Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

15 minutes – Part A: Activating Prior Knowledge
45 minutes – Part B: Who Gets To Tell Our Stories?
55 minutes – Part C: Challenging Perspectives
5 minutes – Reflection

Lesson Preparation:

In preparation for this lesson, make a list of events that occurred in the past year that students are familiar with. These could be things that students experienced personally (like a school event) or something that occurred in the world around them (like an election). The events need to be something that students are willing to discuss and share with other students. Keep this list of events handy; they will be used in Part B of this lesson.

Suggested events:

School camp
School excursion
State or federal election
Major sporting event
Major news story
Natural disaster

Part A: Activating Prior Knowledge

Step 1.

Begin this lesson by sharing the following clip with students:

Welcome to AIME (https://vimeo.com/268931179)

Once complete, invite students to share their reflections of this clip through class discussion. Consider using some of the following questions to guide your discussion:

What did you find interesting or important about this clip?
What does this clip make you think about?
What does this clip make you wonder?

Step 2.

Next, remind students that the clip begins with the statements:

“Let us tell you our story
The AIME story begins in Australia 60,000 years ago”

Without inviting answers, pose the following to students:

Why might stories be important, not only for organisations but individuals?
What does describing something as ‘our story’ offer to the storyteller and to the listener?

Now break the class into pairs or small groups and distribute the Student Worksheet to each student.

Invite students to work in their groups to discuss and record their responses to the following questions (also available on the Student Worksheet - some suggested answers and discussion points are included below):

What is a story?
Suggested answer: A story can be an account of real or imaginary events told for entertainment, or it can be an account of events from the past, events from someone's life or events in the development of something.
Why do we tell stories?
Suggested answer: We tell stories to entertain or to share something about ourselves or an event. Stories are another way of communicating messages or sharing ideas.
When stories are retold we rely on the storyteller to tell the story accurately. Why might it matter who gets to tell stories?
Suggested answer: The storyteller has the power to change the story, including omitting or embellishing little and big details. We rely on the storyteller to accurately tell the story. These changes can happen intentionally when the storyteller chooses to change the story or when the storyteller forgets or misinterprets a detail. This is particularly true when a story is passed from one person to another with details being lost in the process. Consider the game called Telephone where one person passes on a message to another person through a whisper, and then that person passes on the message to another person through a whisper, and so on, until the final person speaks the whisper they heard - the result is typically far removed from the original statement.
Think about your own story - how would you feel if someone else told your story and missed important details or added in something you didn’t want told or wasn’t correct?

Step 3.

Invite students to share some of their ideas through a class discussion. Through this process, lead students to the idea that we all have our own stories and that our stories affect who we are and how we interact with the world around us.

Now pose the following to students:

Does it matter who gets to tell the story of what has happened in the past?
Does it matter who gets to describe and share history?

Invite students to share their answers with the class and explain they will be exploring these questions in more detail throughout the rest of this lesson.

Step 3.

Step 1.

Pose the following question to students:

Where do we get our information for our stories?

Some students may note that the word history is like ‘his story’. You might like to investigate what this could mean about who gets to tell the stories of our past.

Lead students to the idea that there are primary and secondary sources of information.

Digitally distribute the Understanding Evidence And Sources Of Information Factsheet to students and invite them to read through it.

Once complete, ask students to turn to a peer to reflect on what they’ve already looked at about stories and storytellers. Students should work collaboratively to discuss and respond to the following questions (also available on the Student Worksheet - suggested answers are included below):

What might be the benefits of using primary sources?
Suggested answer: You are seeing the account of the event from as close to the event as you can. You can make your own interpretations about what happened.
What might be the risks of using primary sources?
Suggested answer: You might miss some details or be unable to find all the evidence you need.
What might be the benefits of using secondary sources?
Suggested answer: Interpretation and analysis has already been done so you may get more background information or context or connections to other similar events that will enrich your story.
What might be the risks of using secondary sources?
Suggested answer: You are using someone else's analysis or interpretation of an event and they may have chosen to embellish or omit something that you would have thought was important. Their interpretation may depend on their own interests, background experience or biases.

Once complete, invite students to share their thoughts with the class. Reiterate the point made in the final question about the ways we all bring our own experiences into our telling and interpretation of the event we experience and share.

Step 2.

Explain to students that they will now explore how an event can be interpreted and told in different ways.

Think of a range of events that occurred in the past year that students are familiar with. These could be things that students experienced personally (like a school event) or something that occurred in the world around them (like an election). The events need to be something that students are willing to discuss and share with other students.

Suggested events:

School camp
School excursion
State or federal election
Major sporting event
Major news story
Natural disaster

Break the class into groups of three to four. Assign each group to work with a different event.

Step 3.

Now invite each student in that group to work independently to create a short diary entry from their own perspective about the event that their group has been assigned (e.g. one-third to half a page of handwriting). The diary entry should include details about the event and how the writer experienced this event (e.g. “I found it interesting/funny/challenging…” or “My experience of this event was…”). This represents the primary source.

