Using folksongs to teach primary history

Folk songs are the human voice of local history – love, death, toil and tears. It’s a source material that provides children with a direct and powerful link to the past, reports Katie Masters...

If your school was offered – for free – a resource that helped to inspire children with a greater curiosity about the past, teach them historical concepts such as continuity and change, and learn to evaluate source material, what would you say? Well, that’s exactly what’s on offer from The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS). They’ve created a huge database – The Full English – packed with thousands of folk dances and songs, all collected in England between the 1880s and the 1920s, and all freely available.

“These songs and dances are windows into real lives and real experiences,” says Frances Watt, learning manager of The Full English. “They show us things that people were sharing and communicating about in a different age. Some of these are universal themes, like love and loss, but others are about very specific moments in time. For instance, one song on the database deals with the death of 300 sailors lost at sea on the HM Training Ship ‘Atlanta’ in 1880 on route from Bermuda to Falmouth.”
Despite the name, The Full English isn’t exclusively a resource for English schools. “There are songs from the Scottish, Welsh and Irish traditions in there,” says Frances. “There are even traditional French songs in the database: one of the collectors gathered songs from French bagpipers who were living in Leeds. And while some areas of the country have got more local material than others, the furthest afield anyone should have to go is about 50 miles.”
The Full English, funded in large part by the Heritage Lottery Fund, can be accessed from the EDFSS website (efdss.org). It’s already available to search, either by keyword or (by using the Google map function) by the locality in which the song or dance was collected. In most cases, what you’ll currently find are the original documents, but a team of volunteers is working to transcribe all the songs, and to provide a standard notation and sound file for each of them. Many resources should be in place by June 2014, along with a re-vamped educational area on the EFDSS website showing ways in which schools can interact with the material.
“Over the course of this academic year we’re working with 18 schools – secondary, primary and special needs – to explore how the songs and dances can be used,” says Frances.
“These projects will be written up as case studies, complete with sample songs and extension activities.”

Local history

Interesting – and sometimes unexpected – activities are already taking place. At St John with St Mark Primary School in Bury, Lancashire, the children were taught old clapping games, dances and songs. They liked them so much they carried on playing them at lunchtime and then went home to ask their parents about the sort of games they’d played as children and about their experiences growing up.

“It sparked an interest in family history, which I hadn’t anticipated,” says teacher Laura Entwhistle. “Children were – in many cases for the first time – talking to their families about the past.”

At Marton Primary School in Lincolnshire, Liam Robinson, a folk educator who came into the school to work with the children, found a song on the database called The Jolly Miller and used that as a starting point for the children to hold their own historical enquiry. “There are versions of The Jolly Miller from all over England,” says Liam. “So we made it more local by re-christening our song, The Jolly Miller of Marton. Then we challenged the KS2 children to try and find out where the Jolly Miller’s windmill might have stood. We thought about the clues that might help to locate it: an area exposed to wind, roads called something like Mill Lane. They looked at maps, asked older people from the town if they could remember anything. It was a way – without being heavy-handed – of getting children to think about sources of evidence: place names; folk memory; old maps; old photographs.”

Sue Bousfield, a folk educator working with St John with St Mark Primary School, used a folk song called The Little Piecer, about a child working in a cotton mill, to get a Year 5 class thinking about the concepts of change and continuity.

“The song sparked a discussion about the way children’s lives have changed in this area. In the nineteenth century, many children who lived here worked in cotton mills or down mines. Learning about that led to a debate about which was preferable, physical labour or school! The song also got the class thinking about historical bias – I asked them who they thought had written the song: a mill owner or a worker. The children said they thought it was the latter, because whoever wrote the song knew about the hardships involved.”

The Little Piecer also introduced the issue of cause and effect. “I asked the children why they thought cotton mills had been built in this area,” says Sue. “We imagined travelling back in time to a point when there wasn’t a town here at all and I asked them – what do you need to run a cotton mill? They said, ‘Steam’. So I asked them what you need to make steam and they said, ‘Water and heat’. And then they said, ‘We’ve got that here! We’ve got lakes for water and mines for coal and they’re close together.’ So I said, ‘But no one lives here’. The children said, ‘We can go and get people and bring them here.’ So we talked about how the people would need houses to live in and roads to travel on. It showed the children how their town had started building up, over time. Understanding that process is a good way of helping children grasp the bigger and more abstract processes of change – the sort you find in chronological history.”

Know your place
The Full English is a resource that can be used across the curriculum. At Marton, historical characters from the local folk songs were used to create a gymnastics routine – with a blacksmith hammering, a baker baking and Dick Turpin (who once stayed overnight in Marton and was the subject of another song the children investigated) pilfering a horse.

“I hoped The Full English would be a way of bringing local history alive in a relevant and purposeful way,” says Ben Stephenson, head of Marton. “But it surpassed my expectations. It reached across the curriculum. It improved the standard of imaginative writing. It prompted us to start a community band. And it definitely deepened the children’s love of history. Songs are a way of passing on stories, anecdotes, details about what people did and what was important to them. They taught the children about source material, about oral history, about gathering evidence. And the fact that the material came from the local area gave the children a richer understanding of themselves and their place in history, how they fit in. They could see themselves as a link in a chain that stretches back generations. That has given them another strand in their sense of identity and a renewed respect for the community.”

That’s definitely worth making a song and dance about.

Parental advisory!

The folk songs on The Full English database haven’t been censored and there is material that, today, would be regarded as offensive – racist, sexist or dealing with hard-hitting subject-matter like slavery. It’s a good introduction to the way in which the values of a community change over time.

“Some of the material is challenging stuff,” says Frances, “but in an educational setting that can be very powerful. It can be used to reflect on ethics and morality and why attitudes change. You can discuss why communities sang about these subjects and what they would sing about today. Or you could use the songs as springboards for literacy lessons and ask the children to rewrite them from other characters’ perspectives.”