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Overview
Overview
Teachers have the capabilities to embed literacy practices in new and exciting ways and that is precisely what this curriculum offers -- a way to extend the literate practice of graffiti to better understand historical significance. Using an inquiry based model, this curriculum problematizes historical knowledge and encourages students to grapple with the epistemic arguments that surround historical knowledge: whose stories and memories are preserved in dominant historical knowledge? To guide this inquiry, this curriculum explores the centuries old practice of graffiti and enables students to evaluate competing historical truth claims to determine whose story is being told and why it is being told through graffiti, thus reinforcing the primary learning goal: to teach students how to understand historical consciousness.
Teachers have the capabilities to embed literacy practices in new and exciting ways and that is precisely what this curriculum offers -- a way to extend the literate practice of graffiti to better understand historical significance. Using an inquiry based model, this curriculum problematizes historical knowledge and encourages students to grapple with the epistemic arguments that surround historical knowledge: whose stories and memories are preserved in dominant historical knowledge? To guide this inquiry, this curriculum explores the centuries old practice of graffiti and enables students to evaluate competing historical truth claims to determine whose story is being told and why it is being told through graffiti, thus reinforcing the primary learning goal: to teach students how to understand historical consciousness.
Adolescents, the target audience of this curriculum, are ideally placed to engage with these foundational concepts around historical knowledge and consciousness. Adolescent students will be well served in future historical studies if they are able to understand first, how is historical knowledge created? By engaging students to become curious about what it means to make your mark, this curriculum shows how graffiti can be a unique kind conversation in a domain that can be historicized.
Learning Goals
Learning Goals
1. Teach students how to understand historical consciousness by studying graffiti. In other words, what is it about graffiti that develops historical consciousness?
2. Encourage students to evaluate the plurality of voices and trustworthiness of dominant historical knowledge
Target Audience
Target Audience
This audience is targeted at 7th grade school students that I will teach in Seattle this fall. The school culture promotes experiential learning and I would like to adapt this curriculum to match the school’s primary learning goals.
Curricular Essential Questions:
What does it meant to make your mark?
Students will grapple with how the medium, spaces, message, tools and audience shape the historical processes around graffiti. Ultimately, students will explore how and why people have chosen to share some messages publicly through graffiti, and not others.
What impact do these markings have on the memories of individuals and groups?
Students will explore various cultures including the Romans and more contemporary contexts including Egypt and Turkey. While studying these various groups, students will grapple with various tensions around censorship, ownership and dissent. Students will learn from a few examples about why people choose to share their messages publicly and why they do it in different spaces, thus confronting a secondary dilemma -- why are some graffiti writings more accepted than others?
What is the purpose of graffiti today and in the past?
This question challenges students to explore how graffiti is perceived, constructed and at what point public inscriptions become transformed as graffiti. Likewise, it will challenge students to explore various perspectives and take into consideration the broader historical and social context surrounding the graffiti. Students will learn how graffiti changes over time and they will explore the various impulses that led cultures to make their mark over time.
Why teach historical consciousness?
Why teach historical consciousness?
History education scholar Rüsen asserts that historical consciousness is a necessary component to studying the discipline of history. In order to fully study history it's important to explore how the discipline of history crosses over into 'practical' every day life. Rüsen found that as students learned ways of thinking about the past, they also begin to orient themselves across temporal scales, like the past, present and future; the past is not isolated from present and future moments. For Rüsen (1995), "school history should develop historical consciousness so that students bring these temporal scales into focus. By learning about how the discipline history can cross over into every day life students can cope with living their lives as temporal beings."
Graffiti presents an historical space that transcends the past and present -- the impulse to transform our environment around us and develop new tools to represent complex meaning dates back to pre-historic societies and it continues to the dominate the landscape of contemporary societies around the world. Early humans used the materials that were available, like burnt charcoal and stones, to make representations on cave walls. Today, graffiti writers, like Banksy for example, teach us that we are living through an unprecedented era, one where the individual and the society is more connected than ever before. Banksy claims: “You don’t have to go to college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries, all you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count (Smithsonian, 2016)." What is fascinating in the context of this curriculum is that cultures have developed new mediums, tools and used them in new spaces but graffiti, as a literacy practice, is perhaps, one of our oldest literacies and an important part of our collective human story.
Below is a list of the four investigations in the curricular intervention. Each investigation explores a guiding question through activities that establish prior knowledge, gauge the classroom temperature and share various, sometimes conflicting definitions of graffiti.
