One of the principles for curriculum design under A Curriculum for Excellence is relevance. From a chance discovery in a local bookshop I’ve found a book that has potential to provide relevant local contexts for a wide range of curricular areas.
Relevance: Young people should understand the purposes of their activities. They should see the value of what they are learning and its relevance to their lives, present and future. link
The book, Memoirs and Confessions of a County Planning Officer by the late Frank Tindall, tells the story of the development of East Lothian from 1950 onwards. With a title like that, it’s not an obvious choice for the school library shelf – but it brings East Lothian’s recent history to life in a way I’ve never encountered before in more than 20 years living here.
Some topics covered include:
- depopulation and measures taken to address it, including bringing “overspill” from Glasgow
- flooding of the river Tyne, and work done in response
- mineral resources, including coal and limestone
- coastal conservation, including removal of wartime defences
- the development of the ranger service and tourism
Somehow picking these out doesn’t do full justice to the book, though, because it makes it sound like a geography text and it’s not like that at all. It’s written as a series of stories, and you meet the characters involved. There’s endless East Lothian trivia, of course – where else could you find out where the rock went from the hole in Traprain Law, for example?
Because there are stories about every area of East Lothian, it has unusual potential to provide “hooks” for new curricular developments which are locally relevant and interesting. In many areas it would be possible, for example, to look at what the planners intended and see how things are working out now.
We largely have Frank Tindall to thank for the jewel that is Haddington’s Georgian town centre. You only have to visit other principal towns in Scotland to see what was inflicted on them in the 60s and 70s. Personally I think he was a total hero and I think he should get the credit in any tourist guides to Haddignton!
It probably helped too that there hadn’t been much (any?) development pressure. That meant the basics were still there, even if they weren’t very well maintained. His own house, at the end of the Nungate Bridge, was apparently in such a poor state he thought it had only survived demolition because there were concerns that it was holding the bridge up!