'A Novel Approach' to History Teaching

JOSEPHINE JEREMIAH

An integrated study on 'Inland Waterways' with third year juniors, using as a base, two children's novels, The Butty Boy and A Chance Child, both by Jill Paton Walsh, had been very successful and so I was committed to this approach at the start of the school year. My choice of book to be used at the centre of the new study was somewhat limited, in that I had to find one that would fit in with the school syllabus for Environmental Studies, yet still be worth studying in its own right.

I eventually chose 'Children at Work' as a theme. This brought me back full circle to a A Chance Child which fitted in neatly with the syllabus and was to bring much personal satisfaction to both the children and myself.

In this novel Creep, a present-day unwanted and nameless child, crawls out of a sodden cardboard box on a dump beside a canal. When he explores the canal bank he finds that he has slipped into the past, into the world of neglected and abused children working down mines, in forges potteries and on factory floors. His half brother, Christopher, goes in search of him and though he cannot, himself, travel back in time, he realizes what has happened to Creep, even managing to learn the rest of Creep's life history, for Creep never comes back.

The theme of time travel throughout the story did not seem to bother the children of my present class, whereas some of the previous year's class had found it more difficult to understand. My current class seemed to take the alternating chapters of past and present in their stride. Perhaps it was because this time I approached the story with more confidence. I find that each time I read A Chance Child I come away from it with entirely new perceptions.

For the work on 'Inland Waterways' I had looked at the canal aspect of the story, as the canal is the means by which Creep is able to go from place to place with Blackie and Tom, who are seeking work. However, for the new study on 'Children at Work1,1 did not dwell on this feature. Now my class and I were looking more deeply into the story and finding ways in which it could be used more fully in connection with the integrated study approach.

The first pieces of work that the children attempted were about children in the mines. They looked closely at the character of Tom, whom Creep finds in a coal mine. My class were able to find out more about Tom by reading extracts from the Parliamentary Papers, just as Christopher does in A Chance Child. They found out that he was a real boy, who worked in the Windy Bank Pit in Halifax and who, in 1842, described his life to men holding an inquiry into children working in the mines. They were fascinated by these details and Tom became a very real person to them.

We were also able to look up the names of the children to whom Jill Paton Walsh dedicated her book. Among them are Margaret Leveston, aged 6, a coal bearer; Jacob Ball, aged 12, a dish mould runner; Joseph Hebergaum, a worsted spinner from 7 years old, whose mother wept to see him grow crooked; and William Kershaw, aged 8, a piecener, whose mother beat his master over the head with a billy roller. The children wrote away to a number of museums connected with coalmines, ironworks, potteries, chainworks and canals. They were eager to visit one in particular which was not very far away, Big Pit at Blaenavon, Gwent. I was not keen on going as I dreaded the thought of going underground. In the event they prodded me into agreeing to the visit and, of course, it was an experience that both they and I will never forget.

As we went down in the cage we thought about the chapter we had read about working underground in A Chance Child. Then, when we were deep below the surface, we turned off the lights on our helmets. Just for a moment we experienced total blackness. There's a passage in A Chance Child which describes the feeling exactly.

Although places in the story are not actually named, the description of the tunnels at the entrance to the coal mine is obviously that of the Worsley mine, belonging to the Duke of Bridgewater. Similarly, the bottle kilns and inclined plane, for raising and lowering boats, is to be found at Ironbridge. I found it useful to identify these places, especially when the children came to draw their own maps of the story. Perhaps Jill Paton Walsh had looked at one particular painting of the Ironbridge furnaces, for, as we studied the scene on a picture postcard from the Ironbridge Gorge Museum and I read aloud her description, it appeared that they were one and the same.

I would have liked to have taken the children on a visit to Ironbridge, but we had to be content with sending away for information and looking at an illustrated book that a previous class had made.

Some of the children had already visited The Black Country Museum with me, so when we came to the introduction of Blackie into the story and the arduous job of chainmaking, they were familiar with the process, having seen a demonstration at Dudley. The description of Blackie, with her blackened and crooked face, made an impression on the children, as did her dangerous job of chainmaking. The chapters concerning Creep, Tom and Blackie in the potteries were much enjoyed. It was the children's first introdution to the term 'bottle kilns' and they were keen to discover pictures of them in reference books. We were lucky in that we had a scale model of a pottery, complete with bottle kiln, sheds, canal, three narrowboats and a railway siding with moveable trucks. The story became much more alive as the children were able to visualize the scene. They also wrote away for information to The Gladstone Pottery at Longton, Stoke on Trent. This would be a fascinating place to visit, if only it were not so far away.

The story in A Chance Child moves on to life in the cotton mills for children like Blackie and Creep. The children's appreciation of this part of the novel was enhanced by listening to songs such as 'Hard Times at the Mill' and 'Hand Loom v. Power Loom', and by looking at a variety of documents and pictures and photographs of mills both past and present. A visit that I had made previously to Quarry Bank Mill at Styal proved to be very fruitful in this respect. Once again it is a pity that this mill is too far away for a school visit. However, we were able to see a television programme about children in the mills which was made at Quarry Bank.

Long after I had finished reading the novel to the class, A Chance Child kept coming into the children's conversations with me, as did the following novel which I read to them, The Fate of Jeremy Visick by David Wiseman. This is another compelling story that unites past and present through the lives of two boys, Jeremy and Matthew. A tombstone and its inscription exert a powerful influence on Matthew and he comes close to disaster as he tries to discover the link between himself and the tragic death of the young Cornish miner, Jeremy. The Fate of Jeremy Visick was well suited to our study of 'Children at Work'. In the story we read about how Matthew helps Jeremy with the hard work of wheeling the barrows full of ore along the passageways of a Cornish copper mine and how they try to find their way out of the mine after an explosion.

I was able to bring into school a number of photographs of Cornish mines and a map of some of the mines referred to in the story. The children also pored over an Ordnance Survey map of the area and pinpointed some of the places mentioned.

The burning question in everyone's mind was, "Is there really a Visick tombstone in Gwennap churchyard ?" To find out the answer the children wrote to the author and received a very full reply.

I hope that in setting up this integrated study on 'Children at Work' I have been able to provide opportunities for work in the skills that such a study requires, whilst, at the same time, introducing novels that can be read for enjoyment. The final test is whether these books are eventually chosen by the children, themselves, after I have read them aloud in class. I can say that the answer is yes, and not only the children read them, on one occasion a grandmother asked to borow a copy of A Chance Child. Reading for pleasure is the aim of a project like this, but if novels such as A Chance Child and The Fate of Jeremy Visick can help an integrated study along its way, then so much the better.

Suggested Reading

Non-Fiction Books used with 'Children at Work'.