Sod House

Reconstructed sod house at the Mennonite Village Museum at Steinbach Manitoba.

One hundred years ago today, my grandparents, Johann Heinrich Enns and Anna Loewen, were married in a small church in their remote Mennonite colony of "Neu Samara" on the Russian Steppe near the Ural Mountains. They were 22 and 21 years old, and had just lived through the Great War and Russian Revolution, and were in the midst of the famine that gripped Russia during their Civil War. My grandfather, from age 16 to 19, had served in the Forstei and Sanitaersdienst, the Russian alternative foresty and non-combatant medical service. With others from his village, he was sent to the forest of Tossna. I'm not sure where that is, but I understand that it was essentially a forced labour camp. What was life like for them in 1921, living in a sod house or semlin at the back of my grandmother's parent's back yard? My aunt Susan Suderman has conducted extensive family research and tells a moving story about my grandparents in their first year of marriage:

"My parents' first home was a sod hut with a dirt floor on the Abraham Loewen farmyard. They started their life together in extreme poverty. The people of Neu Samara had know crop failures in 1911 and 1916, but in 1921, mainly due to the extreme drought, the harvest was practically non-existent. The government had taken their seed grains, and the meagre crop that was left was eaten by grasshoppers. Barns, granaries, and secret storage places were now empty -- the Red Army had seen to that! Many villagers died of typhus. With the widespread famine, the bodies of those who had died were lying everywhere as they had gone in search of food. Is is said that during these two years, 1921 and 1922, about 7,000,000 Russians dies of starvation. Inevitably, may of those who were still alive succumbed to outbreaks of typhus, cholera and malaria. Animals, too, were dying, and often their carcasses were eaten by the starving villagers. It didn't take long for the villages to be void of dogs, cats, and mice. My father went gopher hunting to add to their meagre food supply. There was no flour for bread. In later years, as my father reflected on those difficult years, he would often say: 'Eascht kaum de Chrich, dann de Revolution, en dann de Hungasch Not.' (First came the war, then the Revolution, and then famine)."

source: Suderman, S. (2016). The Aron Enns family: History and genealogy 1819-1990. Susan Suderman.

Governor General Award

This week, the recipients of the 2017 Governor General's History Awards were announced, and I am humbled and thrilled to be counted among them. The award is given to teachers of history and is based on a portfolio submission including a project, supporting work, teaching context, references, and student exemplars. We all gather at Rideau Hall to receive our awards on November 22nd, and have some other activities set up that week in Ottawa for history educators and the guests we bring. I thought I would share the information I submitted to Canada's National History Society, the group that administers the awards.

Skookum Stories -- Project Overview:

“Skookum” comes from the Chinook Jargon - a trade language that developed in BC and the West Coast during the 1800s. It means “big” or “strong” and has crossed over to become a word in the English language. This Skookum Stories project is about telling a strong story that draws on student's roots and culture, and is based on primary and secondary source evidence.

Provide a description of the project you are submitting. Be sure to clearly describe the activities, processes, and outcomes:

Skookum Stories is an inquiry project for BC Social Studies 9. Students set out to find out more about their cultural heritage. This often starts by settling on what "family" could mean and to make an inventory of the people in their life they could talk to and what evidence they might have about the past. Next student decide what parts of their “story” as they know it interests them for further inquiry and then make the effort to talk to elders, preferably two or more generations back, but just one if that is not possible. Students gather evidence and conduct research about either their family’s roots or their culture, with special attention to stories that have a connection to history, place, and ideas. Students for whom 'family" is a real challenge are often led towards local history & community research, or broader sources that deal more with culture than family. Along the way, students design inquiry questions to help guide their work, and organize their evidence and response to their questions. As the project progresses, they build in spoken and visual elements and get feedback from friends, family, and teacher(s) before finalizing the story and presentation. Finally, they share their story collection with class, share the visual elements (usually artifacts or sources), and wrap up with a contribution to a Skookum feast. The inquiry cycle leading up to the presentations happens off and on for about two months, with some class time devoted specifically to research techniques and project work. The presentation cycle takes about two weeks (13 hours) for a class of 25, with another class devoted to sharing of food. Specific outcomes for this project include: 1) Working with "competencies" -- the historical thinking concepts that are now embedded in the BC Social Studies curriculum, 2) Making personal connections with history, specifically themes and events from the Social Studies 9 curriculum, and 3) developing Research, Inquiry, and Communication skills. Unofficially, two of the most important outcomes are to become confident as individuals who have important stories to tell, and to keep alive the evidence of the past that too often go the graves of the people who have gathered it or were witnesses to history. Each time I have used this project with students, I have taken notes on their findings and what they got out of it. While respecting student privacy, I have blogged about the process and highlights of student stories. Any examples I post with potentially identifying details have gone through a permission process with the students and their parents/guardians.

Describe your teaching philosophy and how this project supports that philosophy in your classroom:

I see classrooms as ecosystems, as constant rearrangements of ideas and efforts. Although I teach Social Studies -- generally seen as a combination of history and geography, I think what I'm really doing is identity work, creating space for students to challenge themselves and grow into something stronger than when they arrive. The ecosystem metaphor works on many levels, with inputs such as light, soil nutrients & moisture, species diversity, and time relating to things like instruction, learning resources & activities, inclusions, and pacing. Perhaps my role in the ecosystem is that of the forest denizen, an old tree that provides support for the whole structure. The Skookum Story project taps into all of these things, with students owning most parts of the inquiry, resources, and pace. Very few things we do as a class bring us together as a community than the project presentations. The diverse stories and journeys of discovery really stick with the students, and have changed me as a person and teacher. I have been fortunate for many opportunities to develop and share resources for heritage inquiry in BC, both on the web and at conferences and workshops. I am both honoured and baffled by the number of teachers who have accessed the Social studies resources I’ve posted online over the years. Dozens have tried and adapted the project, and collectively we’ve pushed traditional heritage projects into the realm of inquiry and application of critical thinking.

Explain what makes your project unique and the particular environment (classroom, school, and community) in which it was developed and implemented:

The idea of a heritage-related project is not new in the realm of Social Studies or History classrooms. I think what sets this apart is the sense of urgency to connect students with elders (and their stories, documents, and artifacts) before those connections are lost. I am astounded at how many students discover or rediscover important and interesting stories from their culture and background that no one in their immediate family knew about. This intergenerational cycle is important for cultures to survive and thrive. Another unique aspect to this project are the options for students that have difficult or complex family situations. I have been supported in my work by school staff, in particular my librarian and fellow Social Studies teachers, and by the Pacific Slope Educational Consortium, a collection of teachers who work on critical thinking resources. I also get a lot of support and feedback from students and parents. This project is almost always of value to families, and in some cases has opened up lines of dialogue and facilitated personal change for students and their inner circle of family and friends.

Explain how your students use the historical thinking concepts in this project using specific examples from your student work submissions:

The project requires use of inquiry questions around each of the concepts.

