Home: Heartland Region: Lucy Baker School

May 25, 2000

Dear Participants:

I thought it might be helpful to give a general outline of our activities both in the Alberta Youth Heritage Project and outside it so that my speaking time can be used profitably for stories relating to our oral history project.

1. Curriculum work: all teachers must own their curriculum-- as an administrator I allow, require and respect the right of each of my teachers to take the curriculum given and adapt it to our local particular and peculiar circumstances. Each year, we review what has worked and what has not and by a continuous refining process- are managing to construct a curriculum which is intellectually satisfying, at least in part fascinating for the students and sufficiently on topic to keep Alberta Learning off my back. At the same time, we recognize the changing needs of our students and the individual circumstances of our school and have thus also developed intentional units to deal with women's history and native history. This curriculum development is crucial, we believe, to ensure that the enthusiasm of one teacher can be maintained even through wholesale staff changes. Thus a terrific project this year does not have to die because Ms. X moved; the next teacher can continue her work and add his own refinements to it. I believe that this approach, in whatever form, is critical to the success of the Alberta Youth Heritage Project so that it is not "just" an enthusiasm but a serious invigoration of the teaching of history in the Province. Our own work has garnered some respect as last year we were Finalists in the Governor-General's Award for Teaching Canadian History.
   
   

2. The AYHP has helped us enormously in our oral history project which we began last year with the cooperation of the local community. We believe strongly in the school's involvement with the local community since it creates phenomenal synergies and creative possibilities which would not be possible within the bounds of a school campus. Of course, it also 'justifies getting out of the classroom too so there is a bi- incentive for us as teachers!! We began oral history as a way of connecting the past with the present. Our elders can take us back into the beginnings of Alberta as a Province and sometimes even earlier through family memories and memorabilia. For our students, the past, in whatever form it was presented, was still a long way away. To talk, for example, to someone about her love life 60 years ago, enabled the students to recognize the reality of life is timeless. It was also a steep learning curve for us!! This year, the AYW grant has kicked us forward many steps and, interestingly, made us responsible to an outside agency for our results. This aspect of funding is one that should be emphasized not in an overseer fashion but in the sense of excitement and pride of doing a job as well as you can and sharing with others the historical chase. We have become more rigorous in OUF approach, a little more professional in the interviewing and much more aware of issues surrounding oral history. For our students, it has undoubtedly been the highlight of their historical year.
   
   

3. We are engaged in developing a partnership with an immigrant women's group in Edmonton called Changing Women. The idea here is that they share their stories with us from all their incredible backgrounds; in turn, we share the story of feminism in western Canada so that they can understand also the struggle that women here have also had. The students are developing an overhead presentation which they can present themselves or which can be presented by someone from that Organization. We hope too that this will also be an aid to Changing Women as they take immigrant women through the transition period in their newly adopted country. This venture, while it has many rationales for us, from an historical point of view, is exciting for the students because they experience history from outside the teacher, outside the textbook, outside the classroom. They experience it spoken from a variety of ethnic, religious, cultural, gender perspectives and thus have the opportunity to delve into the whole area of bias. This we hope to develop as we move into the project. It also an opportunity for the student to have expertise and get respect for showing it. This doesn't happen too often (outside the partial audience in the school!) and introduces a whole bunch of other academic skills related to public performance and presentation. The notion of partnership is critical to our school and I heartily recommend it to anyone who is becoming jaded!!
   
   

4. We are just getting going on our web page as a resource for people to visit. This is still in its infancy but we are presently working on a web presentation of our oral history and our site also has historical women on it with many cross-references to other sites. We hope, in time, to make our site an award winning one which people visit just because it's so interesting.
   
   

These are four ways that we are trying to ensure that history is vibrant and stays at the top of the school's agenda. Curriculum, oral history (which means local history), partnering or networking, website development, all provide incredible opportunities for students to learn important content, academic skills and social skills. They also offer an opportunity for the teacher to be a learner and be stretched in directions not tried before. They are, in addition, a chance for the school to be not just known in the local community but a resource and an asset to it. This latter then opens up the possibility of funding from local places for history projects (the Bank might fund a pictorial history of its building, for example, to put up on the wall) and, in one sense, who cares what the topic is so long as the students are learning, the history is being taught, everyone is excited about Canada and teachers keep increasing the tools they have!!!!!!

Simon Jeynes
Headmaster, Lucy Baker School
www.lucybaker.com