Yosanne Vella
History is a subject which offers many challenges for students. It is an area where howling mistakes are quite common, to say the least. Throughout my career I have come across some errors which did raise an eyebrow. I remember a diagram of a doll which is also a man, a doll man, sent to me by a history teacher of 11-year-olds who had asked them in the test to draw a dolmen.
When I taught history in England, my colleagues and I were all familiar with the Duck of Normandy who appeared regularly in students’ work on William the Conqueror. More recently a German teacher told me how she took into class an old German banknote depicting Karl Marx to start the sixth form lesson on ‘Socialism and Communism’ and, to her surprise, her students studying at the equivalent of A Level standard had no idea who the man on the note was.
While finding these errors ‘funny’, my reaction is always calm and nonchalant. As a history pedagogist, I never associate this situation with student stupidity or the ‘tragic state of history teaching’. This is because I am very much involved with secondary school students and I am aware of the fact that there are various factors at play here and these blunders are not as calamitous to historical understanding as they might first appear.
As I see it, there are three possible things going on here. The first is that the students saying these comments are teenagers. They are different from adults, and they think differently too.
This is not an old cliché here but recent studies have actually shown they use different parts of the brain to the ones adults use while solving the exact same problem. They may look like us and be actually taller than their 30-year-old teacher but these humans are extremely young. So while the adult has had 30 or 40 or more years of encounters with Napoleon through movies, books, newspapers, conversations and travel, these students probably first heard of him literally a year or two ago. So he is to them just one of the hundreds of important characters these students were introduced to very recently.
Our history students are much cleverer than we all think
Their memory is at its sharpest. They can retain and produce whole lists of information much quicker than adults can. But, and here is the catch, only if they think it is worth doing; and they dismiss things they decide are not important much quicker thanwe do too.
Now the one who answered that Napoleon was a Maltese leader is a history option student, so probably likes history or at least did when he or she chose it as a subject. So the second reason could be that the student has lost interest. Furthermore, the most likely reason is that he or she was hit by exam apathy and decided to make a wisecrack and give Napoleon the name of a Maltese leader. That is pulling the leg of adults, taking the mickey out of authority and things adults make them do.
As I go about researching the best ways to teach history students I am amazed at their analytical reasoning skills and historical understanding of complex issues. The right teacher support has shown time and again that it can elicit excellent feedback from these adolescents. I am constantly pleasantly surprised at how knowledgeable they are about human nature and human hidden agendas and how quickly they detect bias in historical narrative. The right teaching methods do produce students who manage to extrapolate from different historical contexts and come up with good history explanations, and from my experience it is really not a problem for many Maltese history students to understand multi-perspectivity in historical sources.
Teachers report back to me how history is becoming more popular and more students are choosing it as their optional subject while in international studies history teaching in Malta compares quite favourably. Malta is doing well in history teaching and learning, for despite the Napoleon error or student jest, our history students are much cleverer than we all think.
Yosanne Vella, History pedagogist, Associate Professor at the University of Malta.
Justin Schembri
The recent report by the Times of Malta about Maltese students being less than prolific about history, could point to several causes that do not necessarily exclude each other.
From my perspective as a teacher interested in general history, I can point out some fallacies that affect the way history is taught and explained within the academia. For generations, the subject has been a victim of politics. Teachers, in their effort to keep away from political bias in the classroom, opt to skim through or omit altogether, important historical events that derive from political events, even if they are of utmost social interest. This has a ripple effect on the students themselves since they find it hard to relate with the subject and ultimately they can’t foresee how it relates to them, especially in an era where their agenda is very short-termed.
So why bother to learn about Napoleon, or know who the politicians who founded this Republic were? The origins of Maltese politics is almost non-existent to 97 per cent of the students who study general history; which only includes one topic about constitutional development (studied in Form 4). To make matters worse, this topic goes on about useless details of every constitution; which to be honest is rather boring. On the other hand, the remaining three per cent of students who choose history as an optional subject, can benefit from a wider spectrum of topics.
Politics in schools is classified as taboo, and thus political parties’ glorified history is hardly known by any of our students
Politics in schools is classified as taboo, and thus political parties’ glorified history is hardly known by any of our students. The subject itself is fascinating, and it can be easily exploited by integrating it into other academic subjects, such as social studies, geography and also Maltese.
The introduction of Il-Ħarsa ta’ Rużann, a short novel written by Francis Ebejer in the Maltese SEC syllabus, which is an obligatory subject, offers a somewhat historical perspective intertwined with a political and social reality that traces back to the 17th century. As a teacher of this subject, I can admit that secondary students in their fifth year hardly know the manifestation of 1919 and the aftermath, leading to the 1921 parliament formation. To add insult to injury, students are even unaware of former political statesmen such as Dom Mintoff, Ġorġ Borg Olivier and the like, let alone Napoleon or ‘Napuljun’ (a possible reason why he could be considered Maltese).
The most probable cause of this situation is because history is taught as what happened in the past, rather than why and how it happened and how it affected the society we live in today, in order to avoid making ‘history’ a very sensitive subject.
Yet, if students were to be given the opportunity to discuss history, even from a hypothetical viewpoint, it could attract interest. What would have happened had Hitler, for instance, not won the 1933 German elections? Or how would history have evolved had Malta not been under the British rule for far too long? Students should be given the opportunity to view history from various perspectives. The syllabus, especially for the general students, should concentrate on more recent topics: current events or those that one can still see the effects of, for instance 20th century topics – the two world wars, terrorism, Maltese political history, Israeli/Palestine situation and so forth.
We must certainly move away from the idea that history (together with geography and social studies) are not important subjects and are not needed for important careers (which is blatantly untrue since careers in law, research, archaeology, restoration among others need a historical foundation). Adopting translating methods that have developed in academic circles abroad, and making them accessible to young audiences, in other words to show history for what it is, how and why it was shaped the way it is, will ultimately help citizens understand better who they are, where they come from and where they are going.
Justin Schembri, PN candidate for the general election on the 8th electoral district.
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