Curriculum Development
History week, part 2
The Dutch Golden Age
(17th Century)
While I was teaching in the Netherlands, I worked at a school that was teaching the government curriculum intertwined with theme-centered learning. In 2018 me and my colleague were teaching a 5th and 6th grade combination class.
Request/need: More in-depth knowledge about the two history periods we were teaching every year from 4th grade and up.
Goal: Our goal was to combine history subjects with as many other courses we could to immerse them in that period of time. We wanted this combined with the soft-skills they needed to have learned at the end of the year.
Solution: We organized two history weeks per year where we combined the spelling, Dutch language, comprehensive reading, writing and art lessons with these history subjects.
Medium: Storytelling, movies, letters, presentations, knowledge clips and our history textbook.
For the second week we did not combine the history subject (The Dutch Golden Age) with the theme, because we thought this subject was too important on it’s own: slavery.
We understood this was a very heavy subject to talk about, but we also knew our students were very open-minded and eager to learn about the Dutch history. Especially because we have a lot of nationalities living in the Netherlands. Partially as a consequence of the Dutch history in the slave trade.
While looking back in time, we incorporated racism and equality as important subjects to guide our discussions.
When we first started the students had a lot of questions, which we anticipated and used to design our lessons for the rest of the week, see the slides below.
Below I will give two examples of activities we used for students to understand the concepts more deeply and to feel empathy with how these people were treated.
Racism & (in)equality
We provided the students with the knowledge and concepts about how the spice trade was the beginning of the slave trade. Why the slaves were traded/ bought, where they came from, how they were transported and what they had to do. Besides the knowledge and concepts we would provide, we wanted to let the students take the lead about what they wanted to know and find out. After we gathered all the questions they had we started every day in the afternoon with discussing these questions. Some of the questions can be seen in the reel above. Every time they needed our help we would provide another perspective, another question to guide them to a different perspective they haven’t thought of, with background knowledge, examples from movies etc. They would tell us when they would need our help and it led to the most interesting conversations the class had. They were very open-minded when voicing their opinion, listening to others, but also seeing the (in)equality in class for example when someone didn’t get the chance to speak and adjusting their behavior on the way.
Who are you today?
Where did you come from and what is your background? A lot of students were asking these questions at home, because they wanted to know what their family history was. But in class we wanted to use an assignment to stimulate their sympathizing skills with people from different backgrounds even more. So we decided to do some role-playing. We made cards for every student with a role on it from the people we learned about that lived in the Golden Age, for example: a wealthy salesman, a slave trader, a child from a wealthy salesman, a slave etc. With these roles, the students needed to write a letter from that perspective. The letter could be to home or as a diary page. They had to incorporate the knowledge and concepts they learned from our reading, the movies we showed, the stories we told etc. They had to provide a draft version first. And they came up with very serious letters talking about being a slave in that period for example, seeing people around them die, because of the stomach flu, but also going to school and having people clean your house, etc. Besides this, we provided them with the opportunity to read the letter to us and ask for feedback before they would write the end-product. Every student used this opportunity and implemented our feedback. Below you will see examples of their letters in Dutch.
