Source Analysis: The Atlantic Slave Trade

One can't roll their sleeves up to work as a History teacher without feeling comfortable with source analysis. Over my years as a teacher I've come across many scaffolds and acronyms designed to help students with this historical skill, and I think it's fair to say there's no hard and fast hierarchy to which one works the best. Whether it's AMOUR, COMBAT, TOMACPRU, OPVL, IOP CAM, TADPOLE or something else, it doesn't really matter which one is used so long as the student understands why it's used and can remember what each letter stands for. 

It's also important for the teacher to feel confident about which one they teach and that they're consistent so students don't get overwhelmed with multiple acronyms. Also, even if they're taught just one acronym, it's important for students to understand that there are other alternatives out there in the pedagogical world. If this isn't mentioned then some students may believe that the one they've been taught must be the best one (or, worse, the only one) and this can cause issues if they later find themselves in front of another teacher or in another school where a different approach is taught. 

Me, personally? I can never remember acronyms and I find them restrictive. I always prefer to try and think about sources in the way that a historian does, which means that not every source offers the same types of information. Acronyms seem a little limited in this sense. 

There's also a question of depth when looking at sources and the need to differentiate for students who may not be able to initially engage with sources at higher levels. What I want is to see students working from identifying basic information up to being able to use a source as evidence in response to a question. So this involves a levelled scaffold. I don't make any claim to inventing this - it's a synthesis of all those who come before me and is essentially just my attempt to reorganise various methods into a common approach that works for me. Anyway, here it is:

• Level 1: Basics - who wrote the source, what's it about, when was it written, where was the source found, how was the source delivered at the time of publication, and why was it written? 

This is about looking at the source in it's simplest terms and comprehending it. The student needs to locate answers to the who, what, when, where, how, and why of the source, however, it should be made clear to them that not all of the questions are applicable all of the time. These questions (like every other part of this scaffold) are simply a range of prompts to promote engagement.

• Level 2: Questioning - what's the point of this source? What makes it significant in terms of how we understand the past? That is to say, why might this be an important source for modern people to see?

This part is about 'zooming out' and looking at the source holistically to determine a central thesis or purpose behind it. It also essentially encourages students to think about the historical concept of significance. Again, just responding to one of the prompts above would be enough.

• Level 3: Closer Analysis - who was the intended audience for this source at the time of writing? Who is the audience for the source now? Do we think this source conveys information about the time authentically and, depending on the answer, why or why not? What sort of biases can be recognised? 

This is where we start looking at the reliability of the source and gauging the level of bias. I think it's important to teach students that all sources are biased in some way or another, it's just a matter of determining what that bias is or why some information has been left out. Politics and postmodernism aside, the practical problem with considering some sources as objective is that it leads to some students simply saying that a source is "biased" or "not biased" and leaving it at that. If we want students to provide detailed analysis about the nature of a source's bias then we may need to take away the option of considering sources from a binary biased/unbiased point of view. 

• Level 4: Evaluation - how useful is the source in answering a key question? How can it be used to answer a question? How would a historian use this source in the course of their own research?

This final stage is often the hardest for some students to grapple with as it involves historical thinking and some degree of higher order thinking. Students need to consider the usefulness of a source but, if they don't have a historian's purpose established, this can be really difficult. Students therefore need to have a question in mind when they answer this part of the scaffold. In the absence of a teacher-supplied question, more advanced students can be asked to consider how this source is useful in conveying a syllabus dot point, or how a historian might use it in the pursuit of a particular agenda.

Lesson Idea: The Atlantic Slave Trade

I would preface the use of this source by telegraphing the use of racist language reflective of historical context. This helps students maintain historical distance from potentially distressing content and sets the tone for how we look at this sort of language in the classroom.

The previous described scaffold has worked well for me with all stages of high school history - it's just a matter of adjusting how students engage with each level of the scaffold and pitching the language at their age group. The scaffold can be modified to connect to a specific source and students can then work their way through it by examining the source four times, moving up a level each time. 

Here is an example that would work well with examining the Atlantic Slave Trade with a Year 9 or Year 10 class. 

1. Start by giving students a question. Here's the example:

Imagine you are a historian studying the question, "What was life like for slaves in America in the 19th century?"

2. This comes with a scaffold - Source Analysis Activity.

3. Work with students through a PowerPoint that guides their response to the Slave Trade source using the four different levels of questions. This can be found here - Source Analysis PowerPoint.

The source included is a primary source related to the sale of slaves. As teacher, you might want to work through responding to the source first so that you have a good idea of the range of answers that might be possible. Students are to complete their scaffold level by level while you work through the PowerPoint as a class.

As mentioned there are more than a handful of different approaches to source analysis. This is just one that works for me and you're welcome to try it too! 

Disclaimer: The above activity was compiled specifically for this blog. 