Significance -- we explore what makes a story interesting versus important, for example is an ancestor's involvement in an event (such as the Northwest Rebellion) significant on it's own or is it the event itself? Of course it depends. This year, I have had students share their connection to many significant events including the Loyalist Migration, Irish Potato Famine, North West Company, gold rushes and railway construction, Red River Rebellion, WWI, Spanish Flu, WWII, Japanese Internment, Residential Schools, and the Sixties Scoop.

Evidence-- students learn the difference between primary and secondary sources and use both to anchor their projects. This year students used journals, photos, military records, interviews, and other documents.

Continuity -- students find patterns in their research that can also be found in history, starting by asking what is different and what is the same. My students often compared homesteading lifestyle with modern conveniences.

Cause & Consequence -- many of my student this year examined the cause/effect cycle related to immigration.

Perspective -- students are challenged to find at least one issue within their research for which they can present differing points of view backed up by evidence. Examples this year include the Japanese internment.

Ethical Dimensions -- students are encouraged to look at values held by ancestors and make judgements as to why they existed and what impact they had. Racism is a common "value" that comes up, as is the idea of patriotism in times of war.

Please provide any additional notes or comments that would help us understand the nature and value of your project in Canadian history:

When I first started doing heritage inquiry in Social Studies, it was often difficult to get my Aboriginal students to take on their own cultural heritage and family stories as a focus for their project. Many of my students had close relatives who experienced various forms of colonization including time at residential schools such as nearby Lejac. Over the years, this has changed; in my mind this has happened for a few reasons. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission process has given many of the elders a safe space in which to share their powerful and often devastating stories. In turn they are now willing to talk to their nieces, nephews, and grandchildren about what they experienced and witnessed. "Being Native" is now less of a stigma -- teachers and Aboriginal Education staff have done great work in the last 10 years to include, develop, and honour Aboriginal perspectives and identity; this has been an emphasis of our revised BC curriculum. I have also gotten better at working with reluctant learners and finding supports for students that have difficult stories to tell or tricky family situations. This also goes for students who have been adopted, live in care, or are not in communication with family members.

Links: list any URLs that house any related material related (e.g., class website, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) and describe the role they play in your project:

Links and resources have been assembled at https://www.thielmann.ca/skookum-stories.html

The Sourcebook

Along with 8 other BC teachers, I've had the pleasure of working on a teaching & learning resource for BC Social Studies 9 -- "Thinking it Through." The other teachers were Rob Lewis, Joe Pereira, JP Martin, Vince Truant, and Jennifer Pighin from Prince George, Paula Waatainen from Nanaimo, Janet Ruest from Chemainus, and Shannon Leggett from Vancouver. We each wrote some of the topics or case studies in the Sourcebook, and I had the fun job of editing, writing the introduction, and other tasks along the way. It was an enjoyable learning curve on curriculum design and publishing a book, and a good experience working with the folks from Pearson Canada.

Here's a little primer on the book for those that might consider using it in their classroom.

This “Thinking it Through” Sourcebook will help students develop their critical thinking skills as they explore selected topics from the revised BC Social Studies 9 Curriculum.

This book is organized according to seven CONTENT STANDARDS, each with four case studies in critical thinking: Revolution and Change, Imperialism and Colonialism, Migration and Shifting Population, Nationalism and Nation-Building, Regional and Global Conflict, Injustices and Rights, Land and People.

The authors have selected primary and secondary sources, all kinds of questions, and suggested extension activities for 28 case studies. Each one is a sandbox for teachers and students to explore CURRICULAR COMPETENCIES and apply historical (and geographic) thinking concepts. Students will push their thinking about what they can learn from evidence, and realize how the account changes depending on the evidence they use.

Finally, by developing the ability to think through historical, social, or geographic evidence, students will learn how BIG IDEAS have shaped the past and the present.

Perhaps the most important purpose of the Sourcebook is to suggest to teachers and students a method of “doing” Social Studies. Whether the focus is on instruction, discussion, inquiry, story-telling, or project-based learning, Social Studies should be grounded in the work of exploring relevant sources from the past and present, the work of creating valid accounts about important ideas and events through the examination of evidence and application of historic and geographic thinking concepts.

The Sourcebook can be an “untextbook” – not meant to be the only resource used by the teacher and students (which is sometimes the criticism of past textbooks), but something that appears at regular intervals in the classroom in order to develop the capacity for critical thinking. It also makes an excellent bridge between the many texts and resources designed for the previous BC curriculum and the “asks” and content shifts of the revised curriculum.

The authors hope that teachers and students replicate this process beyond the examples used in the Sourcebook -- that they develop the habit of finding provocative sources that delve into the heart of historic, social, and geographic problems, and then applying critical thinking concepts to discover their worth in building understanding about the relevance of history and place in everyday life.

Skookum Stories 2017

Wow.  We are a few days into "Skookum Stories" -- heritage inquiry for Grade 9 Social Studies students. I have provided a summary of the first nine presentations. These students have been working on these projects off and on since November, and their presentation included story-telling, educating the class about historical events they might not know about, and explanation of the posters, slides, documents, pictures, and artifacts they have brought in to anchor their talk. I especially appreciate how dialed in these students are to what they are talking about, and how they have made connections to history and geography, many of them from the content area of their Social Studies 9 course. See if you can pick that up in these summaries and (in brackets) a reference to the sources they used.

MJ

• Family left Ireland due to potato famine (journals)
• Scottish Immigration to Canada 1906 (ship passenger list)
• WWI vet - Canadian gunner (attestation papers, photo)
• immigration from Utah to Alberta with a family connection to Alexander Galt, a father of Confederation (journals, photo)
• Impact of the death of a family member in Crimean War in the 1850s (journal)

KL

• Great x 5 Grandparents (Scottish) part of the Great Migration to Canada 1820s: ship to Quebec (37 days), steamboat up St. Lawrence, wagon to Upper Canada (interview, journals)
• family migration  to Alberta; worked on CNR, brothers went to WWI (journals, photos, interview)

BB

• Loyalist family, many buried by a New Brunswick church built in 1789 (interview)
• Family contains a WWI vet and many Caribou pioneers, goldminers, and rodeo pros (interviews, photos, 1875 voters’ list)
• New-found connection to Shuswap Aboriginal Nation (interview)

AS

• Ontario Loyalists, later migrated to Prairies (interviews, family documents)
• family departing Saskatchewan for BC upon Tommy Douglas’ election (interview)
• Metis family stories, godfather was Gabriel Dumont, one member became policeman in 1930s but was discharged when a friend used his police vehicle in a bank robbery (interviews)
• Great-grandfather WWII captured at Dieppe raid, survived war but later went missing while goldpanning (interviews)
• Great-grandparents emigrated from Fukushima, Japan to Vancouver, interned in Tashme camp 1941, later left for beet farm in Alberta (map, government identification card issued to Japanese internees, photos, interview)

TE

• Swedish family legacy and immigration in 1870 (family tree)
• descendent of Chief Gw’eh (Kwah) of Ft. St. James, bearer of a pre-contact metal knife (got through trade) and involved in story of early fur-trade, James Douglas, etc. (interview, memorial plaque, photo of knife from museum)
• interwoven stories of multiple Aboriginal relatives from different nations (interviews, family photos)
• father is current hereditary chief of Beaver Clan; ancestors permitted to switch to this clan due to clan imbalance caused by Spanish Flu of 1918 (interviews)
• horrific stories about family members and others Lejac residential school at Fraser Lake, and uncles and aunts taken in “Sixties Scoop” (interviews, photos)

