This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module builds on Landscapes 1, but moves the students towards the public presentation of the Great War concentrating on museums, galleries and the processes of re-enactment/performance. Here students will apply the different disciplinary approaches and nature of the materials they have seen to the presentation of the conflict. The Special Collections team will contribute regularly to teaching.
The module will be assessed by 100% coursework.
Effective learning will be tested through the production of the final exhibition design (see below) and presentations. The written submissions reveal a student's ability to marshal different sources of material, integrate them into sustained, overarching, sophisticated interpretations and communicate them in clear prose.
• Oral presentations demand that a student reveal the same qualities of source analysis and the ability to deploy them in a fluent verbal argument, which is often accompanied by suitable audio/visual material. Students will be required to make one formal presentation and submit an accompanying written plan/outline of the paper worth 20% of the final mark (15% presentation; 5% written record. The record should be no more than 1000 words).*
*Marking to be based on combination of School of History and Drama presentation criteria.
• The creation of the exhibition will then test the ability to combine research, observation and analysis of a range of materials with high quality presentation skills.
o Final submission: a group project based on individual sections of up to 3000 words.
? Students will be asked to design an exhibition on the First World War based upon the materials and approaches they have examined during the core module. As a group they will be asked to plan an overarching concept for the exhibition and then each student will be made responsible for a particular aspect of the exhibition. The following structures will be suggested to student:
? To approach by theme, for example, women and the Great War and then assign someone to refine their understandings of the secondary literature in order to inform the selection of primary materials. That particular student will then analyse and reflect on their approach and justify their selection.
? To approach by type of primary material, for example a particular material culture object such as a rifle. The student then creates a report justifying the use of the object and placing it within the overall context of First World War Studies.
? Depending on the IT skills of the group, the final group submission might then take the form of a virtual walk through, or on a less sophisticated level, a Powerpoint or Prezi presentation in which the overarching concept, order, themes and progression of the exhibition is presented. This will be presented as a group by the students to the module's teaching team in the final week of the spring term before an assessment panel.
o Each student’s individual 3000 word component will be free-standing in its own right addressing the points listed above. The student will have identified a theme or object that will be analysed within the framework of public presentation. This component is worth 70% of the overall mark.
• In the final presentation before the assessment panel, the students will be asked to explain how their individual components fit into the overall whole. Each individual student will be asked to provide a 5 minute oral presentation explain their contribution. This component will form 10% of the overall mark.
• G. Braybon. (2003) Evidence, History and the Great War: historians and the impact of 1914-1918. Oxford and New York: Berg
• Prost & J. Winter. (2005) The Great War in History: debates and controversies, 1914 to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Roshwald & R. Stites (eds.). (1999) European Culture in the Great War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• N.J. Saunders & P. Cornish (eds.). (2013) Contested Objects: material memories of the Great War. Abingdon: Routledge
• N.J. Saunders (ed.). (2004) Matters of Conflict: material culture, memory and the First World War. Abingdon: Routledge
• D. Stevenson. (2004) 1914-1918: The history of the Great War. London: Penguin
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
As a consequence of taking this module students will have gained:
11.1 An enhanced and sophisticated understanding of the military, cultural, political and social history of the First World War.
11.2 An understanding of advanced concepts in historiography and cultural theory.
11.3 An enhanced capability to understand theoretical issues regarding Historical study and cultural study.
11.4 The ability to assess interpretations of the past drawn from museum and gallery experiences.
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