Teaching the past is marred with the catastrophe of the present. History becomes the focal point for contemptuous claims to ownership, is invoked as legitimation for discrimination and is often mobilised to produce conflict. Seagull’s Professional Development Course attempts to reimagine the way history may be taught and looks to the past to inquire if it could teach values of peace and empathy. Therefore, history-teaching may be purposively geared towards not only incorporating peace but championing peace as its motive, as an essential skill children should learn in these peaceless times.
Objectives:
Inculcate values of empathy, justice and peace through the pedagogy of history (Sunita)
Learn strategies to teach history for peace
Learn strategies to promote historical enquiry
Workshop details
Piecing Peace Together
Meera Bhuvanesh
Events and processes in history help us to draw the full circle. It is a responsibility of history facilitators to create opportunities to see the broad picture. It is extremely pivotal to present varied narratives in history and customise environments for learners to form their opinions about popular beliefs, political stances and apparent understandings. To instill in students the sense of inquiry and questioning. Most of us accept that which has been a system for centuries thus falling prey to the pressure to conform. Present times are an evidence for the same. So through discussions and dialogues we can provide platforms for going beyond textbooks and ignite the eternal flame of ongoing deliberations.
Meera Bhuvanesh teaches History for the secondary and higher secondary levels at Delhi Public School, Coimbatore. She is the Lead Teacher for History-Political Science for DPS Schools and facilitates teacher training, providing scaffolding techniques for teachers facilitating Social Sciences. For nearly 20 years she has been facilitating the Social Sciences at an array for schools across the country and different Boards.. She has also been a UNESCO fellow for the year 2016-2017, where she studied the Badaga community of the Nilgiris, their history and a photo documentation of their unique festivals and the beliefs within the community about their history. She has also published articles in Teacher Plus and Progressive Teacher on history teaching, engaging classrooms and pedagogy of Social Science teaching
Peace and the Past
Sunita Biswas
Ask any middle school student the question ‘Why do we study History?’ and one of the top answers very often is ‘to learn from the past.’ If that is so then as history teachers we have a great opportunity – and responsibility – to lead our students to not just learn about but to actively engage in learning from history. The idea of peace through history seems apparently axiomatic for while one looks at what has already happened, the other is a concern for what is to come. In this workshop we will consider some approaches to the study of history in schools that will, through critical questioning, analysis, interpretation—and even imagination—bring the two together by broadening their understanding of the past and identifying peaceful possibilities for the future.
Sunita Biswas teaches History at the middle and senior levels at Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata. For more than 30 years her aim has remained to share with her students her passion for the subject. She has taught different curricula across different schools. In the classroom she has always tried to instill a questioning, critical interest that goes beyond the textbook and the curriculum, and that stretches far beyond school. For this she encourages her students to delve into songs, pictures—still and moving— posters and advertisements, among other sources. She has been a recipient of the Fulbright Teaching Excellence and Achievement award which gave her the opportunity to observe different teaching practices from around the world. She has also conducted teacher training workshops at several places. She favours a multi-disciplinary approach, encouraging students to join the dots and use lateral thinking to engage with History.
Framing the Present as History:
Challenges, Possibilities, and Experiments in History Teaching
Shivangi Jaiswal
Everything has a history—from ideas and institutions to people’s lives and experiences, to clothing, food, languages, and housing, to technologies and cultures that are part of our everyday lives, and the spaces we live and work in. Several issues of contemporary times—from discussions of nationalism and identity to the challenges posed by climate change—need a critical understanding of the past. What may appear as “natural” or “given” in the present has been shaped by a dynamic past, often filled with struggles, contestations, adaptations, and innovations. History has shaped and continues to shape global, national, and local interactions between individuals and societies. The workshop invites history teachers across curriculums to engage with a few pertinent questions to reflect on how we facilitate conversations between past and present in our history classrooms. How do we refer to or bring current events into discussions in our history classrooms? How could we critically and creatively approach history through a study of current events? What are the possible challenges with this approach to teaching history? In this workshop, participants will collectively explore possibilities of moving beyond the approach of “incorporating” current events in history classrooms to exploring possibilities of making it a key focus in actively shaping and guiding the broader framework of history education.
Shivangi Jaiswal is a historian by training and holds a PhD in History from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her thesis explores the intersection of caste and labour in the crucial decade of the 1940s. Besides, she has also pursued research in the history of medicine and oral history and has published papers across these areas of research in reputed journals and edited books. She currently teaches History, Integrated Humanities, and Theory of Knowledge in the International Baccalaureate Programme at the Aga Khan Academy, Hyderabad. She has previously worked with the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute and the Association of Indian Labour Historians. Her teaching practices and research experience, informed by the rigour of historical methods, aim to make classrooms a space for critical inquiry through research-based learning for children.
Bringing Critical Thinking in the History Classroom
Madhusree Dutta
Promoting critical thinking is an important goal in the teaching of history, however, most of the time, teachers need help to translate their general notion of critical thinking into a specific pedagogy. Teaching critical content (like - race, class, caste) and teaching students to think critically often begs the question: ‘Does teaching critical content develop critical thinking?’. This workshop focuses on how tools like Problem posing, Reflective skepticism, Multi-perspectivity, and Systemic Thinking can be integrated in the history classroom to cultivate thoughtful, responsible, and pluralist citizens who can manage conflict in a non-violent way.
Madhushree Dutta completed her MPhil on institutional history, ‘Indian Institute of Science’ under the guidance of her mentor, Professor Chittabrata Palit, Jadavpur University in the year 2004. A trained Oral Historian and a reflective practitioner, she believes that knowledge should not be confined by boundaries, loves to explore new ideas and methods to make learning experiential. Currently, working as a Lead Educator (History & Political Science) at Vidyashilp Academy, Bangalore, for the past eighteen years, she has been involved in designing and implementing history curriculum and lesson plans for middle and high school by integrating multimodal pedagogical approaches. A trained Oral Historian and a reflective practitioner, she is keen on bridging gaps between texts and practices by familiarizing students with ways to read and interpret history from various perspectives.
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