How do we position our students to engage meaningfully with wartime narratives and commemorations?
Teaching our students to think critically about Remembrance Day
Most teachers across the country can – without hesitation – explain what Remembrance Day is all about. History teachers can most likely go into more detail, while the majority can provide a basic overview.
However, consider the following scenario:
A student of yours, let’s say they’re aged five, asks you what war is, who the soldiers were and why they died.
Now things become a little more complicated. How do you explain to a five- year-old the nature of war without terrifying them and condemning them to countless sleepless nights?
Additionally, how do you then explain to the same five-year-old the complex cultural participation in commemorations?
To be fair, it’s nearly impossible. However, it does provide the foundation for a conversation that needs to be had. A conversation about how we position our students to engage meaningfully with wartime narratives and commemorations.
How we do things today
The status quo is that schools will consult a website such as the Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs to find a runsheet. Students will then be organised to speak, taking heed of the advice for the commemorative address to “highlight the service and sacrifice of men and women in all conflicts”. A wreath may be purchased, a minute’s silence will be observed, and a recording of the Last Post and the Rouse and the Reveille will be played.
The concern is that this ‘surface-level’ engagement is creating generations of historical tourists. These ‘tourists’ are not enabled to understand that memorials and commemorative services are interpretations of the past, or that such services are a representation of how present-day society believes it should interact with that past. They simply pass through without understanding the full context.
Is being a ‘tourist’ really that bad?
It’s probably not a question of good or bad, it’s just that we can do better. As ‘tourists’, students (and the adults they grow into) are at risk of accepting without question nationalistic and political agendas that may not be in their best interests. We should want our students to recognise the political, social, and economic factors that influence how a society conducts and participates in memorialisation of the past. Recognising and understanding this influence leads to active and proactive citizenship.
So how can teachers best prepare school students to think critically about memorialisation?
To answer this question, advice from academics and experts around the globe is insightful. Here are just a few:
Monique Eckmann from the University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland, says it’s important to understand the context and history of the decision to create a commemoration day. It’s vital to think about which advocacy groups take the initiative to propose a commemorative date, when, and for whom. Which groups are involved in memorialisation politics? Which victims are named, and which victims are not?
In his article, Alan S. Marcus, Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut, suggests providing students with or asking them to research the public and private purposes and missions of the memorial or commemoration, and asking students to discuss how they may influence what is displayed.
Barnaby Nemko, Head of History at St Helen’s School in Northwood, London, set his students the task of producing their own photographic memorial of the First World War, based on what they experienced on their day trip to the site of Ypres. Subsequently, the pupils would have to justify their choice of ‘exhibits’.
The results of this ‘experiment’ were interesting, or troubling to say the least.
The work his students produced displayed a complete lack of understanding that the photographic memorial they created was indeed an interpretation of the past. He found that the historical monuments elicited such a strong emotional reaction from the students that it impaired their analytical skills.
This only further proves that this meaningful conversation we spoke about earlier, needs to be had.
Without this conversation we’re missing valuable opportunities to teach students how to critically evaluate memorialisation as an historical artefact. This deserves our attention because artefacts embody the ideological value systems of the community that creates them and the society that, 100 years later, continues to use and observe them. In critiquing Remembrance Day, students will likely learn a great deal about the social and political customs of their own community.
This article, earlier published online in The Conversation, is by Macquarie University’s Kim Wilson. It is adapted for this newsletter.