SS

• immigration from India to California in 1908 by steamship (interview)
• Great x2 Grandfather a founding member and of building sponsor of a Sikh temple in California, also made bombs in the 1920s for the Indian Freedom Fighters back in India (interview, photos)

CN

• three different WWII vets in family, involvements with shipbuilding, Battle of the Bulge, and liberation of Italy (photos, interview)
• family member who helped construct beach features at local provincial park (photo, interview)
• great-uncle, a jockey, who rode Secretariat and was later thrown from a horse and paralyzed in 1978 (interview, photo)

EB

• two stories of marriages between German and Dutch family members that were rejected by family in 1800s (journals)
• homesteading activities in the early 1900s, including use of home remedies still in use by family today (interview, direct observation)
• attempts to learn more about push factors for Dutch immigration to Canada met multiple dead ends - story was known but family members didn’t want to talk about it 150 years later (interview)

BG

• Great x2 Grandfather who fought and died at the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel; his will was made 7 days prior, his grave was later shelled in 1918 (multiple military records kept both by family and available online

Casualties of Ideology - Remembrance Day 2016

Coming from a culturally Mennonite background, with its attendant beliefs about non-conformity, non-resistance, and avoidance of military service, there are no war heroes in my family tree. There are, however, too many stories of war survival, of heroic sacrifices and struggles in the face of abject terror, poverty, and prejudice. This photo shows my grandpa Johann Heinrich Enns who served in the Russian Forestry and Non-combatant Medical Service during WWI. As a conscientious objector, this was the alternative duty afforded to German-speaking Mennonite colonists who refused to bear arms against other human beings. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution ended the war and sent my grandfather home to his family in Neu-Samara, Central Russia (southwest of the Ural Mountains, near the city of Orenburg). It was then that the real terror began for the Mennonites (and almost everyone else) in Russia. The struggle for control of Russia meant frequent thieving raids from the Red Army (and sometimes White Army), wanton murder and molestation from gangs of bandits. In particular, Mennonites who took up arms against the revolutionaries or resisted collectivization were special targets of retribution -- to Russian peasants, communists, anarchists, and other revolutionaries, the Mennonites were wealthy kulaks who were complicit in the class struggle and economic inequality of Tsarist Russia. During and after this Civil War, the Mennonites faced starvation, drought and crop failure, outbreaks of typhus, cholera, and malaria. The reality for my almost all my direct "Russian Mennonite" ancestors was a simple life, religious devotion, and relative poverty leading up to the Great War, followed by severe poverty and premature death for all who remained in the Soviet Union.

In the midst of this chaos, my grandfather married my grandmother Anna Loewen in 1921; their first home was a sod house with a dirt floor on her father's farm. The first two children born to them on the cold Russian Steppe lived 18 months and 6 months respectively before succumbing to typhus and pneumonia. In the growing national fear and acts of state-sponsored terror against all who opposed communism (or held land, or spoke German, or withheld crops, or even their wives and children), many Russian Mennonites fled to Canada. My grandparents left in 1925, not long before this exodus became impossible. They arrived in Quebec on the SS Minnedosa, and "must have looked like a real show piece standing there on the dock in their plain dress with 'Schemadaun' in hand, not knowing a single word of English between them."* By the time they had established a farm of their own in southern Saskatchewan, they managed to get one good crop yield in 1928 before the Great Depression made life difficult once more. Still, they raised 10 children in the Canadian prairies and never saw the ravages of war up close again.

Not so for the other members of Johann's family.  His brothers and brothers-in-law and their families were not able to leave Russia during the 1920s, and thus remained to endure Stalin's collectivization, purges, and state-induced famine. As formerly productive farmers, the Mennonite "kulaks" of my grandfather's colony in central Russia were again made the target of negative attention by the communist government.  They were German-speaking, so during in the wake of Stalin's second Five Year Plan (1933-1937), and again when Nazi Germany invaded Russia in 1941, many of the Mennonite men (including most of my grandfather's immediate family) were rounded up and sent to the gulag, tortured, and killed. Most of this information was unknown to my grandfather in Canada and has only come to light through research by my aunt. The witnesses to these "war crimes" were too afraid to tell their stories until the 1980s.

War and service means different things to different people. For my, grandfather, during WWI, it meant hard work in the forests at Tossna near Petersburg, followed by two decades of hardships. I knew him as a happy, gentle man, and realize that he had it pretty good, including a long life, compared to others in his family and others who lived and served in 20th century conflicts or met their fate because of them.

So, this Remembrance Day I remember my grandfather's brothers and brothers-in-law who were casualties to Stalinist ideology and bloodlust.  At least six of eight died at the gulag in Orenburg. These are my mother's uncles, whose crime was that their ancestors were from German-speaking countries and that they were once productive land-owning farmers:

• Johann Bergman, born 1893, died in prison 1942. His daughter, studying to be doctor, endured incredible suffering during the Siege of Leningrad in 1942; her husband and daughter starved to death)
• Isaak Penner, born 1879, arrested by NKVD and presumed to have died in prison 1939
• Bernhardt Neufeld, b? d?, did not accompany members of his family who left Russia for Germany in the 1920s, possibly killed during Civil War
• Peter Bergmann, born 1890, "ruthlessly taken from his home, falsely arrested and imprisoned, and then shot by the communists" in 1943 
• Heinrich Enns, born c. 1902, "falsely arrested by the NKVD and imprisoned, then shot on November 4, 1942"
• Kornelius Klassen, born c. 1900, arrested in 1942, died in prison. His wife Justina (my grandfather's youngest sister) died in forced labour camp in Kazakhstan
• Peter Enns, born 1905, who, with his brothers, was "taken to the Ural River on Nov 4, 1942, 'with hands tied behind their back with barbed wire.' The prisoners were tortured, cold water poured over their heads before they were shot. Their bodies were rolled into a grave beside the river. The next spring, the waters rose and the bodies came to the surface."
• Aron Enns, born 1906, suffered the same fate as his brothers Peter and Heinrich in 1942

------------------
*This post is modified from a similar version posted in 2013. I have included new information from a 2016 publication, The Aron Enns Family History and Genealogy by my aunt Susan Suderman -- all quotes, and the photo are from this book. Further information came from her earlier volume on another branch of our family.

Here were some earlier thoughts on Peace and Remembrance 2010 and 2011 and 2012.  

Q and A on New Curriculum and SS9

Recently, I was asked some great questions about my draft/sample Social Studies 9 outline that I am using at the moment to pilot the new BCED curriculum. I've been asked "where's the French Revolution" by a few teachers, "where's the competencies" by another, and so on. I've gathered the various tweets, texts, and response emails in what I hope is a useful summary below.

Reference: an outline for Social Studies 9

Q1. Are there topics that have to be included in the new curriculum? Some expected topics are missing from your outline, like the French Revolution and Napoleon. 

