Earlier this year, I received an email from a researcher about the MACOS materials in the IOE Library’s Special Collections, which I have written about on Newsam News (now discontinued). The project,  Man: A Course of Study, has been receiving increasing attention from researchers, particularly from the United States where it originated. MACOS was instigated by educational psychologist Jerome Bruner at Harvard in the late 1960s. You can read more about Bruner and his aims on the IOE London Blog, but essentially, Bruner believed that it was possible to teach children to be more humane and eliminate racism and ethnocentrism by studying another culture closely. He also believed that you can teach children complicated ideas through his concept of the ‘spiral curriculum’ — a pedagogical method that introduces the same theme in increasing complexity over a period of time. At its peak in the early 1970s, the MACOS curriculum, which took a year out of the normal curriculum, was taught in 47 states in elementary and middle schools in the U.S. and reached approximately 400,000 students. However, its success made it a target, and it was eventually attacked by politicians such as Ronald Reagan, then governor of California – see more about the controversy in the National Library of Canada’s documentary film ‘Through These Eyes‘.

MACOS was also used in some schools in the U.K. and other parts of the world, but little is known about how it was taught. This is where David Frost’s story becomes invaluable. As one of the few teachers who can offer a first-hand account of implementing MACOS in a British secondary school, his detailed recollections provide rare insights into how the curriculum actually worked in his classroom. David’s account reveals that MACOS enabled teachers to develop agency and reflexivity in collaboration with their pupils, resulting in a transformative teaching and learning experience. This should be of interest to Initial Teacher Training students, as well as to practising teachers.

One teacher’s MACOS story

David Frost, Wolfson College, Cambridge

I was Head of Humanities in a secondary school in Ashford in the early 1980s and studying on a part-time masters course at Canterbury Christ Church. This was before the Education Reform Act (1988) when teachers still had the freedom to discuss the curriculum and explore innovations for ourselves. On the MA course, I discovered all the great curriculum studies writers, many of whom were at the London Institute (e.g. Bernstein, Lawton, Young etc). I also read Stenhouse (1975) and Bruner (1960,1976) who introduced me to ideas such as ‘the spiral curriculum’, ‘education as process’, and the MACOS programme. Now, 40 years later, I discovered that the UCL IOE ‘s Library in Bedford Square has an archive of MACOS materials which has prompted me to reflect on my transformative experiences in the 1980s.

Image source: Life Cycle of the Salmon

In 1984, I observed MACOS in action when I visited a school in Nottinghamshire. In one lesson, the teacher reminded the students of their previous work on the social structure of baboons and the concept of ‘domination’. She asked them to use the twos and fours group discussion approach to talk about how they had experienced domination in their own families and then how they would want to exercise domination when they have their own families when they grow up. The discussion that arose was extraordinarily rich — personal and social education at its best. The teacher in Nottingham spent time with me showing me MACOS materials and explained the structure of the programme. We discussed how it enables students to learn about what it is to be human by exploring topics such as the life cycle of the Pacific Salmon, the way Herring Gulls bring up their chicks, and the family structure of Baboons. These explorations lay the conceptual foundation which support the study of pre-industrial Netsilik Inuit in which human characteristics such as the use of tools, language, culture transmitted between generations, social organisation, and extended childhood are examined. The pedagogical approach enables students to pose questions about what it is to be human through contrast and comparison. I returned to my school bursting with excitement and contacted CARE (Centre for Applied Research in Education), founded by Lawrence Stenhouse, because they were responsible for disseminating MACOS. In discussions with my school’s senior leadership team, it was agreed that MACOS would be part of a redesign of the curriculum for Year 7 to ease the transition from primary to secondary school. Their form tutors would be those who also taught their subjects, including MACOS.

Forty years later, I still have some clear memories of teaching MACOS. For example, early in the programme, small groups of my students gathered round a desk-top film projector to watch a film about the life cycle of the Pacific Salmon. They had read the book about it and were discussing it and posing questions. One big question was: ‘How can they find the streams they were born in, having been swimming about in the ocean?’. We discussed ways we could find the answer. This was before the internet, of course, but I had seen a piece in the newspaper about marine biologists at the University of Southampton who were working on this. One of the students said: ‘Why don’t we phone them up and ask them?’. The nearest phone was on the desk in the Head of Year’s office down the corridor, so we crept along the corridor, ducking down below the windows of the classrooms we had to pass, and then squeezed into the Year Head’s office which was empty at the time. I dialled the number and struck lucky. The person we were speaking to happened to know about the research on how Salmon navigate by sense of smell. When I explained that I had 28 kids crammed into the Year Head’s office, she became very sympathetic and helpful. Students shouted out their questions and the researcher shouted back her responses with me holding up the phone so that everyone could hear. I am not sure whether we got a definitive answer about how Salmon find their way back to their home streams, but the students did learn about the nature of questions, enquiry, and the provisional nature of knowledge.

