Writer: Liz Hay
Launched: March 2008
Context
ANZAC - New Zealanders at War is a three disk series that provides archival footage of New Zealanders’ involvement in war from the Boer War through to their current peacekeeping roles. The deployments covered include: the Boer War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Malaya, Vietnam and peacekeeping missions.
Each DVD contains a selection of material that can be used as lesson starters or catalysts for a wider discussion on the issues they raise. The DVDs should not be shown in one or two long sittings!
Outline
These support materials suggest some ways that these DVDs can be used by teachers. They have been written to reflect the revised New Zealand Curriculum (2007). All of the ideas here will need to be adapted by teachers in order to suit the learners in their classes. As new resources relating to The New Zealand Curriculum are released by the Ministry of Education, these support materials will be updated.
The New Zealand Curriculum identifies five key competencies that people need to live, learn, work and contribute as active members of their communities (see pages 12-13 or http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz).
Teachers should consider how some of these key competencies could be integrated into their learning programmes. Examples of how some activities outlined in these support materials could be linked to some of the key competencies are shown below:
Key Competencies
Relating to Others
What this might mean for your learners: Students learn about their own ideas and those of others as they listen, compare and clarify their thinking with others.
Example of activities: Students survey members of their school or community about a key issue.
Students work in small groups which will involve them sharing their ideas and clarifying their own thinking.
Participating and Contributing
What this might mean for your learners: Learning will happen when the students can make a link to their own lives and the communities they live in.
Example of activities: Students design a war memorial for their own school or community.
Students reconstruct the life of a soldier who may have been a member of their family, school or wider community.
Thinking
What this might mean for your learners: Students are encouraged to develop their critical thinking to enable them to make decisions.
Example of activities: Students, through engaging with the questions posed, will develop their critical thinking.
Using language, symbols and texts
What this might mean for your learners: Students will present the results of their inquiry in a clear and concise way.
Example of activities: Students by looking at war records and war memorials will be interpreting symbols as well presenting information, both orally and written.
This outline assumes that teachers when using the DVDs will:
- Access the Teacher’s Booklets which provide a detailed summary of the content of each clip on the DVDs
- Will preview the DVDs in advance
- Write relevant Learning Intentions for each lesson
- Write Success Criteria for each lesson. (These are indicators of how students will know that they have achieved success and should be written in the form of ‘I can’ statements.)
Main Achievement Objective
Students will gain knowledge, skills and experience to understand how the ideas and actions of people in the past had a significant impact on people’s lives.
Concepts: identity, conflict/war, remembering, important events
One way of exploring this achievement objective is through looking at these three key aspects of learning:
Ideas about Society: Students understand the ideas and actions of (selected) people in the past.
Personal and Social Significance: Students know these ideas and actions have made an impact on people's lives, in the past and in the present.
Participation in Society: Students can explain why the effects of these ideas/actions are personally and socially significant.
Understandings in relation to this achievement objective can be developed through using a social inquiry approach through which students:
- ask questions, gather information and background ideas and examine relevant current issues
- explore and analyse people’s values and perspectives
- consider the ways in which people make decisions and participate in social action
- reflect on and evaluate the understandings they have developed and the responses that may be required
Further details about the individual processes involved can be found at http://www.tki.org.nz/r/assessment/exemplars/socialstudies/matrices/matrix_process_e.php#
Possible learning topics
Should Anzac Day be replaced with Passchendaele Day?
Many of these ideas have been derived from Steve Watters from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, for more information visit nzhistory.net
Remembering War
Internal and External Assessment for NCEA