A1. No, there are no required topics beyond the "topic areas" that are listed in the content learning standards. Although some teachers could conceivably structure a course that had no firm topics, perhaps around approaches to the study of society, completely based on competencies, or daily analysis of current events, we can be quite confident that many "familiar" topics will remain in BC Social Studies courses. Out of courtesy to fellow teachers, I think most course outlines will not stray too far or too often beyond the new course bookends of 1750-1919. Yes, my new SS9 outline does not include the French Rev and Napoleon (nor the American Revolution per se). These topics, like all the other content, are now optional. Teachers can pick and choose as many of the "old topics" as they wish to tell the story they want, to explore the themes/big ideas, and work out the competencies. Teachers can also add new content, such as other global revolutions or conflicts, if that helps them with their goals. I have explained this in some detail on the 11x17 "content shifting" planning documents posted at http://www.thielmann.ca/new-bc-curriculum.html. 

Q2. How should teachers decide what to include, or how to set up a SS9 course?

A2. Much of the content will naturally be suggested by the course bookends of 1750-1919. However, the decision to focus more on Canada vs Canada/Europe or Canada/World or just World is up to the teacher. Teachers can pick four favourite or important topics and build a course from there, or they could take on forty topics if they want. Teachers may add topics from outside the bookends (e,g, current events) or from outside of formal history altogether, such as architecture, political science, or sociology. Teachers can work through content (and competencies) through talk-and-chalk, worksheets & assignments, press play on the dvd, project-based-learning, debate & discussion, whatever. Some teachers will have core content, and optional content to be explored by students (e.g. project topics). Some teachers will align topics to themes, the content learning standards, or the competencies themselves, others will stick with a sequential outline powered by the topics themselves. Say farewell to common department exams, unless your dep't has a solid history of doing things the same way. There will be good, bad, and ugly all over the place, not much different than now, really, but I think eventually there will be some consistency and productive models to follow. I intend to work towards that, anyways. 

Q3. Why drop French Revolution and Napoleon, but keep the Industrial Revolution? 

A3. My Grade 9 course has a Canadian focus, so, with the exception of the Industrial Revolution, I've dropped topics that don't directly involve or take place in Canada. The French Revolution is interesting, and so very important to European and World history (as are so many other events), but something has to go. I don't  want to teach a fast-paced, low-depth survey course. Ironically, by extending the historical bookends, the new curriculum does more to encourage "survey" vs" depth" than the old curriculum -- although that was not the intention. Our grade 8 teachers will probably not pick up the French Revolution, although it may be an optional area of study for either Grade 8 or Grade 9. A bit later in the course I plan to a short American vs French Revolution activity; more for the competencies, though, and less about the content, e.g. deconstruct some images and sources that either glorify or condemn revolutionaries from each country. I have included the Industrial Revolution because it is part of a truly global story, it is related to Canadian migration, ties to WWI, and is often ranked by historians as one of the top 5 influential events in history. Almost every object and many of the ideas that govern our society, gender roles, environmental issues, labour conditions, and way of life have a link to the Industrial Revolution. Students can wrap their mind around those kind of connections, far more so than some of the nuanced lessons of the Tennis Court Oath and the Reign of Terror. I started the course with the Industrial Revolution as the backdrop to a "skills bootcamp" -- using invention, factory age, results of enclosure, social conditions, and environmental change as ways of introducing competencies and getting students used to interpreting documents and sources, especially images but also graphs and maps. I keep copies of an aged little text around almost exclusively for these lessons - "Thinking about our Heritage: a Hosford Study Atlas" (example here). I also had a student teacher with me for these lessons and he produced some very effective activities and critical thinking prompts, and used some great media.

Q4. Why so you include virtually every other "Canadian" topic (in some form) from 1750-1919 carried over from existing courses? 

A4. The rest of my course is decidedly Canadian (with plenty on and about British Columbia) because I believe it is important in the few short years of Gr. 8-10 to leave students with a sense of the Canadian story, their place in it, and their agency in regards to its future. All other topics are interesting to me as a Socials teacher, but not mission critical for building active, empathetic, and informed Canadian citizens. It is also the Canadian topics that will help me provide an arc and consistency in the use of themes such as Aboriginal content and perspectives. Students can get plenty of world history and culture in Gr. 11 and 12 if they want it, plus some in Grade 8. I have truncated some Canadian topics and left others alone, mainly a reflection of which of my past lessons resonated with students and were fun to teach, or had good class activities to go with them. The topics in my course are also a reflection of the print resources and media that I like to use with students and that our school already owns. We have been, no doubt most school have been told, that there are very little funds for new learning resources. I try to build a course-long narrative that has a point to it; in the past it was part of our job in the class to decide together what the point was. Now we have "big ideas" to frame that discussion. Perhaps we need a new term to describe the blend of narrative, discovery, and repetition that form some kind of class goal. What is it that we actually expect from a successful Social Studies student? Beyond the ability to apply critical/historical thinking to problems and evidence, and the development of good Canadians (itself a problem worth deconstructing), I think we are well served by stirring students to become storytellers. The objective is as simple as students being able to talk about Canada's past, present, or future using emotion, humour, insight, and authenticity. Part of that ability is ease with which students can look at fresh material (like what's on the daily news) and have something interesting to say about it, something that connects with what they learned in the course. In my mind, that is as solid an indicator of readiness to move on to the next grade as is a test score. 

Q5. Why don't you include other (new) topics that fit the time period and big ideas? 

A5. For SS9 I have not yet planned for entirely new topics, Canadian or otherwise. This is my first time through so I will be recycling many old lessons and focusing more on designing new competency exercises and class activities than I will on new content. I am a busy guy with a 1000 interests and a beautiful family, so crisp topics will have to wait their turn. One of the interests I have, however, is developing curriculum. I am currently working with a group of teachers from the Pacific Slope Consortium on curriculum projects, but that is more a long term thing and does not help me out this semester. I find that without quality resources in place, taking on new topics involves too much internet surfing and photocopied materials. One topic that doesn't come up too much in the old or new curriculum is local history and geography. This is passion of mine and an area that I want to spend more time with in my courses. I am also loathe to add more content to an already full roster because I have designed a large chunk of my SS9 course to include project-based learning - a Heritage Connections project that involves ongoing inquiry, source work, interviews, and multiple classes for student presentation. Three other factors influence my choice of topics and will probably drive any further reduction of content in my SS9 outline: increased use of role-play/simulations and the added presence of WWI -- the kinds of things teachers and students can do with this time period could fill a whole course. The last is more practical; I have arranged my units so that I can use the "Crossroads" text for the first part of the course and make a clean switch to the "Horizons" test for the next part. I figure we can do the handoff with the Social Studies 8 teachers who will use the Crossroads text for the second part of their course, thus we don't need to purchase new class sets of texts while they are still useful and current.

Q6. Any suggestions for including Aboriginal perspectives and knowledge? 