Step 4.

Each group should then swap their diary entries with students from another group. Without discussing the diary entries (there will be a chance for discussion later), each student should read through each diary entry and use these primary sources to create a secondary source. This secondary source could be a short newspaper-style analysis (e.g. here), with an interpretation and analysis of the event based on the content of the diary entries. Ask students to focus on the things that they find interesting or important and think about how these can be used to support their understanding of the event as told through the diary entries.

Step 5.

Once complete, invite each group to review, compare and contrast the secondary sources that they created:

How different or similar are the primary sources? What does this tell us about eyewitness accounts and other primary sources?
How different or similar are the secondary sources?
What if you had only one primary source to work with - how different would your secondary sources be?
How did your own experiences and opinions affect your secondary source?
Why might this be important when it comes to major historical events or periods of time?

Part C: Challenging Perspectives

Step 1.

Take a moment to summarise learnings from the previous activity by posing the following:

What happens when only one perspective of history is told?
How might a storyteller alter history? How might this affect our understanding of what has happened in the past?
Why does it matter what history we hear? Isn’t it all just in the past?

Step 2.

Now explain to students that they will be watching a clip featuring Bruce Pascoe. Bruce Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man who has published both adult and young adult literature. In 2014 he published a book called Dark Emu which documents and argues "for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer label for pre-colonial First Nations peoples. The evidence insists that Aboriginal peoples right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing - behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag" (source: Dark Emu, 2018).

Bruce Pascoe - keynote clip (https://youtu.be/UEMeruNEtWY)

Consider inviting students to share their reflections on this clip. Be mindful to keep the conversation on the topic of who gets to tell our history and what the implications of this might be.

Step 3.

Once complete, display the following quotes from Bruce from this clip on the board (also available on the Student Worksheet):

“For five years I was in a complete state of shock as I read this and started to contemplate what it meant for the intelligence of an entire nation that none of this had ever been mentioned in school. None of it. What's going on? How can you do that? What happens (when) a whole nation, for 250 years, (is) completely blind and deaf to a really important story?”

"If you've got a society which is so complex, so sophisticated that they know this story about the whales long before Europeans have worked it out, then you have to pay credence to it... You have to know it because it's part of your own history; because it's part of human history. And if you don't want to know it, why don't you want to know it?"

Invite students to share their thoughts and feelings about these quotes, recording key points on the board.

Step 4.

Explain to students that they will now create an individual piece in response to the following question:

Why does it matter what perspectives we hear from history - isn’t it all just in the past?

The aim here is for students to think critically about the history we hear and why it’s important to seek out alternative perspectives, especially when we’re trying to build a better future.

Students could work independently to create one of the following to communicate their ideas:

Written persuasive piece
Oral persuasive piece
Mind-map (with annotations in full sentences)

Regardless of the communication method chosen by students, students should include justifications for opinions (including reference to evidence where available) - when conducting research online remind students of the Online Search Strategies.

Some questions to consider/prompt students when creating their work (also available on the Student Worksheet):

Why do sources matter?
Are some types of sources better than others?
What is the relationship between the past, the present and the future?
Can we learn anything from history?
How could we make sure that more perspectives are heard?
What would you like to know more about from history and why do you think this would be important?
Remember the clip you watched at the start of this lesson where AIME introduced their story. At the end of the clip the following words appeared on the screen: “We write the next chapter.” What do you think this means?

Allow students time to reread and edit their work before sharing.

Step 5.

Invite students to team up with a classmate to share their work. As they share, invite students to prompt each other about their work, for example:

Tell me more about this point
How is this similar or different from what I’ve presented?
I’d like to hear more about how you came to this conclusion.

Reflection

Invite students to work independently to reflect on this lesson using the following:

I used to think…
Now I think...

Differentiated Learning

Extension - Students requiring extension could conduct further research into Aboriginal agriculture to find further examples that they think other students in the class should hear about. Students can summarise these examples and share. This link is a good place to start.

Provisions for Learning Support - Students could work collaboratively to produce the final work. Alternatively, students could provide answers to the prompting/guiding questions (see below) instead of creating an individual piece:

Why do sources matter?
Are some types of sources better than others?
What is the relationship between the past, the present and the future?
Can we learn anything from history?
How could we make sure that more perspectives are heard?
What would you like to know more about from history and why do you think this would be important?
Remember the clip you watched at the start of this lesson where AIME introduced their story. At the end of the clip the following words appeared on the screen: “We write the next chapter.” What do you think this means?

Teacher Reflection

Take this opportunity to reflect on your own teaching:

What did you learn about your teaching practice today?
What worked well?
What didn't work so well?
What would you share?
Where to next?
How are you going to get there?

IMAGI-NATION{TV} - Flipping the Script on Indigenous History

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