I'm not able to.

So, when I first started teaching I found it a little difficult to get my head around teaching the Drama component of English. Back when I was a student, doing a play like Cosi or Macbeth simply meant reading the play and then answering some questions about it, and for some people this is still the best way to approach the study of a play. But, having been exposed to (slightly) more theatre now and seeing how some other teachers approach Drama, I'm all too aware that in order to make a play into a living, breathing thing there must be some engagement with the fact that it's a text that's designed to be performed.

You have to get your students to be okay with this while they're relatively young. A class of energetic Year 7s are more likely to perform a play in the class room than your typically seasoned and battle-hardened Year 10s. The sooner the teacher engages kids in the idea of performance as a reasonable way to respond to a text, the more helpful it will be in getting our students to think about plays in the terms that they're meant to be thought about in.

It's therefore really useful to teach the Drama-specific techniques used by playwrights, directors, production crews and acting ensembles. One such aspect of production that's fun and fairly easy to get Year 7s to work with is blocking.

Blocking refers to where actors are instructed to stand in relation to the space allowed by the set on stage. It's used in film as well, but in theatre it is far more important because the actors need to consider the audience. If an actor is accidentally facing away from the audience, it makes it difficult for the audience to identify or understand what's going on. Likewise, if the actors all face the audience directly, all of the time, it can make the action in the play feel too contrived and artificial.

Below is a resource that can be adapted for use with any play. The top section of the sheet shows an example of how the opening scene of the play The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler could be blocked, and the section below shows an empty stage space.

1. Explain to students the process of blocking and why it's useful. Get them to look closely at the example on the sheet.
2. Ask students to use the space below to block a scene out of their choice from the class text. Make sure that they label each character, object, and set piece that they choose to feature.
3. Project the sheet on the whiteboard and get some students to come up and draw their examples of blocking on for the rest of the class to see.
4. If you have a highly engaged and passionate class, get the students to block the scene at the front of the classroom in small groups. 

This should take about 20-25 minutes.

Resource: Blocking

The History Wars

History Wars! Sounds almost tautological, doesn't it? So much of our History syllabus is built around wars; World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Cold War... As Australians, our historical identity is constructed in relation to each of the 'great' wars of the 20th Century. One needs only look at ANZAC celebrations each year to see the near-religious fervour and respect that surrounds this aspect of Australian culture. 

The 'History Wars' themselves only have a tertiary relationship with war though, the term instead refers to the metaphorical battles fought by historians, journalists, and politicians over what the 'official' version of history should be for a nation. Many countries have their own versions of this debate. Japan continues to navigate a delicate relationship with their imperial past as the 'rapists' of Nanking, China. Quite recently, the U.S. senate intervened in plans for the Smithsonian museum to depict the less savoury aspects of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the less said about Turkey's foreign relations during the 19th century, the less likely you are to incite vehement argument from Greeks, Cypriots and Armenians.

A look at the Australian History Wars is often a great way to involve students in the contestability that forms so much of the crux of History Extension.

Our nation's history has been heavily contested over the last 30-40 years, and provides an excellent opportunity for Extension students to really grapple with the front-lines of historical discussion and argument. The debates that continue to fuel the History Wars are also demonstrative of the sort of debate we'd like to see students spearhead for their own History Extension Project.

Some examples of various aspects of the History Wars in Australia are:

• The political debates surrounding what content should be taught to students in Australian schools.
• Keith Windschuttle, and his footnote-debunking attacks on Left Wing historians (such as Lyndell Ryan).
• The ongoing arguments over whether the decline of Indigenous Australian culture and population constitutes genocide or not.
• The 'black armband' (Left Wing/Apologist) school of historians vs. the 'three cheers' (Right Wing/Traditionalist) school.
• Whether the 'Frontier Wars' between colonists and Indigenous Australians should be included in Australia's 'official' list of wars (and, by extension, whether the War Memorial should acknowledge these conflicts).
• The concept of 'Terra Nullius'.
• Were the Aboriginal people the first Australians?

Anyway, below you'll find an introductory powerpoint to go through with students. While you discuss each slide the students can fill in the graphic organiser with their thoughts and notes.

Resources:
The History Wars PPT

History Wars Graphic Organiser

STEM Sells

It's Thursday afternoon, and I'm sitting in a lecture theatre at Western Sydney University simply because the professional learning on STEM has been offered as a free seminar. I've heard this acronym a few times over the last year and since it's free I thought I should come see what's it all about. 

