Technicoloured Dreamcoat

My teaching equipment has evolved over the years. In my very first job, I carried my essential bits and pieces in a battered leather satchel that my parents gave me when I started Big School aged eleven. At that stage, my kit involved tissues for tearful students or my own runny nose, a tube of lip balm, various biros, my A4 teaching planner and assorted whiteboard markers. At School No.2, all staff were issued with white Apple Mac laptops so I carried a laptop case and stuffed my charger into my satchel; by that stage, I had also discovered lipstick. When I started work at School No. 3, I always had a USB stick in one of my pockets so that I could easily transfer material from home to school and I’d often discover that I had also stuffed a digital whiteboard pen into my pocket at the absent-minded end of the final lesson. And so it went on: my teaching life involved carrying a small collection of personal objects necessary for long days away from home (a water bottle, paracetamol, a tube of rescue mascara) and an ever increasing mound of electronic kit: portable hard drive, portable DVD player, cables various, laptop and charger plus spare batteries for my badly behaved overhead projector. It took me a long time, however, to realise that I also needed a technicolour dreamcoat.

This dreamcoat would live on a hook in my classroom and it would be for my exclusive use. Wearing it would give me unlimited ideas and resources for those moments when a student announces that they are not interested in any aspect of school whatsoever and that there is no job that they will ever be interested in. During these episodes of frustrated despair, I would throw on the technicoloured coat and instantly become brimful of suggestions for the epically bored student.

In the absence of a multicoloured dreamcoat, I scrawl ideas on bits of paper that silt up my desk until I remember to share these recommendations with students. Given that there are plenty of teaching days that don’t feel multicoloured, let alone technicoloured, I am always on the hunt for fresh possibilities and by the end of the BBC’s new documentary on the historical evolution of Stonehenge (Stonehenge: the Lost Circle Revealed, 12th February 2021), I had covered several A4 pages with ideas.

As narrator of the documentary, Alice Roberts represents a fascinating career progression. Trained as a doctor, she studied for a PhD in paleopathology and now teaches undergraduate and post-graduate courses in anatomy. She is Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham and her passion for the way in which science can reveal aspects of the past is at the heart of her career in television and radio. She also finds time to write books, care for her kids and train a vizsla puppy. All these things make her a great role model for students.

With my documentary notes on hand, I was keen to check out UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, which I did not know very much about, and I really liked the look of the university’s four year BA in Archaeology with a Placement Year. A year spent working with a professional team offers a great balance to a degree that that already has intellectual and practical qualities.

Then I did a little bit of reading about geological mapping, geochemistry and the work of the British Geological Survey. Lost students sometimes find their purpose in the places where subjects overlap and so it was really good to think in more detail about the possibilities offered by the relationship between the earth’s structure and its chemical composition. The BBC documentary also demonstrated how another type of compositional analysis, this time the evaluation of chemical compounds in cremated human bones, can identify where a person was living from the trace elements of what they ate. The data from this analysis can then be used to draw up maps of biosphere isotope remains. These complex and demanding fields offer all sorts of innovative possibilities and they might well provide professional homes for students thriving on both geography and chemistry and reluctant to give up either one.

I was fascinated to investigate the work done by experimental archaeologists (known as EXARC, which makes them sound like Stars Wars characters) and the international projects shared on EXARC.net are exciting. This discipline provides an intersection of science, history, curation and craft that would be perfect for some of the restless historians-with-a-love-of-science that I have taught. And, long before they need to think of higher education and employment, it would be such a treat to take a KS3 school group on a residential trip to the Ancient Technology Centre in Dorset so that they could sleep in a Viking longhouse and learn the skills required by life in the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages and in the Roman, Anglo Saxon and Viking periods. Although it is no longer fashionable to talk about kinaesthetic learning, there is no getting away from the fact that making and doing unlock learning for many students. It might not be feasible to recreate the Roman’s wine making production techniques in school, and certainly not during a pandemic, but I want my students to know that it is possible to study the past by making objects in the present.

