The Power Of Objects: How Might We Teach Our Children Through The Lens Of Stuff?

 By Charlotte Nicholas

Consider the object in the image and ponder your answers to the following questions: What is it? Why might it have been created? What is it for? Where is it from? What might it be able to tell us about society? It may just look like a skull with numbers on but in fact it is so much more. This is a phrenological skull created by James Deville in the 1820s. Phrenology is a ‘science’ where the size of the head was measured and this was used to make revelations about individuals’ intelligence and character. The skull's deep lines show the 27 areas of the head responsible for certain characteristics and personality traits. This pseudoscience helped support attitudes towards criminals, racist ideology and stereotypes towards genders and can tell us a multitude of things about Victorian attitudes and beliefs. It helps us to understand the journey that psychology has undertaken to reach where it is today. You might be wondering about the relevance of a fake Victorian head….

What got me thinking?

When most people think of history as a subject they often think of endless and boring source activities. In fact, history teachers seek to avoid this ‘death by sources’ (G. Howells). Since my PGCE year, I was always motivated to find ways to make learning history as captivating as possible and completed my first assignment on learning about WWI not by studying the boring battles but by learning through objects and what they could tell us about the war. Ever since then I have been itching to bring objects into the history classroom. In the 1970s and 1980s historians and social scientists alike were grappling with the ‘linguistic turn’, a phrase that represents the shift to cultural and written sources instead of touchable and tangible sources. Now historians are faced with the ‘ material turn’ where they focus on historical objects and consider what they can tell us about people and their lives in the past. What did the reading say? `Touching, feeling, smelling, and sensing history through objects: new opportunities from the ‘material turn’ by Bird, Wilson, Egan-Simon, Jackson and Kirkup, 2020 influence me to think about objects in the classroom again. This Teaching History article discusses a project completed by history teachers where they were inspired by the ‘material turn’ to focus on teaching history to students through everyday objects. The objects chosen represented economic transformations from 1000 to 1700 and broadly demonstrated the rise in manufactured products, and illustrating significant changes in society. Whilst this project was generally focused towards primary school students, the group found that students used their imagination to create their own impressions of the past. They were able to have a deeper conceptual understanding without knowing too much about the specific time period. Students were able to have freedom in their thoughts and could offer multiple ideas towards open-ended questions. Learning through objects helped students to consider the world as dynamic and changing, through the eyes of ordinary people not the elite and it added a little mystery to their lessons, mysteries they were inspired to solve. Students started to consider ‘What do things do to people?’ rather than ‘What do people do with them?’ (Labanyi et al). How might we consider this in our own teaching?: I am under no illusion that the most obvious place to teach about historical objects is in history lessons, however, there is a place for learning about objects across the curriculum, since the object itself is only half the story, it is really about the questions that are asked. In addition to this, an aspect of the Theory of Knowledge (TOK) internal assessment in the IBDP forces students to think about objects when they consider a question about knowledge and have to choose three objects which help illuminate this. If students were introduced to thinking about objects in a meaningful way across the curriculum and lower down the school, they might be better equipped to talk about objects when they reach the sixth form. Getting students to think about objects will help inspire ‘awe and wonder’ in our lessons, it is an inclusive method of teaching, all students can engage with an object in some way. It encourages our students to think with fewer limitations and encourages them to think for themselves, giving more meaning to the content they are learning about. Finally, it gives our students an opportunity to increase their cultural capital, giving them a chance to engage with items they may never have the chance to otherwise. I encourage you to take a risk and think about how you might make some room for objects in your classroom. I have included two examples of how we have included objects in the history and TOK classroom. I’d love to hear ideas from the WA community about how we might ingrain objects into our lessons and hear how you have made a place for them in your lessons.