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths. The STEM organisation has grown as a response to Australia's flagging home-grown talent in these areas, in the hope that better ties can be made between high schools and industry to plug the gap. I'm paraphrasing here, but one great opening idea to this lecture ran as thus, "The more connections a young person has with industry, the higher their chance of post-school success". STEM seeks to embed this philosophy into Australian education through the support of the Beacon Foundation and Origin Foundation, in the hope that our senior students will start selecting these subjects in greater numbers.

This chart shows the Top 10 performing countries for Maths, Sciences and Reading (please excuse the poor lighting).

Many students are not choosing STEM subjects at high schools. For example, the number of students who don't study maths at all has tripled in recent times. In Australia, 30% of staff in some STEM sectors are manpower imported from overseas, and coders created in this country are almost all male. The Beacon Foundation seeks to connect STEM businesses with schools in order to build more productive pathways into these industries.

So where do my KLAs English and History fit in? Well, if you want to be a teacher, you will - believe it or not - find that STEM skills are highly useful in working as an effective educator in our increasingly administrative and data-driven profession. It's also believed by the STEM organisation that 1/3 of the jobs of the future haven't been invented yet, so I think we should also therefore consider that current jobs will also undergo additional evolution in conjunction with technology and use of data. The way that teachers teach in the future will be radically different to the way we teach now, in much the same way that current professional expectations contrast quite heavily with the way teaching was conducted 30 years ago. 

From a content-driven standpoint, English in particular can actually contribute to the deficit in STEM industries by addressing gender stereotypes. The sheer dearth of females in STEM jobs in Australia has been borne out of gender stereotyping that continues to persists as an ingrained aspect of Western society. This is where the importance of the English curriculum comes into play, with several opportunities throughout Years 7 to 12 to address our society's cultural constructs regarding gender, which should help encourage more teenage girls to become interested in STEM subjects. Additionally, from a STEM standpoint, we should also be ensuring that numeracy is as accounted for in humanities subjects as we'd like literacy to be catered for in the STEM subjects.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this seminar was an interview panel with some industry professionals. From left to right in the picture above, we have:

• Andy McDaid - manager of sourcing programs for Origin Energy
• Sean Barrett - Head of Origin Foundation
• Mark Bernhardt - Senior HSE Business Partner - Origin Energy (Health Sector Environment)
• Ben St Clair - Manager, Market Risk Development - Origin Energy 
• Catherine Attard - Associated Professor WSU
• Scott Harris - Chief Exec of Beacon Foundation

Each spoke about their interest in STEM subjects and the ways these domains of knowledge are imperative for their respective industries. 

This chart shows the motivations behind teachers choosing to specialise in STEM subjects. Blue = 47%, Darker Green = 29%, Light Green = 24%

Barriers to student uptake of STEM subjects. Green = 32%, Grey = 26%, Dark Blue = 30%, Light Blue = 16%, Orange = 16%

How much do we currently engage industry in the delivery of our curriculum? No = 49%, Sometimes = 14%, Yes = 37%.

WARNING: I'm going to get political now, so close this tab if you don't want to think about all of this too negatively.

STEM ultimately wants to prevail in creating an 'innovation pedagogy'. There is, however, one great irony that needs addressing here - in a political regime that promotes 'innovation', why is education funding so poorly considered by Malcolm Turnbull's government? For STEM and other areas ripe for future breakthroughs, our culture isn't going to change while education is so undervalued by the blokes in power (and let's face it, most of them still are men). 

At the time of writing, the government has pledged $12 million towards restoring a focus on STEM subjects. Under a purely equitable model, that equals $8 per school. You can't even buy one calculator for that much. And let's face it, without better literacy in our schools, how are we even going to get students to engage with higher order skills in STEM subjects? With that point, I would say that funding needs to go to all areas of education in order to improve STEM, not just the STEM subjects. 

This is through no fault of the STEM organisation, at least no more than any other aspect of Australian society being the fault of voters. All I'll say is: when you vote, think about how much money that particular political party is willing to put into education. Nothing is going to happen in this culture of ours without better funded education. We talk about the future as being a space that needs to be prepared for, but what about now? Students need us now. 

For more information, check out these websites.

Beacon Foundation

Origin Foundation