Creative Writing: Reinforcing an Idea

One of the challenges of teaching Year 7 is that we often have to determine the level of understanding that a class is at. We may often find that this varies wildly from year to year. Students in metropolitan secondary schools are often drawn from a range of primary schools, and this variation in context can lead to ever-shifting permutations of Year 7 classes where students sitting alongside each other have come from different primary schools where curriculum has been interpreted and delivered in many different ways. 

In short, we can't really assume too much. 

Instead, we utilise assessment for learning - informal evaluation of student ability gathered through activities that act as a litmus test of classroom efficacy. We watch how students react and work with certain activities to gauge their ability level. We check for understanding. And then, after this, we engage to some extent in a process of universal design - re-adjusting how we pitch the lesson so that all students can access it in some way. 

Sometimes, or oftentimes, the general ability level of a mixed ability Year 7 class requires us to start from scratch so we can better understand what's happening inside the learning of our students. The activity in this blog is borne from such a context. It speaks to the idea that one needs to go back to basics to ensure that an intellectually-diverse collective of students are brought onto the same page. Even high-performing students with gifts for critical thinking will benefit from having things broken down to their components as this allows for new approaches that they may not have considered, or explains things they may have subconsciously wondered about. In the task below we are looking at one aspect of imaginative writing. With Year 7, or any mixed-ability class, I often find that it's much more effective to only focus on one skill or idea at a time.

In this case I'm aiming to teach the use of increased vocabulary to reinforce a theme or idea. This means that I won't get bogged down in spelling, or grammar, or sentence structure, or punctuation, or any number of other things. I want to look at this skill in a vacuum. I want to quarantine it off so I can examine it in on a plate of glass in the cold unyielding light of a microscope. And so students, who are looking at this microscope slide alongside me, can better understand how to "show their working" (to borrow a phrase from Maths). The time for synthesising a range of disparate skills is a whole other lesson - we simply just can't teach everything at once all the time; it's overwhelming for both the teacher and the student. 

Here is a PowerPoint that breaks down this skill through the use of a modelled paragraph - Make Your Idea Stick.

1. The goal is to get students to come up with an idea or theme and to then explore and reinforce this using a variety of words.
2. First, we model this with an excerpt from an age-appropriate novel. In this case, I've used Victor Kelleher's Taronga. The idea is that he wants to show his audience a version of the future where society has broken down and everything we know has been destroyed.
3. Give the students a copy of the paragraph from the PPT.
4. Students highlight any words that show that things have broken down, gone wrong, or been destroyed. Direct students to look for nouns, adjectives, verbs that demonstrate this. This will create a visual guide to a subject-specific set of vocabulary within the paragraph.
5. After students have had a chance to find their words, work together as a class to construct a highlighted version on the board with the 3rd slide of the PPT. The 4th slide of the PPT then has a completed one for the class to compare their collaborative version to.
6. Students then draw arrows from each word to the next, creating a text chain that ties the paragraph together and again visually demonstrates how subject-specific vocabulary has conveyed Kelleher's idea. 
7. The final step is for students to then write their own paragraph. If they're stuck for an idea it will up to the teacher to pick one for them, something different to the Kelleher model. It could be something like: a character is amazed by something they've seen or a character feels a sense of immense dread related to their surroundings or depict a world where modern technology was never invented. The possibilities are endless.

I'm a big fan of teaching students these text chains. The real name of this grammatical element of writing is 'lexical chain', and it exists in texts as a reflection of said text's overall cohesion. Well-developed or expert use of lexical chains improves clarity for the reader and 'builds the field' of a topic that is being explored. Teaching this isn't restricted to just English, I've used it also with History and Aboriginal Culture classes, and have seen it used really well in Science.  

Everything Old is New Again

An image from The Bad Sleep Well

Are remakes a new phenomenon? The short answer is 'no'. There is a fallacy in pop culture that cinema is becoming increasingly unoriginal - that we are awash in an endless sea of remakes, reimaginings, sequels, prequels, adaptations, and franchises. Perhaps top of this list is the idea that superhero films are ruining cinema. 

I'm not here to venture an opinion on the quality of said superhero films, I tend to believe that their quality varies depending on a range of factors, however, I would argue that any perceived lack of variety could find its parallels in other eras of fiction.

• Martial Arts films of the '70s and '80s.
• Spy novels of the '60s.
• Action films of the '80s and '90s.
• Western films of the '30s, '40s, and '50s.
• Penny Dreadfuls of the 19th century.
• Spaghetti Westerns of the '60s.
• Teen comedy films of the '00s.
• Vampire/Supernatural novels of the late '00s. 

And so on.

A generic formula responds to the desires of the market as much now as in previous eras, and the quality in such genres was as variable then as it is now. 

Something that I find quite fascinating about cinema in particular is the way in which even the most celebrated 'original' films are the culmination of a long echo chamber of ideas that are borrowed and refracted over time. Here is one example:

1. Revenge of the Sith (2005) includes a scene in which Palpatine formally establishes the beginning of the Empire. During this scene, the speech he makes is intercut with shots of Anakin murdering Palpatine's enemies. This pays direct homage to the baptism scene in The Godfather, in which Micheal Corleone consolidates his place at the head of the family while his underlings orchestrate the murder of rival mob bosses. Both films deal with the rise and establishment of a corrupt power.
   