Learning to be human

Learning about the Salmon’s life-cycle was a powerful experience for my 12-year-old students. The idea of the parents dying before the young were born led to a lot of reflection about the role of parents, the gradual pace of childhood, and the importance of schooling for humans. It led to intense discussion about learning and how we can all work together to get the best out of this precious opportunity. Learning arose again in the study of the Herring Gull, which focused attention on the concepts of innate and learned behaviour.

Another activity that was particularly memorable for me was ‘life-ropes’ through which the students could reflect on and talk about the human life-cycle. The idea was for them to create a set of illustrated cards, each one representing a significant milestone in life — being born, beginning to walk, going to school, and so on. Then the cards were pierced so that a string could be threaded through them and the life rope could be pinned up for discussion. A group of girls had made one which seemed overly focused on their anticipated love-lives, so milestones included ‘going steady’, ‘getting engaged’, ‘getting married’, and ‘having children’ with dying following on rather abruptly after that. There was one milestone which still puzzles and amuses me to this day — ‘becoming eternalised’ — which came after going steady, I think. What we — both the students and myself — learned through MACOS continues to be relevant.

Image source: Fishing at the Stone Weir

One of the defining characteristics of being human is the role of beliefs and traditions which are passed on through stories. Let me illustrate this with the story of Kigtak. 

The idea of the spiral curriculum underpinned MACOS, so when we explored the lives of the Netsilik Inuit, life cycle was revisited and a memorable aspect of this was our discussion about the story of Kigtak, an old woman at the end of her life. The nature of the Inuit’s livelihood meant that they had to keep moving to follow the Caribou and respond to changes in the season. Kigtak’s increasing frailty presented an insurmountable challenge for her nomadic family and tribe. When she couldn’t keep up with the others and was left behind to die, she accepted it because in her society this was understood as natural. Sitting on the ice as your final moment was inevitable. In my own household, we have been following the current parliamentary debate about assisted dying, and my partner is actively involved in the field of palliative care through her Being Mortal campaign. Kigtak features in our current, ongoing discussions.

Just two years after I had started teaching MACOS, I was asked to join the university as a teacher educator. As I made this transition, I drew confidence from an enhanced professional identity based on a strong moral purpose and clear pedagogical principles. This was due in part to critical scholarship as a student on the masters in curriculum studies but also to teaching MACOS, which was perhaps even more powerful. At an early stage, I had met a teacher educator from Goldsmiths College, Gwyn Edwards, who had taught MACOS himself. He often came to my school to sit in on MACOS lessons and engage me in a continuous dialogue about pedagogy. What I learned through this experience – for example, about the value of learning through discussion and enquiry, about the teacher as a facilitator, and about the power of reflection on experience – became the golden threads in the fabric of my knowledge and capability as an educator over the four-and-a-half decades of my career. This led to the development of non-positional teacher leadership through which teachers are striving to address matters of social justice around the world. We might say that we are learning what it is to be human and how we can become more so.

This post is by Pia Russell, who was was awarded the ‘Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellowship’ by the Research Institute for Collections in 2023.

Maria Lawson. A History Canada for Use in Public Schools. Toronto: W.J. Gage, 1908. p. 2. https://archive.org/details/historyofcanadaf0000laws/page/2/mode/2up

This scholarship occurs in the homelands of the WSÁNEĆ and LƏK̓ʷƏŊƏN peoples on whose lands the University of Victoria now stands and whose relationships with this land remain today.

Constructing settler colonial origin stories

In 2020 a petition signed by more than 268,000 people, asked the United Kingdom (UK) government to make the teaching of Britain’s colonial past more prevalent in the compulsory primary and secondary curriculum.  In doing so, signatories hoped that children in UK schools would learn how: “Colonial powers must own up to their pasts…and how this contributes to the unfair systems of power at the foundation of our modern society.”[1]  The following year, the UK’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities released a report which included among its 24 recommendations the teaching of an inclusive curriculum regarding the making of modern Britain.[2]  While these initiatives are not without challenges, they do demonstrate two important aspects.  First, that so often schools are ground-zero for debates about collective historical consciousness.  And second, that the UK is beginning a process of self-reflection about their colonial legacies which can feel overdue to many in former colonies.  While there is much public and scholarly discussion of our so-called postcolonial world, those living today in the peripheries of former empires continue to experience imperial realities as very much a part of our present.

