Using the Blog Itself as a Teaching Tool

A student reading the "Derry Walls" blog post.

Every Spring, our students examine what was on the table for the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998 and then--in pairs--make decisions about what they would choose as the most important provisions and which provisions they would be willing to let go (power sharing, an end to parades, stopping punishment beatings, decommissioning of weapons, etc.  -- ten provisions in all). Then they compare their decisions to what was actually accomplished, in the 1998 agreement and in the 2007 additions, and what has still not been accomplished. 

Students are often surprised by what was judged as valuable and what was left out. Their plan for peace can be quite different than the choices made in the actual peace agreement.

This year, we want to look past the agreement a little bit and start to judge how things have worked out. This could involve a look at Brexit and some speculation about the changes it will bring. But all of that is still very uncertain. 

What the blog can provide is a feeling of visitation accompanied by some historical context from our own learning. We can at least fill in some of the gaps by exposing students to what we felt and observed while we were over there. It's imperfect of course (we were only there for a week in the summer), but we can at least give a little more of a sense of the feeling in the streets of Derry and Belfast than we could in prior years. 

For a start, I chose the blog posts "Derry Walls" (https://teachingthetroublesatnha.blogspot.com/2017/08/derry-walls.html) and "Stormont and Other Surprises" (https://teachingthetroublesatnha.blogspot.com/2017/08/stormont-and-other-surprises.html). With the Peace Agreement fresh in their minds, I thought these two posts might have the most ambience in terms of the Unionist-Nationalist divide in its current form. In the space of the second half of a block period lesson, this seemed possible to get through.

It was interesting to see who most engaged with these readings by their teachers and who did not. It did not fall along the same lines as the students who most engaged with the other activities. This felt like a very different mode for learning about the conflict. For this reason, I wonder if this blog might be good to use more often, to differentiate for a sort of learner who doesn't always respond to the other sorts of teaching modalities that we typically use in Facing History classes.

A student makes notes based on the blog posts.