2. The Godfather (1972) begins with a big wedding reception where a mafia don's daughter has just gotten married to a young man who has worked his way into this shady family. Journalists are parked just outside the main action, photographing the various high profile figures in attendance. This scene deliberately replicates a similar scene at the beginning of Akira Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, in which a company kingpin's daughter has just gotten married and journalists watch from outside while discussing the various high profile figures in attendance. Both films deal with a Machiavellian patriarch whose legacy is steeped in violence and crime.
   
3. The Bad Sleep Well (1960) is a modern Japanese adaptation of Hamlet. Instead of a medieval Danish court of intrigue and murder, the action is set in the corporate boardrooms of corrupt Japanese businessmen. Like Hamlet with his wavering quest for revenge, Nishi is a young company man who hides his identity while working to expose the men who killed his father. 
4. Hamlet (1599) is one of the most well-known stories of all time and perhaps Shakespeare's greatest tragedy. It is not, however, a story entirely of Shakespeare's creation. Shakespeare is thought to have directly remade a now-lost play that also featured a Danish prince named Hamlet who is urged by a ghost to pursue revenge.
   
5. Hamlet (c. 1580s) is the suspected name of a play by Thomas Kyd, a highly influential figure in Elizabethan theatre. Referred to as Ur-Hamlet by scholars, this play likely leaned on the 'hero-as-fool' trope, which flows back into the untraceable realms of ancient storytelling. It is also thought to be a loose retelling of a Scandinavian folk tale about a prince named Amleth. 
6. Amleth (c. 1100s) is a folk tale in which a prince dresses himself in rags and pretends to be insane as a means to disguise his quest for revenge against his uncle. This uncle, Fengo, murdered Amleth's father so he could marry his mother Gerutha. Fengo eventually sends Amleth to England with two escorts carrying a letter instructing the English king to kill the prince. Amleth, however, switches this letter so that the escorts get killed instead, and he returns to Denmark to watch his own funeral and then finally take revenge on is uncle. Like Hamlet, The Bad Sleep Well, The Godfather, and Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith, this story deals with the theme of corruption and the extreme behaviours that surround it. 

So, as we can see, even Shakespeare isn't immune from this 'unoriginality' problem. Here are some other examples of great films that can be traced to earlier texts that explore the same themes.

• A Fistful of Dollars (1964) - a spaghetti western remake of the 1961 samurai film Yojimbo, which was an adaptation of the hardboiled detective novel Red Harvest (1929). Thematic core: an outsider takes on a lawless community.
• A Bug's Life (1998), an animated film about a misfit putting together a group of warriors to save an ant colony from an evil grasshopper, which sounds a lot like the Western classic The Magnificent Seven (1960), which is a direct remake of Seven Samurai (1954). Thematic core: the value of community and team-work.
• The Searchers (1956) is a famous Western based on a 1954 novel of the same name. 1970s films as varied as the seedy crime dramas Taxi Driver (1976) and Hardcore (1979), and the sci-fi epic Star Wars (1977), and the more recent television series Breaking Bad (2000s) and the film Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) all draw upon plot elements or iconic shots from The Searchers. Thematic core: the anti-hero's journey. 

And here are some films that challenge the notion that 'original' stories in cinema have ever been common.

• Gladiator (2001) is recognisable to most as a throwback to the sword-and-sandals epics of the 1950s and 1960s. Dig a little deeper and you'll find The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), which tells the same story. 
• The most famous cinematic versions of Ben-Hur (1959), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and The Ten Commandments (1956) are not the first film versions of these stories. All were made as silent films in the mid-1920s first. 
• Star Wars (1977) used the 1958 samurai epic The Hidden Fortress as both a narrative and stylistic influence. George Lucas replicated the idea of a kidnapped princess and a grizzled samurai, as well as the narrative choice of telling his story from the point of view of two comical and lowly characters. He also 'borrowed' Akira Kurosawa's way of using vertical wipes to transition from one scene to another. The Japanese director's influence is so keenly felt in the Star Wars trilogy that Rian Johnson would borrow stylistically from Kurosawa's 1980s samurai epics Ran and Kagemusha much later in The Last Jedi (2017).
  

Some of the above are more obvious than others but what's interesting is that none of the famed directors responsible for the above classic films would even try to hide their influences if asked. There's a tendency in pop criticism to reject texts that aren't original or to bemoan the replication of ideas. But, like the great painters who obsessively toiled on a singular topic or style, or playfully subverted each other's works to add new meaning to common themes, should storytellers not also be lauded for mining common material in new ways? These directors and writers are combining old ideas with new genres, or diving deeper into a particular story to explore a new context.

There are, after all, only 3, 6, 7, or 36 types of stories (depending on which writer you trust).