A6. We have a few decent local learning resources in SD#57 related to Indigenous culture, issues, and worldview. We have a large and well-funded Ab-Ed Dep't with many staff that are available to advise or visit classes. They recently put on a successful Ab-Ed Symposium that gave over 700 local educators a sense of the challenges and possibilities ahead. FNESC http://www.fnesc.ca; and BCTF have produced some great resources in the last couple of years. Check out this Project of Heart site http://bctf.ca/HiddenHistory/ and also this one: http://projectofheart.ca/. Like others, I have many existing lessons or lesson elements in various states of development on the Aboriginal cultures of North America (or Canada, or BC), Indian Act/Potlatch ban, residential schools (historical, modern i.e. TRC), land claims (process, results, protests), environmental issues that relate to First Nations, Aboriginal self-government, Aboriginal soldiers in WWI/WWII, 1960 vote, etc., etc. That's where I'll start -- include as much of that as makes sense, keep my eye open for critical thinking activities and continue becoming familiar with the First Peoples Principles of Learning and their implication for my classroom and students. Our union local's Aboriginal Education rep has also posted some resources here: http://www.pgdta.ca/aboriginal.html.

Q7. What's your take on the curricular competencies?

A7. I have been using the Seixas et al Six Historical Thinking concepts (significance, evidence, continuity and change, cause and consequence, perspectives, ethical dimensions) in one way or another for years, so they are not strangers within my lessons, although it has been hit and miss. While they were as good a place as any for the Ministry K-9 team to build their competencies, I feel as if they have squeezed geography in the process and go straight to the complex stuff at the expense of a few old-fashioned Social Studies skills like map-making, charting and graphing, making, and simply learning from a variety of sources and voices (as opposed to decoding them for bias, significance, etc.). I suppose if you teach/learn the core competencies alongside the curricular competencies, you can do it all. The Big 6 can be scaled, too, so that the process/outcome for students is basic... more like "thinking" than "critical thinking." The Gr. 10-12 Ministry team is working on some unique competencies for Geography 11/12 -- these will likely be similar to the six historical thinking concepts and will be useful for Gr. 8-10 Social Studies in the future, perhaps even incorporated in later edits (if that happens). Another area that seems to be missing from the core and curricular competencies is authenticity. Making personal connections to course material, using personal strengths to express learning should be considered a skill that can be developed, refined, and perhaps assessed (or at least self-assessed). Authenticity relates to quality of research, depth of inquiry, choice of strategies, plagiarism education, and acceptance in the learning community. Maybe that's just an extension of the three core competencies.

Q8. How will you use the competencies and how will they be assessed?

A8. It may not obvious from looking at my course outline how competencies fit in. My plan is to be more regular about using at least one competency-driven activity in each of my lesson. This could mean comparison of disparate sources, having students identify and explain turning point, do cause-and-effect webs, pick a position and defend it, debate issues involving ethics, etc. Some of this stuff I can just wing it -- there is enough of it in my lessons already, but some of it needs to be more deliberate, such as dropping direct/specific questions from lesson handouts and having more open-ended inquiry, perhaps around the image on the screen or an object in the classroom. Towards this end, the project I mentioned in A4 above will be useful -- one of the products we hope to end up with are "assessment boxes" with many source documents, laminated photos, and maybe some 3D objects that are meant to provoke thought, center discussion, and be the subject of competency-driven questions and activities. For example, the class gets a series of images of inventions and artifacts from the Industrial Revolution, with enough time or background info to figure out what they did, why they were important or what impact they had. These could be used for so many learning and assessment purposes, group or individual. Arrange in a timeline. Arrange in order of significance, based on criteria developed by your group. Guess (or find out) what technology this invention replaced and what specifically was improved. Predict the social or environmental consequences of the invention. Explain why YOUR invention should be on the cover of a museum exhibit brochure on the industrial revolution. Find one other invention that is related to yours and, with your new partner, explain the connection to the class. You see how this list could go on and on. Instead of having a test bank, we'll have a source bank that can generate fresh assessments simply by changing up the order or the activity. Combined with simple instructions and a couple of different assessment rubrics (e.g. formative, summative, self, peer), we think this method could actually simplify assessment and not take up any more time than the standard test. In our experience, we learn much more about a student's progress from these open-ended "explain your understanding" assessments than we do from ye olde multiple choice tests. I haven't dug into the TC2 http://tc2.ca resources in a while, or had a chance to read The Big 6, but there one can find many more ideas to drive work with competencies.

I wish all schools and colleagues the best as they wrestle with the many issues that come up with the new curriculum. Historical content remains important, and is a great hearth on which to spin a "Social Studies" narrative with your students and practice both critical and creative thinking, but it is not the only thing that matters in Social Studies. In addition to competencies, tend to the geography, tend to the broad themes of the Humanities and other disciplines that make Social Studies more than a history course. For those that are unfamiliar with the "elements of historical thinking" -- learn more at http://historicalthinking.ca or sign up for their summer institute http://pdce.educ.ubc.ca/historical-thinking-summer-institute/. For those that use them all the time, challenge the notion that competencies begin and end with these elements. I encourage BC teachers to experiment with diverse course outlines and find a way to compare notes afterwards. Social media works fine for this. The word will eventually seep out to teachers who don't use social media.

Heritage Inquiry Stories

Each time I have taught Social Studies 10 for the last fifteen years or so, I have cleared some space in the lessons about Confederation, Metis uprisings, the Fraser River Gold Rush, the Physiography of Canada and so on to guide students into some heritage-based project-based learning. I've called it the Culture Project, the Heritage Project, Heritage Connections, and adapted versions of it for Social Studies 9 (the Heritage Skills Venture, Cultural Landscapes Project), Social Studies 11 (The Echo Project), and Geography 12 (GeoNarratives).

Each time the Grade 10s go through their round of project presentations, I am blown away by the results of their inquiry, the personal connections to history (and geography), the impact on the rest of the class and the families of the presenters, and the satisfaction and ease demonstrated by students when they are telling stories that combine curricular inquiry, personal research, and (usually) critical thinking. It is no surprise that students are more invested in their learning when their identity is engaged. Identity as curriculum, developed through story.

Here are some past posts on SS10 Heritage Inquiry:
http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2012/03/heritage-pbl-in-social-studies.html
http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2011/12/awesome-start-to-student-heritage.html
http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2011/10/heritage-redux.html
http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2011/11/4-stories-4-connected-students.html
http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2011/11/big-connection.html
http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2011/11/stories-keep-breaking-like-waves-on.html
http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2011/11/little-hymn-book.html
http://thielmann.blogspot.ca/2011/11/red-fife.html

Below are some of the stories told by my recent class of Grade 10 students.  They learned about the project in Oct 2015, worked on it off and on in Nov-Dec 2015, and presented the projects in Jan 2015. They had class time for some steps of the project, and the rest they did on their own -- this is virtually the only homework I assign in my Social Studies courses. The students usually put together displays, posters, or slideshows, bring in any artifacts they have to support their project, and present to the class the results of their primary source work, interviews, story-gathering, and so on. They all think that 15-20 minutes for a presentation will be daunting, and yet, with questions from me and the class, these presentations routinely take 25-35 minutes. That means I usually have to set aside 10-12 hours of class time for this, including the feast day. These stories were parts of the student presentation (not the whole project) and are written based on my notes taken in class, not necessarily in the students' own words.

