After your visit
Reviewing and reporting
If pupils visited the site with their own ‘research mission’
and collected evidence on site with this in mind, then their next step
should unfold naturally. Pupils should be given the chance to compare
evidence collected in groups and discuss what it reveals. Further research
may be necessary at this point; certain pieces of evidence may be examined
and then rejected. At its simplest, pupils can add to their KWL chart
(what do I know? What do I want to know?
What have I learnt?). Pupils should then have the chance
to make some kind of a presentation to the class, either orally or in
writing in which they explain what they wanted to find out and what their
conclusions are.
Further follow-up activities
A battlefield guide
A more general focus for review activity could be the construction of
class, group or individual battlefield guides. Pupils could add photographs,
drawings and descriptions to copies of maps of the battlefield to create
their own ‘mini’ guide to the battlefield. These could be
produced as booklets, or could form the content for a slide presentation
using digital photography taken on site with either cameras or mobile
phones. They could produce postcards or calendars to be sold as part of
an Enterprise project.
The aftermath
Pupils are likely to want to know what happened after the battle. Ideally,
following the battlefield tour, pupils should be given the chance to return
to the Visitor Centre and explore the final section of the exhibition,
which looks at the aftermath of the battle. Otherwise, if time is tight,
this can be explored through whole class teaching, or through individual
research. A number of contemporary accounts are available in the Aftermath
section of the Resource Bank.
Imaginative writing
Help pupils write accounts of the battle from one or the other side. Help
them choose real regiments and to include real incidents and features
of the battle. These could be dramatised and recorded, as in the Visitor
Centre.
Enterprise in Education
As part of a class enterprise project, pupils could include photographs
taken on site as part of a set of postcards, bookmarks or calendars to
sell.
A review of the site
Discuss the pupils’ impressions of the whole site - the battlefield
and the Visitor Centre. How well do pupils think the NTS has presented
the story? What are the ‘must see’ elements? Pupils could
produce personal writing about their visit or could write a review of
the site for a tourist magazine. Could they create a promotional leaflet
encouraging people to visit the centre, using digital photographs taken
on site and simple desk-top publishing programmes?
Debate
It costs a lot of money to build new visitor centres and to maintain the
battlefield. Some of this money comes from people who donate money to
the National Trust for Scotland, but some of it comes from the Scottish
Executive Government – it’s public money. Discuss with pupils
why it is considered important to spend public money on heritage projects
like this. Do they agree it is important? Organise a class debate on a
motion which explores this tension, for example: This house believes that
Scotland should spend money on the future, not on the past or This house
believes that the land should be used for housing rather than to commemorate
something that happened 260 odd years ago. Pupils could also collect evidence
from other visitors about how they feel about the site. Different nationalities
may react in different ways.
