I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to visit the WW1 battlefields of France and Belgium on my main placement and the experience really struck a chord. Here's a piece I wrote about it for the PGCE newsletter in February 2013.
--------
As
a typical trainee history teacher, I shall start this piece about my
experiences on the WW1 Battlefields trip with my placement school (Lady
Lumley’s School, to whom I must express my sincerest thanks for this amazing
opportunity) with our favourite questions, neatly summarised by these 6 letters
– WWWWWH.
Who?: I went on the trip to
accompany 40 Year 10 pupils, with 3 other members of staff (the Head of
Department, my mentor [herself an ex-York trainee], and a Teaching Assistant).
What?: We went to explore the
battlefields of World War One in France and Belgium, and the memorialisation
seen in the war cemeteries there, with our excellent tour guide Liz from Mercat
Tours, who specialise in providing the ‘battlefields experience’ for both
schools and adult groups.
Where?: We stayed in Ypres in the
aptly-named ‘Poppies Hotel’ – although, as a city haunted by the ghosts of both
world wars, the name is perhaps not surprising. During the trip, we visited
(amongst others): the preserved trench at Sanctuary Wood, the Canadian memorial
at Vimy, the church where Hitler’s life was saved after he sustained injuries
in the First World War at Messines, Thiepval Memorial, the bunker where John
McCrae wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’, the devastating and lonely cemeteries of
Passchendaele where nearly all the graves are not named, and the shocking Languemarc
German cemetery, where 24,000 Germans are buried in a mass grave barely the
size of an ornamental flowerbed.
When?: Friday 8th –
Wednesday 13th February, departing at 11pm from North
Yorkshire to arrive in Belgium at 5pm the following day, after a gruelling
coach and ferry journey (featuring ‘Mean Girls’, the singing of 30 war songs
including hits like ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and fitful sleep under an
assortment of blankets in our coach seats!) We were met with snow, which
continued throughout the trip, but only served to make the sites we visited
more moving.
Why?: Although Year 10 do not
study World War One as a part of their GCSE course, they study the effects it
had on building up to World War Two. Issues like commemoration and war guilt,
which the trip so skilfully brought to light, are very important here and can only
really be holistically understood through the emotional response to the
thousands of graves which pepper the French and Belgian landscape.
How?: After being issued with a
booklet to accompany their learning on the trip by Lady Lumley’s (and
negotiating our way through the numerous checks necessary to authorise a school
trip of this duration and geographical distance!), the pupils were handed into
the care of Liz, our guide, at an evocative ‘Pals’ Battalion’ ceremony in the
car park of Lady Lumley’s by moonlight, at 11pm on the Friday they left.
Parents waved goodbye to their children, just as they would have in 1914 when
battalions formed and left for the Front. Liz then guided the pupils (and
adults!) through a journey around the battlefields themselves, preserved
trenches from the war, and, finally, the many memorials and cemeteries of the
area. This included tours, a personalised memorial cemetery at Essex Farm
cemetery and visiting the graves of pupils’ relatives - as well as literally
putting ourselves in the shoes of the soldiers by marching to Tyne Cot cemetery
(as the soldiers would have done in 1917) after a military drill from the Colonel (aka the Head of Department)!
The
profound effect this trip had on me personally is something only expressed in
my reflective journal completed there, alongside the pupils, every evening. It
will affect me for a long time to come, and probably for my whole life, and I
firmly believe that everybody should make the trip to the battlefields to
experience those unique emotions first-hand. However, the trip also had effects
on my teaching, and as a part of the PGCE newsletter, it is this that my
article will focus on.
The
immediate effects were obvious when I was reunited with my Year 10 class after
our trip, and from the smiles exchanged between myself and the other pupils who
had been, who were not in my class, in the school corridors. I had become
‘human’ to them (as one does, when one cries uncontrollably in front of one’s
pupils, in the middle of a freezing, desolate cemetery - because you are
standing over the grave of somebody with no name, someone whose grave no-one
has ever visited before). In turn, I saw the potential and the personality of
all my pupils, enabling our classroom relationship to flourish and become
warmer, more personal and promote greater engagement. Similarly, the
relationships I built with the other members of the department were equally
strengthened – you don’t really get to know somebody until you have sat in a
service station on the East Coast at 3am with them! In addition, my
professional relationship with the Teaching Assistant who accompanied us has gone from strength to strength, and I know I can rely on him to go along
with some of my more unconventional lessons (usually involving him dressing up
as a historical character of some sort)...
I
also gained many valuable resources from the trip, which I have used across all
my classes to bring the benefit of the trip to as many pupils as possible. For
instance, a grave bearing the infamous phrase ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria
mori’ in all sincerity provided a great counterpoint to the poem of the same
name by Wilfred Owen, when I was exploring trench warfare with Year 9. The
photos of the battlefields and memorials that I accrued have also proved a
valuable mine of resources in bringing home the horrors of the war, and knowing
that I had stood there to take the photograph seemed to make the war ‘real’ to
younger pupils.
Linked
to this, my subject knowledge of World War One has been hugely enriched thanks
to the expert guidance of Liz and the programme from Mercat Tours. Liz provided
us with so many stories of individual soldiers – from the youngest war casualty
at 15 years old and the oldest at 62, to the father and son buried next to each
other, and the extraordinary bravery of the Canadian regiments – which I have used,
and will continue to use, in my teaching about World War One. The knowledge of
themes such as sacrifice, honour and duty cannot really be understood until you
have stood in front of a soldier’s grave and thought about the man inside it.
My understanding of memorialisation has greatly improved, thanks to the
contrast between the impeccably maintained Commonwealth war cemeteries and the
bleak, hidden German ones. This is something I wish to explore further in my
own time, perhaps as part of our upcoming ‘1914 in 2014’ project.
I
gained so much from this trip that it is impossible to fit it all here.
However, I would like to finish by quoting what one pupil wrote as their
overall reflection on the trip – that it had “changed their life”. It seems
like a cliché, but it is true. I left for the trip believing the sarcastic
denouncements of Owen and Sassoon told the whole story – but returned to find
that the words of Rupert Brooke, that “there is some corner of a foreign field
that is forever England” is not jingoism, but truth.
 |
| The grave of Lieutenant Henry Webber, whose family chose to have the infamous phrase 'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' engraved on the headstone. They clearly believed it in all sincerity. Just one of the many different perspectives this trip showed me. |
No comments:
Post a Comment