Richard Kennett (at Redland Green School, Bristol) writes …

When I was a child ‘visual history’, on the whole, meant Ladybird books with their combination of text and illustrations, but in the words of Bob Dylan “the times they are a changing”. With video sharing sites like YouTube, students today have instant access to a vast array of audio-visual historical resources. Now is the time to take advantage of this revolution and, as history teachers, capitalise on these visual media to help our students communicate their understanding of history. Allowing students to make videos or slideshows that combine text, image and music can result in some truly outstanding outcomes.

Watch the video below to whet your appetite:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiF3YqINXc8&feature=plcp

Download and Workshop Website

A WORD version of this guidance can be downloaded [ click here ]

The website for Richard’s workshop at SHP Conference 2012 is available [ here ]

Why use visual media?

Firstly, and most importantly, contemporary popular history is often an audio-visual experience. Many children seem to love the way that Horrible Histories attacks their senses through music, dance and the inclusion of excrement in most scenes. TV documentaries presented by Michael Wood, Helen Castor and others achieve huge viewing figures.  If this is the way people enjoy history surely we should provide opportunities for our students to communicate history in the same format.

Secondly, in terms of student learning this medium plays to the strengths of many young people and is something they do quite naturally. When I asked one of my classes how many of them had YouTube channels over half put up their hands. Their examples included videos of their hamsters, rants about their breakfast and clips of themselves singing and dancing.

As a teacher, you don’t need to be a genius with video-making software to utilise visual media; in fact, like me, you can know very little. Many of our students have these skills already. Every computer these days comes with some sort of free software (MovieMaker, iMovie etc) so even if a computer room is a problem video production can be set as a really good homework task.

How can I use visual media with my students?

1. Creating overviews

At Key Stages 4 and 5 helping students to develop an understanding of the bigger picture and the overall narrative is crucial. In the words of Ian Dawson “One of the most important – and hardest things – for an A-Level student to do is develop an overview of the content” Visual media provides a brilliant opportunity to do help students with this.

After each chunk of the overall narrative set your students the task of creating a video that summarises, in their own words, what they have learnt. Get them to consider the choice of image and music and to reflect carefully on the things that they think are significant. Limiting the time of the video and the number of words that students can use will help with this.

Below are video summaries of Russian history from two of my students:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivWTxDN1jzk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGRcfccr0c8

As you can see, these are two very different perspectives on the same topic showing that each students has formed a personal narrative of Russian history. Setting this work as home learning had the added bonus of giving us more time in class to spend on analysis and the exploration of in-depth issues.

2. Historical enquiry

I often set extended pieces of home learning where students are asked to devise and answer an enquiry question on a given topic. For their research on the 1960s I gave my my students the option of presenting their work in a video and most jumped at the chance. Visual media requires students to balance several variables - text, image and music - and this demands critical and creative thinking. In their enquiries on the 1960s students needed to think very carefully about the criteria they were using to select material relating to their enquiry questions. In addition, the use of a wider range of sources meant students were truly immersed in a period.

Below is an example of a particularly good enquiry on the 1960s:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OMBW5pdfOQ Note: this video may be blocked

Your own You Tube channel

You may have noticed that all of the projects mentioned above are available on YouTube. If you want to make the full jump into cyberspace, a natural progression is to create your own YouTube channel for hosting students’ work (mine is at www.youtube.com/rgshistory.)

Creating your own You Tube channel has real benefits:

• The work can be viewed on any device that can access the internet anywhere in the world so students can show off at home
• There is an in-built comment feature where you can leave feedback on a project
• Videos like the narrative creation suggestion above can serve as a ready built selection of revision videos

NOTE: It is important to consider e-safety when publishing work online. Staff moderation is essential and parental consent and school leadership consent may also be necessary.

Conclusion

As teachers we need to be prepared to move with the times, and embrace technologies that our students enjoy Using visual media to communicate historical understanding can, in my opinion, have huge benefits in terms of engaging students with history and developing their thinking The suggestions above are only two ideas and there are many more possibilities. So why not give it a go and share your work on the SHP website?