History
“Explore what happened in the past to understand the present society and its people.”
Visual Thinking
The essence of history is to equip students with historical sense and analytical skill. To this end, school-based workbooks and learning materials for junior and senior students are developed to include various types of visual thinking frameworks. The input in form of these frameworks helps students classify and analyse factors or effects of different historical events, enables students to organize their knowledge and viewpoints in an orderly way and raises their higher-order thinking capabilities.
Mock International Conference
Mock international conferences or forums are conducted in senior forms to promote critical thinking. Students are assigned different roles as heads or representatives of particular countries. In the mock conference, they have to present their viewpoints about a particular historical event. Simultaneously, students need to give instant responses to interrogation from others. This enables students to enhance their argumentative power. Students’ higher-order thinking skills in the learning of history are well developed.
Cross-Curricular Project
One of the projects is conducted in S3 in collaboration with the English Department. The topic was ‘The Holocaust.’ Students read ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ in the Literary Module of English Language and apply what they learn from the Module to the research project of History. Projects of high quality are exhibited in the library. Another one involves extended reading in S2 in collaboration with the Home Economics Department. Students can explore the origin of staple food items such as potatoes and tomatoes.
Walk-Through of Cartoon Analysis
Cartoon analysis is an important skill in studying history. Therefore, we start to adopt this approach of cartoon analysis in junior forms with organized questions so that students can easily infer and analyse the underlying notions of cartoonists. This can enhance students’ interest in history and train students’ skills in analysing information, which acts as a bridging element to senior secondary.
Study Tour
Through the study tour to Xian, students learn about the historical features and events of our own nation. Students need to prepare outlines of their project regarding Xian before the trip. After the trip, students have to finish the project and present it in the sharing sessions with other participants. Students thus have a valuable experience which offers traveling, knowledge development and collaborative learning.
Off-Campus Competition
In order to unearth and train talents in History, gifted students are encouraged to take part in various competitions, such as the ‘Inter-school Competition of Project Learning’ organized by the Hong Kong Museum of History. Participants can benefit a lot from data collection, data synthesis and peer collaboration. All the above activities can help consolidate students’ historical knowledge and provide them a platform to showcase their potentials.
Visits
Various visits to local historical sites, museums, public records offices and courts have been organized to enhance students’ sympathy and historical knowledge.
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
- Our department joined the school-based language assistance scheme of The Polytechnic University in the 17-18 academic year.
- S3 History teachers attended two workshops before the actual lesson observation, where the topic was ‘Cold War’.
- Our department also attended a sharing session at the institute with other participating schools in June, 2018.