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"Making Good Progress?" Final Thoughts: A useful summary but a missed opportunity

2/14/2017

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Overt the last 2 weeks I have been reading and analysing Daisy Christodoulou's latest book "Making Good Progress?" This is an area which I have long been interested in, as followers on my blog will know.

You can find the chapter analyses below, however I want to offer something by way of an overall summary of the book.

CHAPTER 1 - Why didn't AfL Transform Schools?
CHAPTER 2 - Curriculum Aims and Teaching Methods
CHAPTER 3 - Making Valid Inferences
CHAPTER 4 - Descriptor Based Assessment
CHAPTER 5 - Exam Based Assessment
CHAPTER 6 - Life After Levels
CHAPTER 7 - Improving Formative Assessment
CHAPTER 8 - Improving Summative Assessment
CHAPTER 9 - An Integrated Assesment System

In Conclusion... 
I generally enjoyed reading “Making good progress?” and found the argument cogent and, on the surface, persuasive. I do however have some reservations about Christodoulou’s complete rejection of carefully considered constructivism, as I detail in the chapter reviews. If nothing else, Christodoulou has provided a useful synthesis of many decades of thought on assessment, across many disciplines. 
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Yet I also feel like the book was something of a missed opportunity. If it is read widely, then this book may have a big impact (though I imagine it will circulate 

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Book Review: Remembering Ahanagran. Searching for the overlap between history and memory

3/9/2016

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Richard White's "Remembering Ahanagran" is a book which I have been unable to put down. At times witty and amusing and at other times deeply moving, White tells the story of his mother's early life and emigration to the United States through her own memories, gathered over a lifetime. 

"Lives are not stories. A day, a month, a year, or a lifetime has no plot. Our experiences are only the raw stuff of stories...We turn our lives into stories, and, in doing so, we...[give our] lives a coherence that the day-to-day lives of our actual experience lack."

One one level, White helps us to get a glimpse into the intimate stories of his family and shows us the strangeness of the world they inhabited. We see the impact of British policy in Ireland, we feel the social stigma attached to mixed marriages, we appreciate how people were both driven by the own desires but also controlled by factors outside their control. I was particularly drawn in by the detailed focus on the construction and reconstruction of ordinary lives. White is by no means glorifying the life his mother led, however, he shows it to be of the same interest and importance as so many other "famous lives" which have of course received far more attention. He demonstrates this beautifully when talking about the house in which his mother spent her early years in the USA.

"There are no histories of Chicago in which 6420 South Mozart Street...matters very much...But for Sara, Chicago always existed in relation to South Mozart Street. And all of America existed in relation to Chicago. South Mozart Street, where she started and ended her day, was the center of America."

On a different level, the book is also a history of the United States in the early 20th century. The characters of the story, whilst very ordinary, are also touched by the major events of the time. During Prohibition illegal stills are kept in the basement. When the Great Depression arrives its toll on the immigrant Americans can be seen. The racial tensions in the South also receive mention as do the corrupt legal systems of Chicago which find themselves in thrall to the Irish gangs. Towards the end of the book, themes of anti-Semitism and racism tinge the story, whilst the War throws the lives of the characters into disarray. If nothing else, the book is well worth a read to see how these "great" events impacted on the lives of everyday people. It is a story about what it means to be American and how American identity has been shaped.

Finally, and most importantly, "Remembering Ahanagran" is something of a historiography. The memories of White's mother are the raw materials of the book, however White has taken a very different approach to this. Much of the book sees him discussing and dealing with the gulf which exists between the memories of his mother and the evidence he can find historically. He begins by outlining the tensions between memory, story-telling and history.

"I once though of my mother's stories as history...Then I became an historian, and after many years I have come to realize that only careless historians confuse memory and history. History is the enemy of memory. The two stalk each other across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain."

In every aspect, White compares his mother's memories and stories with the evidence he can find. In most cases there are huge tensions between the two version of the past and the book deals with how these might be reconciled. This is often a difficult process, and on more than one occasion it is clear that White's mother is not entirely happy with the direction the book is taking, she would rather keep the version of history she has created for herself. However White persists and the most fascinating aspect of the book is how White deals with these tensions and how he attempts to construct a history from the fragments. This is one of the most brilliant and eloquent explanations of the historical method I have read. It is like picking up White's thoughts and notes as much as it is a finished book. He also clearly struggles with his own memories of his mother and father as these are challenged by the evidence.

I think my favourite aspect of the book has been, what White would term, its anti-memoir quality. There is no attempt here to construct simple stories with simple meanings. Every aspect of Sara Walsh's life story is scrutinised. In many cases the result is complex and the result seems strange. But as White notes:

"Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present...The past should be so strange you wonder how you and the people you know and love could come from such as time..."