Teaching students to think historically while studying graffiti:
The curricular interventions and four investigations will teach students how to think historically and also it will teach students how to understand historical consciousness by studying graffiti. Although historical consciousness is often deemed too vague, complex and ill-defined to be taught, it can be understood by learners and more importantly it can empower them to understand sense-making processes in history. Swedish scholar Robert Thorpe compiled various cross-national reports about historical consciousness to build towards a more epistemological theory about historical consciousness. He argues that:
"historical consciousness ought to be understood as an understanding of how matters past, present and future relate to each other in a way that enables the individual to create a specific kind of meaning in relation to history (Thorpe, 2014, p. 20)."
Teaching Historical Consciousness by Studying Graffiti
Teaching Historical Consciousness by Studying Graffiti
What is it about graffiti that teaches historical consciousness?
Graffiti helps students to understand what constitutes a historical moment, and it captures conversations that occur in a learning domain. According to Elizabeth Moje, "every moment of graffiti is not a moment of historical discourse -- it's a conversation in a domain. It can be historicized. People have different motivations for doing what they did, whether or not they intended it, they left a mark. Then, historians can make sense of the historical moment. Historians can study what were they using graffiti for and how was it read." (E. Moje, personal communication, May 26, 2016) In this way, graffiti becomes a tool to teach historical consciousness because students are charged to reconstruct historical moments, build context around historical moments and consider what voices become part of dominant historical knowledge and what voices do not. Studying graffiti compels students to wonder how and for who(m) historical knowledge is created.
According to Patricia Alexander (2001), domains differ in structure and content. She defines a domain as “recognized field of study associated with academic realms. (e.g., history or science) (Alexander, 2001, p. 401).” All of academic domains have well structured and not very well structured problems. History contains more ill-structured problems, compared to the domain of Math for example. In the academic domain of history students need more heuristic procedures -- like Sam Wineburg’s Thinking Like a Historian protocol to structure their thinking about historical problems. The whole work of the domain is about logic and it requires a different kind of thinking. In history, historians don’t choose to order problems in the same way as other domains.
Studying graffiti allows students to grapple with the structure of historical domains by encouraging them to become conscious of what it means to make your mark overtime. Graffiti presents an unusual historical domain because students are left with questions about who made the mark, how and why? Graffiti, is unlike the typical primary and secondary sources used by historians because authorship, message and audience are less known to the reader -- we, as historians, have to reconstruct those moments. This kind of historical reconstruction presents an interesting space for students to understand how and for whom historical knowledge is constructed, thus enhancing a focus on historical consciousness and how knowledge becomes 'known' to others. Graffiti presents a view of past from the perspective of rare and lesser known every day people. In more contemporary contexts, like in Egypt and Turkey, graffiti tells us about how spaces are used to express messages. However, graffiti about the Arab Spring showed us what occurs when individual and collective voices do not match dominant control mechanisms. In these cases, graffiti shows us the voices of individuals who resist censorship and persist to have their memories shared publicly, even if the act of graffiti poses a risk to their own health or safety. This kind of attempt to be 'heard' and remembered urges students to consider what is just or ethical and what further actions might be necessary to encourage historical consciousness more broadly.
Graffiti provides students with different tools to uncover competing truth claims and it allows them to determine when it offers meaning that can better inform a more holistic and collective understanding of the past. Ultimately, students learn to challenge the assumption that history is already written and just merely passed along to them. Instead it offers learners an opportunity to discover how and for whom history is remembered.
Sources:
Alexander, Patricia A, and Judith E Judy. "The interaction of domain-specific and strategic knowledge in academic performance." Review of Educational research 58.4 (1988): 375-404.
Bain, Robert B. "Into the breach: Using research and theory to shape history instruction." The Journal of Education 189.1/2 (2008): 159-167.
Buehl, Michelle M, Patricia A Alexander, and P Karen Murphy. "Beliefs about schooled knowledge: Domain specific or domain general?." Contemporary educational psychology 27.3 (2002): 415-449.
Glaser, Robert. "Education and thinking: The role of knowledge." American psychologist 39.2 (1984): 93.
Moje, Elizabeth. "To Be Part of the Story": The Literacy Practices of Gangsta Adolescents." The Teachers College Record 102.3 (2000): 651-690.
Lee, P. (n.d.). Walking Backwards into Tomorrow: Historical Consciousness and Understanding History. Retrieved June 15, 2016, from https://centres.exeter.ac.uk/historyresource/journal7/lee.pdf
Rüsen, J. ‘The development of narrative competence in historical learning: an ontogenetic hypothesis concerning moral consciousness’, in J. Rüsen, Studies in Metahistory, ed. P. Duvenage, Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1993, pp.63-84.
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