School Resource Packs: Cork 1912-1918

Through War and Rebellion: Cork 1912-1918 Schools Resource Packs

By Cork City and County Archives

Information For the Teacher

Cork City and County Archives (CCCA) is the official local government archives service for Cork City and County, and the largest repository of historical records in the Cork region. Archives are the building blocks of history, the naturally accumulated records of states, organisations, and individuals generated in the course of their activities, and that have been selected for permanent preservation. Historically, most often these have been written documents but film, photographic and, increasingly, electronic records are also preserved. In the last decade, with the advent of high-speed scanning, Archives have become leaders of the digital revolution with millions of documents being scanned and published online. In Ireland, for example, the National Archives has made the household returns of the 1901 and 1911 censuses available free online for use by anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world. Cork City and County Archives has made many records accessible through the Digital Archive section of its website, www.corkarchives.ie. Through the present Schools Pack Project, we hope to reach out to Cork’s secondary schools by presenting ten important documents from our holdings from the period 1912-18, which may form the basis for classroom study and activities. While of particular relevance for History students, the pack may also be a useful resource for other subjects, eg, English, Geography, Art.

The Project has five core aims.

• To introduce students to the work of CCCA and its collections and online resources • To help develop the use of primary documents and research methods among students • To allow students to explore the potential of the internet in historical research • To generate ideas for self-directed project work at Junior, Senior, and Transition Year levels • To encourage students to visit the archives and to see how these documents are stored, and to learn how to access the documents in the research room setting. Each document is annotated with links to other relevant sources in CCCA and elsewhere, including online, for students to use for further study. This by definition is open-ended and students should be encouraged to find out more about incidents. For example, if a letter refers to the death of a soldier in the trenches in October 1915 and he is a member of a regiment then the student may be encouraged to find out where the regiment was at that time, what battles they were fighting in and what other sources (newspapers, film, books, speeches and pictures) are available. The focus could be on the personal (trench life) or the general (leaders, generals, course of the battle, outcome, and casualties) depending on the students’ abilities and interests.

Syllabus Junior Cycle Junior Cycle History Teacher Guidelines

The project will benefit junior students as it will explain the difference between Primary Documents and Secondary Documents and help them to analyse these in a fun and interesting way where they are able to explore the topic themselves. It is especially useful for the documents questions at Higher and Ordinary level and should prove useful as an ongoing resource and for revision close to examinations.

Schools Resource Packs by Cork City and County Archives, with the support of the Heritage Council. Research consultancy by Barry Keane, BA, PgED (DCU). ©Cork City and County Archives 2015

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