Not Just the Facts
If ISA’s Grade 8 Social Studies were a textbook based course, March would have been the month they reached the chapter on colonial America, and this week the section on indentured labour. The teacher would have introduced the main points in a mini-lecture; the students would have turned to their books for more details, then answered questions prompting them to first identify basic facts then to describe broad themes. A more modern textbook may have made room for a student to discuss their opinions with a partner, before asking them to imagine they were an indentured servant and to write a letter home about their situation. Next week, there would have been a quiz to see how much students remembered those basic facts and broad themes.
We judge a lesson like this on how much students leave knowing about colonial America. Some students may question why they need to know about colonial America, while, as teachers, we are aware that retention of factual knowledge in even the most motivated student is less than five percent after a year; by the time they are at university all they will be left with is a vague sense of having once studied it. Nevertheless, many schools do it, because there is a general sense that this is what should be done.
Such traditional lessons still have their benefits though. Students are reading and writing: skills they practise across many subjects daily, thus embedding and mastering them. They get a sense of things having been done differently once, and what we do is not the only way to do things.
However, that’s a bit like praising junk food for providing the energy we need to live. It’s true, but if we fill up on it all the time, we miss out on foods that can provide the necessary calories and other vital nutrients. Textbook based learning does encourage high level literacy, but other opportunities are lost.
This month, Grade 8s have been studying colonial America and indentured labour in particular, but not because that is where they are at in a textbook. Of course, they use books, the teacher and the internet to get information, but they understand facts are a tool not a purpose. Their focus over the last week has been to create a civil trial between a landlord and a runaway indentured labourer. Instead of being asked questions, the students created their own; instead of being given information, they found things out for themselves.
Students questioned witnesses, asking them: did you see this yourself or did you hear it from others; does what you say add up with other known facts; do you contradict yourself or others; if so, why; do you have a reason to present the truth in a partial way that gives a particular impression? Of course, their questions were phrased differently, but the lesson’s purpose was clear: when there are multiple perspectives from multiple sources, how can we know what happened?
More than that, how can we know the meaning and significance of what happened? The trial hinged on an item in the contract that said the landlord could administer ‘appropriate punishment’. They labourer said he was abused. This then was not just about establishing what happened, but how we should interpret what happened, and how different perspectives affect those interpretations.
These were lessons with plenty of literacy calories - students were reading around, writing questions, taking notes on responses, deep reading the contract terms - but there were other intellectual nutrients as well, a chance to start asking, ‘how do we know?’ and ‘what does it mean?’ There can be nothing more relevant than that.
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