The BBC documentary uses radio-carbon dating to bring to life the hazelnut snack enjoyed by one prehistoric stonemason. GCSE Bitesize (Physics, single science) offers a precis of this method of dating biological material and the technique becomes properly gripping when students see how it can illuminate people and objects from the deep past. Still in the realm of Physics but combining elements of anthropology sits archeoastronomy, a discipline that I didn’t know existed. The realisation that it is possible to take readings that determine the angle of the sun in the sky in 3000 BC - and therefore its position at the summer and winter solstices - stretched my mathematical understanding so far that I had to make a cup of tea and take some time to try and visualise these concepts.

Having visited the geochemists, the Stonehenge research team also deployed geophysicists to take photographs by drone and then to create 3D models of landscape features using arial photogrammetry. The geophysicists also used ground penetrating radar and magnetometry to locate the magnetic traces left in the soil by ancient fires. The presence of prehistoric hearths tells a story of human settlement and I know that these extraordinarily precise techniques might inspire students who wander slightly aimlessly between art, physics, computer science and geography. The study of Earth and Environmental Sciences, as taught at St Andrew’s for example, allows undergraduates to take modules that integrate physics, chemistry and biology. I was astonished to discover the existence of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), a technique used to date fossils in geological sediments through ionized radiation to determine the last time a mineral was exposed to sunlight. Understanding how scientific techniques can be used to tell stories is incredibly exciting and I can think of at least one former student who could forge a fantastic career if given a drone, a chisel and training in the interpretation of electromagnetic radiant imagery.

There is a lovely poem by Billy Collins called ‘Schoolsville’ that begins: “Glancing over my shoulder at the past, / I realise the number of students I have taught / is enough to populate a small town.” Having taught for long enough to populate my own small town, I could just holler down the street and several of my bossier ex-students would shout right back. These folk would be the perfect dig supervisors, a role that demands a rare blend of academic knowledge and practicality with assertiveness, patience, humour and large quantities of tolerance. Dig supervisors also need to be waterproof.

I am absolutely certain that plenty of students would leap at the chance to become microbrewers making craft beer like the chap in the documentary who created a new IPA in honour of the excavations in the Preseli mountains. One of my previous students is two years into one of the rare-as-hens’-teeth BBC apprenticeships and she could educate me about the skills involved in making a documentary as compelling as this one on Stonehenge. Even a quick wrack of my brain tells me that the team would need camera operators, a sound crew, a research team, script writers, a programme editor and several digital wizards to create the historical reconstructions of the prehistoric monuments and the stylised shadow animations that represent people who lived 5,000 years ago. The documentary also uses music technology as part of its storytelling and this is a field that would appeal to many students.

At GCSE and during A Levels students begin to think about what they will do after they leave school; in doing so they have to imagine the next phase of their own stories. This sort of imagining can be an be incredibly difficult because it requires students to move beyond their current stories - those of childhood and adolescence - while they are very much still at work shaping their teenage lives. Those of us who work with young people can help them with this imaginative work by showing them some of the myriad possibilities available to them and by doing all that we can to remove obstacles to students’ learning and progress. Most of all, our young folk need to believe in themselves and for some of them this is almost as difficult as heaving blue stones from the Welsh hills to Wiltshire’s chalk downs.

The BBC’s tremendously engaging Stonehenge documentary bears witness to a lengthy and demanding multidisciplinary investigation into events that took place so long ago that they have their own myth, that of the shape-shifting Merlin. Having the magic of technicoloured dreamcoats and Merlin’s wizarding skills would be immensely useful for teachers helping young people to imagine their own futures. That said, I would hope to hook the attention of a class by cutting up some card into squares, writing a job title onto each square and then distributing one card to each student. With a bit of time and some teamwork a class could figure out what sort of documentary all these jobs were involved in making. And it is possible that exercises like these might reduce students’ worries about a dark age after school and inspire them to begin imagining the next stage of their lives.