‘Stock your mind…’ A Closing Post

Now that our Heritage Lottery Funded project has come to an end, we wanted to write one final post to thank our readers who followed along with the National Union of Women Teachers archive collection.  Both the cataloguing and education outreach projects have allowed us to increase accessibility to the collection, and shed a bit more light on these formidable women, determined to level the playing field of gender equality.  If you’d like to keep up to date with archive related education resources and blog updates (including classroom lesson plans and activities), head to our new site Archives For All, or the Newsam Library & Archives’ blog Newsam News. Archives get the reputation for being dusty, stuffy places.  What collections like the NUWT prove is that archives are anything but useless papers of the past.  History’s tendency to repeat itself, as issues of the past continue to present themselves as issues in the present, is no more evident than in collections like the NUWT.  The NUWT disbanded in 1961, after achieving equal pay for men and women teachers.  Yet, 50+ years on, women continue the fight for equal pay, equal representation, and equal opportunity. During a recent school workshop about life during the First World War, I asked a group of Year 3s, ‘Why are archives important?  Why do we bother saving – and looking – at all of this stuff?’  One very clever student raised his hand, and gave the following impassioned explanation:

we need the archives… because we need to learn from our old mistakes so we don’t make them again! – Year 3 student at St Joseph’s in Camden, positioning himself to take my job

On a personal note, this is my last week as the Archive’s Education Coordinator.  I have been so lucky to be a part of this team, this archive, and to have had the opportunity to work with such dynamic schools and community members. While working with school pupils (whether they’re Year 2 or university students), the focus has always been on the archives – of course.  But alongside that, our objective has been to encourage critical enquiry, investigative skills and above all, to encourage students to question everything both in and outside the history classroom.  Go to the source, and then question that source, that issue, that argument. I was recently reading Angela’s Ashes, and was struck by this passage, where Frank describes his teacher.  Mr O’Halloran’s words pretty much sum up why we think history education, which fosters all of those above skills, is so important…

He says, You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind.  Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it – Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes

Christmas in the Archives

It’s three days before Christmas, and the university is fairly quiet at the moment; so, I felt the most practical use of time would be to peek around the archives for some holiday related documents…

When I searched the term ‘Christmas’ in the archive catalogue, 133 unique files popped up: from Christmas cards, to school pageants, and holiday programmes, the festive season has always played a fairly big role in education and schools.  Here is one such example…

Arthur Sporne Archive Collection: Christmas Letters

Some of the most compelling aspects of our collection are those documents which reveal student voice.  The Arthur Sporne archive collection includes essays and letters written by pupils to their teacher, Sporne.  ‘Story of My Life’ essays written by 14 year olds in July 1914 give insight into the lives and hobbies of children on the brink of the First World War; whereas similar essays from pupils in 1952 illustrate childhoods defined by the Second World War.

Today I wanted to share a letter from 1917.  Sporne had recently taken up a teaching position at Fulham Reformatory School, and pupils wrote letters to him, discussing the end of the school term, the Christmas holidays, and plans for the following term.

End of term letter written by Albert Day to Arthur Sporne (December 18, 1917). Document Reference: IOE Archives, SP/4

Common themes include thanks for Sporne’s genuine interest in the student’s academics, his love of sports, and nearly half of the letters mention the probable absence of Christmas pudding given the food shortages of the First World War.  In addition to Albert’s letter, another pupil echoed similar sentiments, ‘we wont be able to make a very big christmas pudding this year because currants and raisins are so dear…’

If you’d like more Christmas in the archives, head to our catalogue.  And in the meantime, we hope you all enjoy the holiday season!

The IOE closes Tuesday, December 23rd at 4.30pm, and reopens Monday, January 5th, 2015. The Archive Reading Room reopens Monday, January 12th (after a week of stock-taking).

Some big news…

We have two fairly big announcements to make!

Firstly, some of you are likely up to date on this, but the IOE has now officially merged with UCL.  As of December 2nd, we are now the IOE Archive at the UCL Institute of Education. For more information on the merger, visit here.

Secondly, our Archive has been awarded National Archive Accreditation status (which was also made official on December 2nd… December 2nd was a pretty big day around these parts)!  The IOE Archive is the first archive of an educational institution in London to be accredited.

Accreditation is the new UK quality standard that recognises good performance in all areas of archive service delivery. To achieve accredited status, an archive must demonstrate that it has met clearly defined national standards relating to the management and resourcing of the care of its unique collections and the service it offers to its users.

The accreditation panel that made the award noted the following:

[They] were very impressed with the application and the range of ways in which the service is delivering its mission. They noted specifically the excellence of the documentation submitted, which reflects on the service’s strong management and planning. They congratulated the service on its achievements and innovative good practice in many areas, specifically developing outreach, broadening the volunteering offer and tackling digital preservation issues which many larger and better-resourced services have struggled to address.

We are so pleased to now be fully accredited, and want to thank the accreditation team for all of their help and support as we went through the application process.

For more information on accreditation, head to the National Archives.

How do we teach the First World War in Schools?

‘Whatever else war is, it is always horrific’

– Richard Aldridge in ‘IMPACT 21: How ought war to be remembered in schools?’

