Teaching Family History in Schools

[dwalin]

hi i must very strongly suggest you take heed of suttontrust,i work with children who are (damaged)(vunrable).
for example some parents are in prison or they children are under local care.
there is drug abuse and drink.
children with incest in there background.
and no children dont know everything about there classmates.
some things are kept hush hush.
searching for a local hero past sounds good though.
but this must be handled with the utmost care.
or vunrable children could feel even more isolated than they do already.
dwalin

[Ninatoo]

I am a teacher too.  Years ago I tackled the family tree just to great-grandparents with a young class, and even then there were issues, naturally....but being unmarried and therefore not divorced at the time, I was not aware of the issues until the project had begun.

I would love to foster this wonderful hobby in children of today, but I think a much more appropriate way of dealing with some of the more painful facts that present themselves to today's families,  would be to set the children the task of choosing ONE of their parents to research.....starting from that parent and naming grandparents and so on, leaving OUT marriages (or not)  of any kind for the chosen parent.  That would alleviate a fair amount of the problems of recently divorced family.

Yes I am aware it would not entirely erradicate discomfort, as grandparents can divorce too....but for the more recent, and therefore more painful reminders to those students who are from divorced families (or illigitimate OR one mum-four  kids-three dads, etc etc....) I think it would be a better way to introduce this topic.

I do know the problems that can be caused firsthand, as my son did a family tree at school a few years ago after his father had left and had recently remarried.  I DID find it painful to have to go over that on the tree, but my son solved it for me by stating that he only would enter me and his father, not the new wife, whom he did not accept at the time anyway since he had never met her.  It didn't alter the purpose of the exercise so that is how we did it and it was fine....but yes...painful.

Nina

[suttontrust]

Can I suggest that the aim, for teachers, is to teach children how to research.  Family history is a means to that end and, for all the reasons I and others have given, not a very good one.  There are other ways of doing it, and researching a local hero is one.  But what we are trying to do is show them what resources are out there.  Years ago, pre internet, I arranged for a class to pay a visit to the local studies library.  It helped that I knew the librarian.  She laid on an exhibition of the resources - old newspapers, maps, census fiches etc.  We looked up the 1851 census for the address of one of the kids.  We looked in the newspaper indexes for some of their names and found some articles.  The best comment on the day was from a child who said, "I thought it was going to be really boring but it wasn't." 

[Burrow Digger]

As an interested lurker and parent to this thread, I read all the "warnings" advising not to subject children to doing a family tree because they might be embarrassed.

What age children are we talking about?  6 thru 8 year olds? Or 16 thru 18 year olds? Of course the little ones dont need to know this stuff yet. They too busy learning the local history and the 3 Rs.

So far the only thing I have taught my 3 year old is how to say the word GEN-E-A-LO-GY 

I loved what Magistra did and waited until the kids were older - High School - and then teach them how to do the family research.

If I were teaching Family history (and while I am not a teacher - I would be interested in teaching people in a community setting) I would probably put a lower limit of age 16. That way they can deal with whatever they find without being ostracized by their peers.

But thats just my opinion. 

Burrow Digger

[Magistra]

Yes, I am very fortunate indeed to be teaching at a very well-off school, where parents are almost all professionals and in upper-income brackets, in traditional nuclear-type families with few irregularities (which in itself is an irregularity, I suppose!)  I also didn't ask kids to indicate if their parents were divorced.  They didn't need to show that their real parents were not the ones living with them.  And if they chose to lie about their relatives (e.g. say that their step-parent is their real parent), there's no way I could really have known. 
The curriculum requirements I was trying to fulfill were not accurate historical research, or how to do research and cite sources.  Rather, the standards I had to fulfill state "students will relate literature to their life events" and "students will transcribe information from oral, written, and technological resources into various tables, charts, and other formats." Currently, the educational buzz-words are "cross-curricular" and "interdisciplinary integrated approaches." And so the family tree held its appeal for these reasons. 
(True, I could have told students to write a paragraph on how they feel about their novel, to draw a timeline of the main events of the novel, or research the author's biography, but they've done all that before - by Grade 9, these are boring to them.  So while I recognise there were alternate ways to fulfill these standards, I took the chance, and am pleased I did IN THIS circumstance.)

[annaandchester]

My love of the family tree started with a project when I was 12 years old - I still have my original project in with all my notes and research.

I think that learning about our roots gives a feeling of belonging!

[kerryb]

My nephew (age 10) has recently done a history project about family history and of course he came to me for some help.  I didn't do it for him though. 

Sadly I think I went over the top though because after going all the way through the tree back to 1400 he was asleep!  Can't imagine why.   

His project seemed to be about trying to fit in themselves and their family with the history they had been learning generally ie the tudors, the victorians etc.  He now knows that history didn't only happen to kings and queens and important people, it happened to his family as well.

Quite good I thought.

Kerry