Ultimately the book feels like a discussion, a conversation about the past and how and why we construct it. It is a brilliant way to get thinking about the historical method and a highly recommended read to really get you thinking about what it means to be an historian and what the role of history should be. It also asks us to consider the meaning of historical significance, taking seemingly innocuous events and showing the enormous shadows they cast over the lives of the people in the book. White also demands that we think about the nature of time itself. He shows how some stories occur in ordinary time, whilst others, such as those of the heroes of The Troubles, take place in a "monumental time", where lives and deaths can span centuries instead of decades. Of course, ultimately the question of historical truth is raised. The conclusion on this is far from clear cut. The themes of the book are universal, they ask us to consider the merits and dangers of memory, and the shortcomings of History as a discipline. This book has not always been a simple read, but it has been absolutely riveting. I am not sure I have done it justice here but I cannot recommend it highly enough. I will finish with one last quote (from a book I could quote every second page of).

"Memory is a living thing vulnerable to a dead past until memory itself dies with its creator... History is a dead thing brought to new life. It is fragments of the past, dead and gone, resurrected by historians...It threatens our versions of ourselves."

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Book Review: Contested Plains by Elliott West

1/17/2016

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On the surface Elliott West's "Contested Plains" seems to address a much explored period of history, namely the Colorado Gold Rush of te 1850s. Whilst the book does an admirable job of explaining the conflict which eventually led to the formation of Colorado, the scope of this work is so much bigger.

West uses the story of the Colorado Gold Rush as as lens through which to examine the vast story of settlement and conflict on the Great Plains. Echoing the work of Turner, West asks us to consider the role of the Plains in shaping the destinies of those who have settled there. Unlike Turner however, West's Plains are not fixed and unchanging, but dynamic and shifting. He asks us to understand how different cultures' visions of the Plains have fundamentally shaped how they have been approached: the Spanish who saw them as worthless desert, the Cheyennes who viewed them as a the key to a new nomadic lifestyle, and of course the White Americans for whom the sparkle of gold caused them to see the West as a land of opportunity. In doing this, West also explains why conflict began: not the result of an every shifting frontier, but the end product of two competing, flawed, and ultimately irreconcilable views of the Plains.

West expertly combines the larger ecological narrative and the human stories which illuminate this period so poignantly. In doing so, he moves beyond traditional retellings of the Indian Wars of the 1850s-70s. There is no time here for Turnerian heros shaping the land to their will, nor indeed for peace-loving Indians, perfectly in tune with nature. The Sand Creek massacre and the death of Black Kettle are no less moving because they are not wrapped in a layer of post-colonial guilt. Indeed, the people in West's Colorado are far more real than Dee Brown's martyrs and villains. Every person in West's narrative has their own motivation, their own unique fortes and flaws, their own visions shaping and molding their thoughts and actions. The attention West pays to this aspect is what makes the book such a moving and important piece of history. Every character is a human being.

Anyone interested in the story of the Gold Rush, indeed anyone interested in the history of America and its place in the world today, should read this book. A lively, engaging, thought provoking, and ultimately ground-breaking approach to understaning the American West.
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Book Reviews Index & Updates

5/29/2015

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This page serves as an index for all the book reviews in the different subject sections of the site. Please click the link to see the review.

  • Edward Baptist, The half has never been told. - Slavery in the USA
  • Chris Eyre, Smoke Signals, 1998. (film review) - American West
  • Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History, New York, Holt & Company, Henry, 2014
  • Helen Gunter, Leaders and leadership in education. - Leadership in education
  • Peter Kenez, Varieties of Fear.  Cold War and Communist Europe
  • R.N. N. Morris, The Gentle Axe: A Novel, United States, Tantor Media, 2007. - Tsarist Russia - Fiction
  • Robert Service, A history of 20th century Russia. - Tsarist and Soviet Russia.
  • Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries - The Men and Women Who Fought for Our Freedoms, London, Abacus, 2010. - British History - General
  • Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories, United States, Hill & Wang Pub, 1999. - Immigration in the USA & the Historical Method
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Quick Review: "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and American Capitalism" by E. Baptist

3/1/2015

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I am only really intending to make this a brief review as I plan to revisit some of the claims made here in more detail soon. Never-the-less, I could not finish a book like this and not write anything. 

In many ways Baptist does for the story of slavery what Dee Brown's "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" attempted to do for the story of the American Indians in 1970. His view is clear from the outset: "Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden." (loc.229). The book recasts the whole of the story of slavery to see it through the experiences of those it affected. Baptist also goes on to show how the results of slavery continue to influence capitalism today. There is an almost Marxist overtone to his final section, quite unusual in an American history:

"Forced labor that is slavery in everything but name remained tremendously important to the world economy well into the twenty-first century. And the lessons that enslavers learned about turning the left hand to the service of the right, forcing ordinary people to reveal their secrets so that those secrets could be commodified, played out in unsteady echoes that we have called by many names (scientific management, the stretch-out, management studies ) and heard in many places. Though these were not slavery, they are one more way in which the human world still suffers without knowing it from the crimes done to Rachel and William and Charles Ball and Lucy Thurston; mourns for them unknowing, even as we also live on the gains that were stolen from them." (Loc. 8675-8680) 

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AndAllThat Blog Move #tweko

10/20/2013

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The AndAllThat.co.uk teacher blog is moving from WordPress onto the main website. From now on you will find non-topic related content here. 

You can still access the archives from the WordPress site by visiting http://andallthatweb.wordpress.com . I will endeavour to transfer the content over the next few months.

Mr F

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