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RK's Story 1: "Opa" (pictured above) fought for Germany in WWII and had his leg blown off by a mortar shell while at war with Russia. An officer found him and brought him back to a hospital where he convalesced. While there he received one of the perks of some recovering wounded -- a signed pictured from Hitler (while in the family's possession, it did not make it to school as part of of his exhibit). The Opa would spend three years in a refugee camp before immigrating to Canada. During the war, the student's great-uncle was also injured and rescued by the very same officer who had recognized Opa. The officer recognized the family name from the soldier's ID and informed him that his brother was indeed alive. Due to this coincidence, the brothers were later reunited.

SH's Story: This student started by saying that on doing some research, she came to realize that her " family is like the stock characters in a book"  What was familiar to her was not familiar to the class, though. We heard tales of Newfoundland fisherman (and being lost at sea), pirates, Beothuk ancestors, a family tradition of adoption, and mysterious Chinese grandfather in the family tree. The student used ship records, church and burial records, photos, wills, and interview notes to tell her story.

BM's Story: Sometimes the stories we hear are like hyperlinks from the brief outlines we see in textbooks on topics that are important to Canadian history. This student shared his Metis heritage, complete with a gorgeous sash, models of a teepee and a Red River Cart.  Among the documents he shared were reproductions of a petition signed in 1787 by 58 Metis (including an ancestor), and the Scrip used by his Metis ancestor to take up lands near Fort Garry in the aftermath of the Red River Rebellion of 1869-70. We heard stories that belonged to his Great-grandmother, a Metis elder, and followed the family tree as it grew westwards across the Prairies and into British Columbia.

SC's Story: Angola was once a colony of Portugal, and is was here that this student's Portuguese grandfather spent his youth as a soldier in the 1970s, "keeping order" among other things. He had a parrot and monkey, although the monkey dies of a drug overdose, mistaking another soldier's medication for candy. On the other side of the world is Kitimat, BC, a town built by Alcan to house workers for its Aluminum smelter. On the account of the jobs, it was a popular destination for Portuguese immigrants, including the family of young woman who arrived in 1968. There, at the prompting of a friend, she began a correspondence with the soldier in Africa. When Angola achieved its liberation in 1975, he came to Kitimat to marry his pen pal. An atypical Portuguese love story.

EV's Story: This student's great-grandfather was named George.  He was 4th in a line of Georges, born in England in the 1890s. He was the eldest son a family who got their wealth from a printing company among other ventures. George the 4th did not care for the family business, did not want to "live up to the Victorian ideals," so in 1914 he left home, took passage on a ship for Halifax (or Quebec?). He "hitched" across Canada (by rail?) and ended up in Vancouver, far enough away that he could forget about England and his family. Upon arrival he learned that the Great War had begun, and knew he had a choice to make. He decided to flip a coin: heads, he would find and board a ship for Australia; tails, he would enlist in the Canadian army and join the war effort. It was tails, so the 17-yr-old passed himself off as a Canadian 18-yr-old and went to war. Eventually he saw action and fell victim to the German's mustard gas while holed up in a tunnel or trench in eastern France. He was taken back to England to recover, where he met his wife-to-be, a nurse in the hospital. Around this time his family found about about the goings-on of the prodigal son, and when the war was over he was "sent" to a family farm to be respectable and work for a living. In 1952 he took his young family and left for Canada, this time for good. Due to storms, their passenger ship went off course and arrived in New York rather than Halifax. They stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, at the time the tallest and one of the most luxurious hotels in the world. They had a Waldorf salad, of course, and to this day the family still has a tradition of making this salad on any special occasion. although the recipe has morphed into something involving jello, now. George's family soon presen on to Canada, where they scanned a map and picked Prince George, BC as a destination because it had "George" in it.

ER's Story: We learned about the history of Acadia from the viewpoint of an Acadian descendant. Her family has been there from the beginning, immigrating in the 1630s, draining marshland, hiding in New Brunswick during the Expulsion of 1755, starting various businesses, and dispersing across Canada in modern times. Her stories were interspersed with French-Acadian terms, references to land and home(s), to delicious food, to fishing, alcohol, crafts, coffin-making, and the familiar (yet incredible) themes of grief, resilience, and thrift that are common to any people who have endured hard times.

TO's Story: We all leaned forward a bit when the first words of the presentation were "this story is really important to me." The narrative focused on the student's mother, an immigrant from rural Peru who grew up poor on a potato farm. Each day the mother ran barefoot many miles from her village to the closest school. It was there that she proved herself such a remarkable student that he secured scholarships for further education in Lima, and became involved in international development work. The narrative took many turns through world travels, fascinating jobs, photos, and interview quotes, and ended up with an observation that when the student now runs competitively she feels like it is something in her bones.

CM's Story: This student realized that the direct evidence from family-based research would only turn over so many stones, so he took on the broader topic of culture and social context. Focusing on Scottish Heritage, he gave us a history lesson on the fairs of Glasgow in the 1800s (and what was traded there), fishing, architecture, and shipbuilding, the impact of the Industrial Revolution on Scotland, and finished with one of few stories for which he had hard evidence. This was the narrative of his great-grandfather who fought at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and started a second family, much to the surprise of his first family.

I have notes in front of me for 18 more recent student presentations, so I hope to return to this topic when I have a chance to write some more.

Generations

Here's a photo from a student Social Studies project showing five generations in one family, the youngest in the photo being the student's mother. It is remarkable to think about the potential of intergenerational wisdom; in fact this idea is what formed the foundation for two kinds of student Heritage projects at my school. Not just wisdom but also humour, purpose, shame, awe, controversy, destiny, grief, and inspiration.

I've worked with our school's teacher-librarian over the years to encourage our students to interview their elders, and to think about how their generation might see things differently than the one(s) that came before. Not everything works along generational lines, but it is a practical way for students to conceptualize the last 150 years.  One of the things my teacher-librarian and I chat about is what to call the next cohort of students in our school -- the generation that follows the so-called Millennials.

Here's a list of the generations previous:

• Generation Y / The Millennials / The Echo Generation -- c.1982 - c.2006
• Generation X -- c.1965 - c.1984
• Baby Boomers -- 1946 - c.1964
• The Silent Generation / Lucky Few -- c.1925 - c.1945 
• The Greatest Generation / G.I. Generation -- c.1901 - c.1924
• The Lost Generation -- c.1883 - c.1900

Here's what we came up with so far for the next generation -- c.2005 - ?:

• Generation Z
• The Quantum Gen
• Hyperconnected Gen / Networked Gen
• Meme Gen
• Post-Carbon / Green Gen

Characteristics: Those born after the creation of popular online social networks, after global acceptance of climate change (and the gloom therein) but also after global shift in growth rate from exponential back to linear. Most of the world's poorer nations of the world have transitioned from early expanding, underdeveloped status to become newly industrialized with declining birth rates. China overtakes Japan and Germany to rival the United States in economic status. Globalization and pervasive, hyperconnected mobile technology dominate all aspects of life. Advances in science have given us insight into the cosmos as well as the basic building blocks of life and matter.