In British Columbia (BC), Canada’s most western province, the Ministry of Education implemented an entirely revised elementary and secondary (K-12) curriculum in 2016.  A leading influence of this redesign was a response to calls for increased Indigenisation and decolonisation, largely influenced by the 2015 findings of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) Commission of Canada.  The TRC was a federal government inquiry which sought to document the painful histories of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system and provide survivors of this system with opportunities to share their experiences.  Among the TRC’s 94 Calls to Action, many relate specifically to education.  For example, Call 62.i asks governments at all levels to: “Make age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students.”[3]  Today, BC’s K-12 curriculum policy includes Indigenous ways of knowing and being at every grade level and in every subject.[4]  While considerable work still remains ahead, it is nonetheless a start towards decolonising the often fractured relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples living within the context of the Canadian state.  Whether it is controversy about curriculum, statues, the commonwealth, or museum collections, the process of how decolonisation is discussed in the heart of former empires—the imperial metropole—feels rather different than how it is increasingly discussed in its former colonies.

One powerful way for learners and educators to think about colonial legacy, is to understand how the narratives of our past often inform our present.  Reflecting on our historical consciousness asks that we think critically about how it is we came to know our past.[5]  By critically re-reading settler colonial origin stories we might begin to trace a line of how power was, and continues to be, expressed in the lives of people on the colonised ground.  In Canada, for most non-Indigenous people, a leading source of such stories has been school textbooks.  As the Education Librarian in Special Collections at the University of Victoria (UVic) Libraries, I curate BC’s historical textbooks (BCHT) collection.  It is a growing print and digital archive of our province’s textbook history.  In Canada, education is structured provincially so over the past 153 years of BC’s existence, a defined corpus of textbooks has been required reading for hundreds of thousands of public school pupils.  What stories might these textbooks have told children over time about the place they called home?  To be clear, we cannot always assume that just because children read a textbook that somehow meant they adhered to its ideology—what book historians often refer to as the receptivity fallacy[6]—but we can imagine that their interactions with the book’s narratives introduced them to commonly held attitudes portrayed in the textbooks.  So, what were the early textbook stories that British Columbian’s told their future citizenry about colonization and empire?  And, how might these compare to the textbook stories told in the heart of empire, the British metropole?

Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellowship

Self-image of Pia Russell, outside the Institute of Education (July 2023)

In July 2023, I had the remarkable opportunity to ask these internationally comparative scholarly questions about colonisation and empire in children’s school books when I was the 2023 Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow at the Research Institute for Collections (RIC) at University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society.  Here I had the opportunity to review dozens of UK textbooks in the IOE’s Historical Textbooks Collection that were contemporaneous to the ones I curate in BC.  Currently my focus is on the first fifty years of BC’s textbook history.  During the fellowship, I also developed wonderful professional collaborations with counterpart colleagues such as the exceptional Dr. Nazlin Bhimani, Research Support and Special Collections Librarian.  Together, we were able to share best practices for the unique technical aspects of the rare books we curate, and also comparatively discuss the social contexts our collections exist within.  Serving as a Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow initiated a completely new and innovative line of inquiry within my existing program of scholarship.  My long-term scholarship has focused on decolonising, anti-racist, and feminist analyses of these unique historical sources.  Most often I partner with and take guidance from Indigenous colleagues who work locally.  This is essential, truth-telling work that seeks to establish more respectful cross-cultural research partnerships and personal connections.  Through a Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellowship, I was able to include a dynamic international dimension to my historical textbook scholarship and this provided a beautiful complement to my already established local relationships closer to home.  When engaging in decolonising work in such deeply colonised lands as British Columbia (a problematic colonial name, to be sure), such complementarity not only strengthens the scholarly work but also takes seriously the responsibility of being a historian working in this place.  When reflecting on the histories, presents, and futurities of the Indigenous homelands where I reside, understanding the centuries old power structures of the British empire that instigated this colonisation through actions such as map making, land surveying, and textbook provisioning is essential.  Through my Fellowship at the UCL’s RIC, I strengthened my understanding of critical imperial studies alongside my engagement with local Indigenous ways of knowing and being.  As a result from dialog with colleagues such as Dr. Bhimani and while examining rare books in the RIC, I am now better able to fulfill my responsibilities as a historian who hopes to raise up previously suppressed voices and bring their histories in from the literal and figurative margins of both BC’s and Britain’s historical school textbooks.  Our vocational partnerships show much future promise and I look forward to exciting public history work together in the years to come.

Side-by-side: comparing historical textbook narratives

One specific outcome of my time as a Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow at the Research Institute for Collections (RIC) was the development of a teaching resource that utilises these textbooks as historical objects of truth-telling instigation.  The resource seeks to embrace a pedagogical approach that is comprehensively decolonising.  By drawing upon both the UK’s Key Stage Three History curriculum alongside BC’s Grade 9 Social Studies curriculum, we now have an internationally cohesive, curriculum-aligned, learning tool.[7]  This resource guides teachers and students through critical re-readings of historical textbooks to reveal that narratives of empire did not tell the whole story and had considerable consequences lasting up until today. (more…)