Summary of Lectures

Adele Geras took us on a quick voyage through the chronology of her life. We dropped into key evens from her background, gaining an appreciation of hoe her memories, including the 1948 Siege of Jerusalem and the sharing of a tin of sardines, provided by an experience to be used in her later book. Her childhood years spent in far flung countries such as Bourneo and Botswana, provided further ideas as did her school years spent at Roedean in Sussex. She was brought up on stories from Our Island Story by H.M.Marshall and developed a love of the great personalities from British History. The Illustrated London News developed her keen interest in the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, and learning more about Marie Antoinette and Desiree, Napoleon’s first love, fired her up with enthusiasm for history and the characters that are part of its story. She uses all her enthusiasm and love of the past in her own work. Her research is focused, but on her admission, not wide ranging – she uses the idea of unity of place just as the Ancient Greek writers did and she suggested the secret of her success in keeping the plot together is her own use of the settings of historical bedrooms and kitchens!

 

 

Brian Moses: Performance Poetry and History

Brian’s focus was how the reading, performing and writing of poetry could support and extend the teaching of history. He had always had a great love of history, particularly the lives of ordinary people played out against the background of the major events, these everyday histories illuminating the key political happenings. To illustrate how poetry could amusingly portray the personal against the background of the political, he read the poem ‘Love Letter from Mary Tudor to her Husband, Philip of Spain’. History, he said was about making connections between the past and the present, between ourselves and historic people or buildings. He gave examples of how he uses frameworks in his own work with children to help them to formulate their ideas. For example, in helping children to think about their own personal histories, he suggests that they write a poem in which they think of what they would miss if they were to move on, beginning each pair of lines with: ‘If I left, I’d miss…and…’ Using this framework, a child can explore, for instance, what it was like for an evacuee to leave home. Brian gave a number of other examples of frameworks such as: writing a letter to a friend about shared memories; thinking of the different sights, sounds and smells that an ancient building would once have seen and comparing that with the present; writing letters from German soldiers garrisoned on Guernsey to develop empathy; thinking of what ancient walls might say, grumble, complain, gossip, laugh about if they could speak; writing letters to historical figures; setting up a writer’s trail around the grounds. He emphasised that the structure was only a guide, not a straightjacket and that children should be allowed to take their poems in other directions of that was effective.