Last month, IMPACT (an initiative of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain) organised a seminar led by David Aldridge, lecturer at Oxford Brookes. Held at the Institute of Education, Aldridge and his co-panellists discussed: ‘How Ought War to be Remembered in Schools?’

History teachers aren’t faced with the easiest of tasks; it’s already a challenge to engender a memory of events that students (and often teachers, themselves) didn’t experience first-hand. Teaching the First World War, a war often seen as morally neutral, can be doubly tricky. In history lessons, there are aspects that are black and white: Asquith was Prime Minister in office at the outbreak of war; the Battle of Liege began on the 5th of August, 1914; the war was primarily fought in trenches. But it’s the grey areas that also need addressing whenever we teach, talk, or even think about the past. Aldridge pointed out that, as educators, whenever there’s reasonable disagreeance on an issue, we need to teach that variance.

Aldridge argues that the horrors of war need to be communicated for students: images and narratives of soldiers – including children and young adults – killed or wounded. He advises educational institutions to ‘consider whether the rituals and practices they engage in around remembrance successfully communicate the horror of war’ (Aldridge, 2014: 6).

Aldridge’s fellow panellists also shared their thoughts. Jerome Freeman, Director of the First World War Centenary Battlefields Programme (run by the Institute of Education and Equity), emphasised the importance of going beyond the horror to encourage students to really discover the First World War. While schools often opt to teach the Second World War over the First, the FWW has been largely undertaught. The Battlefields Programme enables two students and one teacher from every state-funded secondary school in England to visit battlefields on the Western Front between 2014 and 2019. Students are encouraged to research their own family connections to the war, but the tours are important historically, not just emotionally. Freeman emphasised the significance of discovering the political and social consequences of war, while also engaging with historiography – was it a just war? What were the consequences? The tours are built around these key questions, while also probing the issue of remembrance. Who, what, why and how do we remember?

In the IOE Archive workshops we deliver in local primary schools, we use archives to tell the stories of ‘ordinary’ individuals during the war. How did the Great War impact men, women, children? These details range from photographs of children setting up gardens to address food shortages on the home front, to letters describing life in the trenches, to applications made to tribunals for exemption from military service. Working primarily with primary schools, we ensure the horrors are not overplayed; rather, children develop a sense of how nearly every aspect of life was impacted by the war in some way.

Pupils tend to a school garden.  Allotment-style gardens were developed in available areas of land during the Great War – including school playing fields.
Image via Imperial War Museum via www1schools.com

However, that doesn’t mean skirting around the terrors and tragedies of the war, including the realities of Britain’s own role. We worked with a Year 5 class in Camden who were busy learning about conscientious objectors. Through the archives and classroom discussions, students were fully aware of the harsh consequences faced by COs. Moreover, as pupils carefully considered why pacifists objected to serving brought to the fore the daily realities of war: the very fact that, as Aldridge pointed out, ‘war is killing, not just dying’.

A Year 6 student commented that he had recently read Private Peaceful, a Michael Morpurgo novel (spoilers ahead). In the novel, a young soldier, Thomas ‘Tommo’ Peaceful, reflects on his life in the trenches of the First World War. It’s revealed that Tommo is to be executed by firing squad in the morning for cowardice, and serves as an honest examination of soldiers killed on the grounds of cowardice or desertion. The student simply, and thoughtfully, remarked: ‘I couldn’t believe stuff like that happened by our own army… wasn’t there enough killing?’

As with teaching of any sort, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way. But we also have the knowledge that history too often repeats itself.  One of the best things we can do as educators is to ensure students have a multi-faceted understanding of the range of issues and perspectives which surround any historical event, particularly when it comes to conflicts and peace-keeping.  Aldridge suggests it’s imperative that we remember the horrors of war, ‘so that we continue to make every effort to avoid or at least condemn unnecessary conflict in the future’ (Aldridge, 2014: 5).

Relevant Educator Resources:

The Interwar Peace Movement: lesson plan from the IOE Archives
While our archive collections don’t contain a great deal on the graphic horrors of war, the National Union of Women Teachers collection contains papers, leaflets and correspondence relating to the post-war peace movement and their support of/for conscientious objectors.

Learn Peace: An education project by the Peace Pledge Union

An Autumn Update

I should apologise for how quiet this space has been lately! The beginning of the academic year has been particularly busy here in the Archives. We’ve been out in classrooms, delivering new archive workshops for primary schools. Over the next week or two, I’ll be giving an update on the sessions, the histories revealed, the collections used, as well as posting resources that may be of use to educators out there.

With the centenary of the First World War, schools across the country have been doing amazing projects: digging trenches in the playing field, rehearsing remembrance day plays, and going on field study trips to museums and war memorials to develop their understanding. We’ve been bringing archives into classrooms to investigate what life was like in 1914… how did the war affect men? women? conscientious objectors? children (from P.E. class to school dinners)?

Students practise military style drills in P.E. class C1914
Lilian Flora Best Archive Collection

Keep tuned into this space, but in the meantime, head over to London Metropolitan Archives’ First World War blog, ‘Emergency! London 1914’. We are this week’s guest blogger, opening up the archives to reveal the impact of the First World War on women teachers.