Why the name choices?

Gen Z - for Zombie of course - a revived symbol of deathlessness to go along with Vampires, Werewolves and such. These timeless denizens underwent a revival since the publication of Twilight in 2005, but do we really want that event to mark the beginning of a generation?  In 2005, Aubrey de Grey predicted, in a TED talk, that the generation that will live forever has already been born. While he didn't have Zombies in mind, the idea fits -- the focus is on the next 100 years and not the last.  In education it is around 2005 when educational marketers and pundits start pushing the "21st century" learner, teacher, education system and so on.  Better late than never.  The students of the new century are supposed to be less concerned about fixed states of learning (including subject areas) and more about creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking.

Quantum Gen - a quantum is essentially the smallest entity that comprises some larger whole, it is a reduction of complex systems down to the basic parts.  This is a fitting metaphor for the way in which modern sciences (including social sciences) have growing confidence that we can actually understand ideas that were previously immutable, particularly as it relates to the brain, genome research, biotechnology, and different kinds of physics. This is the generation that will see transhuman experimentation (cyborgs), mind control, and perhaps interstellar travel. Read Asimov's Foundation series for the blueprint.

Networked Gen / Hyperconnected - Speaking of 2005, this is also the year that Youtube is created.  A year later it's Twitter.  During these years, Facebook turns from a college online yearbook to a wide-open social network.  These three form the unholy Trinity of Social Media that would shape the existing generations and create new conditions for the one that follows.  Sorry, Myspace.

Meme Gen - This is also the generation that saw the rise of memes, both as a philosophical/psychological/linguistic term about cultural transmission, and of course the popularized meme which is about mimicry, deconstructing (or debasing) cultural detritus, and use of familiar images, catchphrases, and media in order to be witty on the internet.

Post-Carbon / Green Gen - The Earth is witnessing affects of environmental crises, notably as a result of climate, but also the possibility that exponential population growth is turning back to linear.  Nations are finally taking carbon emissions seriously after mixed results of the Kyoto Protocal.  Bali and Copenhagen Summits set new goals, and governments have shown a new willingness to put controls on carbon and seek energy alternatives.  Alas, much wishful thinking here and Greed could stand in for Green often as not.

Please feel free to critique these or suggest some new ones.

Sept 2015 update: just read an interesting article about the extent to which Americans identify with their generational labels:  http://www.people-press.org/2015/09/03/most-millennials-resist-the-millennial-label/

There and Back Again

I had the pleasure of spending last week in London and Oxford, England. It was formal and informal pro-d for me, and my first time off the continent since 1988. This was covered in part by the PGDTA PD Fund (the committee approved an amount commensurate with a BC-based conference) and the rest from aeroplan points and what I'll have to think of as an advance on my BCTF signing bonus :)

I attended a "Tolkien symposium" in Oxford, focusing on medieval language, literature, modern philology, and Tolkien's connection to all three. I chased down a few of the haunts of the Inkings (the literary circle that developed around C.S. Lewis), found the grave of William Blake among others, and visited every museum and historical site I could get to with the remaining time. Highlights included the Ashmolean, Bodleian Library, the Wallace Collection, Tower of London, and Portobello Road Market.

As a personal and professional learning experience, I am only beginning to realize how this will influence my approach to "what's important" in Social Studies. For the next time my locally developed course Middle Earth 12 runs, I think I have reckoned what needs to be at the centre of it. More practically, I have some good new stories to tell about aspects of history and culture e.g. English Civil War, WWI, colonization & empire, the London Blitz, the Holocaust, and how modern cities preserve the past without being blind to progress.

I took over 1000 pics, and tweeted out some of them with captions. I have archived these at https://storify.com/gthielmann/there-and-back-again for you to see.

GeoNarratives

For educators and others: this post is intended as a beginning, a draft for a Gr. 11 student project design. Your feedback is welcome, particularly about communicating these lofty ideas to students so they can understand it, managing steps in the project so they don't get lost, assessment suggestions, and weblinks to examples of similar projects appreciated. I'll also be seeking "critical friends" feedback at Mumbleypeg 2013, an annual meeting of the Pacific Slope Consortium. Virtually all of the students at my school have conducted Heritage Projects or Echo Projects of one flavour or another in Social Studies 9, 10, or 11. This means that they have spent considerable time gathering evidence and stories about past cultures and locations, mainly ones within their own family. For my current group taking Geography 12 and English 11 together in the Language and Landscape Program, I want to provoke them to examine the role that geography played in those stories, and to engage in writing and other creative expression to deconstruct these narratives. We will be assigning a significant number of our learning outcomes to this project, and working through it off and on for about two months.

Enough preamble; here it is:

GeoNarratives: Cross-curricular Project-based Learning about People and Places

Each of us has rich stories in our past, stories that woven together with places. For some, it is the tale of our ancestors as they endured challenges that we can only imagine. For others, the people, places and stories are more immediate, still present within our lives. In all cases there is direct and indirect evidence hiding in language, food, and song, and written into physical and cultural landscapes. 

This project will require building a “geography” and creating a “narrative” -- specifically:

• heritage inquiry: taking the stories from your personal and cultural background and examining patterns, geographic relationships, and significance -- applying critical geographic thinking to an authentic context 
• creative non-fiction: writing and creating narratives based on research -- perhaps there is some short cross-over into historical fiction and personal myth-making, but at its heart is the telling of a story that connects to your heritage 
• embodiment: putting your senses, your artistic side, your physical presence into your research and presentation -- creative expressions of the parts of your research that you find most compelling 

 Aside from the critical thinking and creativity involved, some specific skills will be developed:

• careful use of technology: placing a digital stamp on this project -- use of an online portfolio, use of technology for research and/or expression, experimenting with something new 
• literature review and wordtake: surveying the reading and media that relates to your inquiry and using some of it to explore Self and Other, or global issues that impacted your own backstory

This is a broad framework created by your teacher, but it is important that you design the questions that will allow this to be meaningful to you. As your teacher, I can provide as much structure as you think you need to be successful with this project, including narrowing down your topics, suggesting courses of action, and helping you embed “benchmarks of geographic inquiry.” With all this in mind you are free to take this project in new directions, as long as we consider certain learning outcomes that are basic to English Language Arts and Geography, including a high standard for writing.

