What were people from the past like?
Overview
Set of three illustrations that encourage students to ask questions about the past and to carry out a process of inquiry to give a broad and reflective response to it. It is structured in three phases based on the three figures that make up the resource: a first one for detecting prior ideas (illustration 1); a second one for developing the investigation (illustration 2); and a third one for conclusion and closure (illustration 3).
For further suggestions and tips about how to implement the cases selected in this itinerary, we encourage you to consult the kit for teachers that can be found here: https://www.letheproject.eu/toolkit/
Infographs and helpful materials are provided.
A specific teaching itinerary is presented for the development of several history lessons from an active learner who seeks to initiate a reflection in the classroom on the past and its social and cultural characteristics. For this purpose, an itinerary marked by three phases is offered:
1. Figure 1. Starting from initial motivation questions [How do you imagine the people of the past?] and the request for a specific action by the student [Try to recreate a scene from any given day on this street in a city from the Roman era. You can draw or on the Internet, print and cut out, the different people who could have passed through that street] the student is asked to recreate how he imagines the society of the past. The result is usually a homogeneous, masculine, exclusive image, where numerous voices and key social groups are excluded.
2. Figure 2. The student is offered the exploration of different historical cases (8 in particular) developed within the framework of the LETHE project (https://www.letheproject.eu/) which presents the student with 8 situations that show how the past can be diverse and integrate the action of characters that usually do not appear prominently in the historical narratives that appear in textbooks and curricular materials. These cases are developed from a historical research strategy where the student reflects on the past based on the sources and supporting questions that are established. The idea is for the student to reach his or her own conclusions and for the teacher to act as a mediator in the process (more advice on how to apply the pedagogy proposed by LETHE can be found in its manual).
3. Figure 3. Once the students have carried out the various inquiry processes and have reached their own conclusions, we propose an alternative image of what the people of the past could have been like, exemplified in a street in a city during the Roman era. Students will be able to discuss the results of their research and the reasons for the lack of knowledge about the groups represented here.