Teaching Heritage - Teaching this Unit


	See an OVERVIEW of this Teaching unit: History Geography

Use the resources and activities in Reshaping cultural values – greenbans and beyond to examine the inquiry questions in Stage 5 History Social and Political Life from the 1970s to the 1990s and Stage 5 Geography Issues in Australian Environments.

Investigate six heritage places – drawn from the New South Wales State Heritage Inventory (SHI) – for evidence of the major influences on Australian life from the 1970s to the 1990s. Discuss contemporary ideas of heritage, for example, values underlying celebrations that reflect the shared values of Australians – and the connections between places that these ideas generate.

Explore the ways that oral histories can contribute to an understanding of the past. Activities in this unit incorporate ideas for using oral histories to examine important events and developments and the effects of these on people’s lives. Connections are drawn between buildings, environments, communities and the events and cultural practices that give rise to personal and collective identity. Interviews with activists of the green-ban period provide an opportunity for thinking about the ways the past is remembered and recorded.

Paula Hamilton discusses the way oral histories can contribute to explorations of the past.

The following is a transcript of a taped interview:

Oral History’s been one of the methods that have been, its been used more recently, particularly since the 1960s, to try and work out people’s experience of events, or the past, to try and work with that, and it’s usually collaborative, like you make the history with the person involved, and its been used in a whole lot of areas, increasingly, that involve talking to people about the things that they value, and heritage obviously is one of those areas, but Oral History is also vital in areas like Native Title, in terms of Aboriginal claims to land and in one way, the only way they can ascertain how long people’s attachment has been to land and how they have used it and how is it socially significant, is through the collection of Oral Histories.

And obviously Oral History has a great many other uses in heritage organisations. National Parks is using Oral History as a methodology in terms of working out significance of particular sites, particularly post-contact, there’s a huge move away from an assumption that heritage is only, in archaeological terms or Aboriginal terms, pre-contact, or that everything’s nineteenth century. So that Oral History comes in when you’re talking of a past that’s twentieth century and you’re looking now to determine what is, or what can be, significant in the future, so obviously it’s to do with a living heritage.

(Hamilton, interview for Teaching Heritage)


	Starting points for Reshaping cultural values – greenbans and beyond include:

	Heritage places as a springboard for investigating the influences on life in Australia at the end of the 20th century Examine heritage places for evidence of influences on life at the end of the 20th century

	Choosing a syllabus inquiry question or content area and using heritage places as a source of information and evidence Choose a topic for investigation and access heritage places to gather information and evidence

	Taking a retrospective view of the 20th century through an investigation stemming from heritage places Use the information and evidence provided by heritage places to investigate key influences, events and developments in one of the following focus issues of Australian history:


	Teachers In building units of work for classroom use with these questions and resources, you may like to consult the NSW History and Geography Stages 4-5 syllabus outcomes: History Outcomes - Stage 4 History Outcomes - Stage 5 History Values and Attitudes Geography Outcomes - Stage 4 Geography Outcomes - Stage 5 Geography Values and Attitudes For help with designing classroom assessment activities to help gauge whether these outcomes are being achieved, you may like to consult the History Planning Assessment Guidelines History Course Performance Descriptors Geography Planning Assessment Guidelines Geography Draft Course Performance Descriptors