A lot of people have been doing a lot of talking about the way we teach history, why students engage with this subject and, more importantly, why they disengage. One response to this is the developing national curriculum. Any sort of curriculum is going to try and achieve a balance between content, skills and methodology, but today I’m banging on about emotional engagement and the teaching of history.
Many students see history as a bunch of facts and figures so dry they could start a firestorm. Here at the National Museum of Australia we’ve got two programs that seek to make our history sparkle and speak to youth audiences through using drama and emotional engagement.
The first is a short program called ‘Meet the People’. It is designed for large groups of students who, with their teachers, want to explore the Museum independently. A brief welcome and overview of the Museum is provided and then students have the opportunity to emotionally engage with Australian history through a short dramatic presentation- the educator ‘becomes’ a person from Australian history that students can find in our galleries (Nancy Bird, Nova Peris and Frank Hurley are our current personas). The ‘litmus test’ for engagement is the kind of questions kids ask following the performance and, of course, the way students then engage with the exhibit in the gallery. I become Nancy Bird and some of my favourite questions have been:
- Is Bird her real name?
- Did she ever take her Dad for a flight?
- What was her husband famous for?
The second program is a festival of student devised Museum Theatre called ‘Come Alive’. Ten high schools and colleges from Canberra participated. The students came to the museum, selected a story, researched it and created an original piece of theatre. The results were joyous, exciting, funny, moving and… alive! We’ve got some video of the festival, and we’ll blog it in the next little while…
Both of these programs make me pretty excited about the capacity of drama and emotional engagement to enliven young people’s interest in history, especially Australian history. I think that students disengage from history when they lose sight of the individuals involved – it’s awesome to work in a social history museum where our bread and butter activities are hooking students on the stories of ordinary and extraordinary Australians who form our history.
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