GeoNarratives at a glance -- considering the impact of geography on the stories from one’s past

The final presentation of your GeoNarrative will take in four parts:

1. sharing the part of your portfolio that shows your heritage research, literature review, and critical analysis (the conclusions you have made about both the topic and your learning)
2. sharing some or all of the creative non-fiction (or historical fiction) that you have built around your research 
3. sharing a performative piece that you made to express or symbolize the deep part of your learning during this project 
4. use of at least one effective of digital technology in the process of project creation or presentation 

Project Steps (not always in this sequence):

1. look at and assess example of creative non-fiction, heritage inquiry, and “geographies” 
2. develop questions and designs for your project 
3. accumulate primary and secondary evidence and conduct a variety of research 
4. co-develop aspects of your project and evaluation criteria with student groups and the teacher 
5. create the pieces that make up your project 
6. prepare the pieces for sharing, including presentation 
7. share and present your project 
8. reflection, celebration, and evaluation 

Examples of stories that would work well as GeoNarratives:

• immigration experiences, so different depending on location and time period 
• wartime from civilian or a soldier’s perspective 
• grandma’s garden, grandpa’s workshop; practicing bygone skills and trades 
• working on the land; pioneering and homesteading 
• outdoor lifestyles, a tradition of hunting or fishing 
• managing a farm and family, homemaking in the past 

Examples of global issues that could be examined within your project:

• a study of racism/tolerance, language acquisition, or labour market among new immigrants 
• evolving role and treatment of women in various places, cultures, and time periods 
• aboriginal ways of knowing and relationship between First Nations and the broader society 
• the power of wealth: studies of “class” and differences between rich and poor 
• citizenship, rights and democracy: how much freedom or “agency” did historic groups really have 
• the idea of sustainability and the relationship that different peoples have with the environment 
• grief and hope: how did historic groups cope with challenges (could tie in to religious studies) 

Examples of evidence that would support a GeoNarrative:

• non-fiction, documentaries, history books and websites, academic studies 
• novels, short stories, works of fiction and poetry from the time period and place that you are examining 
• artwork or crafts such as paintings, architecture, sketches, sculptures, carvings, jewelry, tools, heirlooms 
• primary evidence, journals, memoirs, recollections, artifacts, photographs, recipes, travelogues, interviews 
• genealogical websites, graveyards, government records, family history books 
• existing “human geography” connected to your topics (studies that parallel your inquiry), historical atlases

Examples of a performative piece:

• musical creation (e.g. write a song), interpretive dance, historical re-enactment, water colour painting, original poetry, food creation, a model or diorama, puppet show, simulation, class activity, video reflection, narrated slideshow, interactive display, build something

Examples of a digital stamp:

• use of QR codes to link to key evidence, like a reader’s guide for someone to understand your work 
• creating an attractive space in your digital portfolio to display some of your work (lots of applications to try for this one) 
• using video or computer animation for part of your project 
• conducting interviews via Skype and archiving part of it as portfolio evidence 
• use of social media for “curating” (assessing and organizing) research or telling/sharing a story

Examples of a projects that put together many strands of inquiry:

• Cigar-Box Project http://www.thinkinginmind.com/cigar-box-project/
• Seven Geography-themed projects from High Tech High http://www.hightechhigh.org/pbl/
• Learning Geography in the 21st Century http://mahara.umeedu.maine.edu/view/view.php?t=ymiKptgDcakl5JUIeJ1k
• Zombie-based learning - Geography curriculum http://www.zombiebased.com/

Note on the image at the top: this is a map of the Molotchna colony -- home to Mennonites who left Prussia to settle in this part of South Russia from the 1780s onwards.  After WWI and the Russian Revolution, many of these Mennonites fled to North America, including all four of my grandparents. One of my own GeoNarratives is very much connected to this time, place, and people.

Awesome start to student heritage projects

After a month of preparation mixed in with the other things we do in Social Studies 10, my students are finally ready to present their Heritage Projects (blogged about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 times now). Having learned from the past, I knew we had to start on Friday with a few students were very organized and inspiring. That way the rest of the class could home for the weekend, sulk for a bit, and then get to work on the last bits of their projects. As Akhil said "okay, that was good, but you set the bar way to high!" What a great start. First class, Travis and Jennifer fit the bill: thorough, engaging, and ready to go (I'll write about them soon). Erin led the next class off, with a tour of her diverse background, and some wonderful storytelling about tolerance of difference based on a story her grandmother shared with her. What made me very proud of Erin was that I often give her a hard time for procrastinating, so she was determined to go first for this project and prove me wrong. We finished the Friday round with a stunning presentation from Hailey. Her slideshow was modeled after a history book, mostly a British one at that, and she had incredible artifacts like the old hymnbook, journals, an unusual ring, and "the box" (shown above) to go with the slides. According to Hailey's family tradition, and the note included in the writing-box, this belonged to William Beatty, part of their family a number of generations back. He was the ship surgeon aboard Admiral Nelson's HMS Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Assuming this checks out, it is quite likely he used this fold out desk aboard the hosptial ship Sussex in 1806 to write his influential work on Nelson's death, something he was unable to prevent (he did the autopsy, though!). The box shows a few defects, and perhaps some more modern repairs, but is otherwise in fine condition. Hailey's mom brought it in to show us at lunch, and it wasn't long before the history buffs and wood enthusiasts among staff & students were gathered around and jumping in on the conversation. Our shop teachers had the veneer, joints, inlay, finish, and species figured out. Our Socials teachers had the Napoleonic struggle dialed in, with some speculation about how this major museum-worthy specimen ends up in a basement in Prince George. Where's the Antique Roadshow when you need them? Hailey also shared a leather-bound notebook with beautiful script from the 1890s belonging to her great-x2-grandfather, a chemist, containing recipes for tonics, ointments, and cure-alls. This was a journey into Victorian medicine ("maggot wash" was my favorite), a time when mercury, arsenic, opium, ground up bones, and all manners of herbs and spices could be had from the local apothecary. One more of the stories she shared was that of her great-great-grandparents who responded to the Laurier/Sifton "Last Best West" campaigns and came to Manitoba in 1911. Needless to say the process leading up to this day involved some cool learning for Hailey and others, for me, for a bunch of parents. The students are picking up skills related to historical empathy, critical thinking, resilient research, the themes of geography, judgement of evidence, strategic use of technology, and authentic presentation. It is amazing how excited students are when the learning is connected to both themselves and the threads of "social studies" that they identify as interesting and important. I'll try and keep up with blogging about some of the other presentations.

Stories keep breaking like waves on the shore

where Beatrix Potter bought her tinned veggies and tea

I am astounded at how many of my students are learning basic history about their background for the very first time. The conversations that are opening up at home sound very interesting... neutral ground for some of my students to talk to semi-estranged parents or realize that their step-mom's family background has a direct relationship to the kind of values and parenting skills used now, etc. etc. There have been some powerful, awkward, messy stories involving residential school survival and the impact of colonization, and lots of research dead-ends that are that way for a reason. Today, though, was about classic history... Hailey has waited patiently to show me an album and share the family stories she is discovering. Her background seems mainly British, and her grandmother who lives here in Prince George has kept great records. One of the pictures (shown above) is her family's old store in Windermere, UK that was frequented by Beatrix Potter. We've been seeing incredible photos this week, including daguerrotypes going back to the early history of photography. The artifacts in granny's house, though, were what really got us intrigued. One is a tiny worn leather-bound bible or such, maybe old enough to be alkaline paper pre-1800 - she may bring it in tomorrow. Another is a small wooden chest, curly maple with brass strapping. It belonged to the William Beatty, the chief surgeon for Admiral Nelson during the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. He is tied to Hailey's family tree and the box, which looks almost new, has passed down the line and has ended up in our backwoods city in northern BC. What other treasures are hidden here? A movie has been made about Beatty and the surgeon's perspective from the lower decks of the HMS Victory, including the treatment of the injured and dying Lord Nelson.