Slavery by Numbers – Task Sheet

An example of an extension project for the very able, compiled by Alison Stephen

This activity comes from a project I tried recently with some very able pupils in Year 9.

Aims

  1. To encourage co-operation and joint planning by a small group of very able pupils, giving them ownership of the project.
  2. To encourage extra reading and research with a focus.
  3. Allowing pupils to produce a task which could be carried out by their classmates. I hoped that to see it in use would be a better incentive and reward for them than my own comments.
  4. Focus on the significance of numbers – tying in historical and numeracy skills.

Background

The idea came from class discussion about the story of the slave ship Zong, where Captain Luke Collingwood threw 123 slaves overboard, and then made an insurance claim for lost cargo. Some 60 of the slaves were already dead. The rest were sick. We discussed how many he had murdered, and whether it mattered, as the court case that followed concerned the refusal of the insurance company to reimburse him for the lost carge, and was not about murder.

This reminded me of a worksheet I had previously devised for Year 10 on the significance of numbers in World War I. I had been trying to help them connect with the huge numbers of deaths at the Battle of the Somme, as well as attempting to reinforce numeracy skills and to make use of estimations, as pupils are encouraged to do in Maths before performing calculations.

Instead of spending time compiling a similar task on slavery myself, I showed the worksheet to my three Year 9 pupils and asked them to see if they could devise a similar one on slavery for their own year group. I explained the aims, and then let them discuss what steps they would have to take to complete the project.

Progress

The three pupils went away to research the slave trade individually. Because they were looking for numbers, it gave them a focus for their research. The pupils then compared their notes, chose the parts that they could use, and typed up the sentences they wanted. They then made them into questions, refined and redrafted, and gave the task to their class. In so doing, they had performed extensive reading and research, considered the significance of their findings, and selected the most relevant and meaningful parts, collaborated in planning a project, and thought about how to present it to their classmates. The process took them several weeks of their own time. The typing was done in class time.

Results and comments

The other pupils enjoyed completing the worksheet, and had to think about the answers. It led to some useful discussion about the significance of the numbers involved, and also to pupil-prompted discussion about whether the slave trade or the Holocaust was worse. They found out that the slave trade involved larger numbers, but was of a different nature to the Holocaust. I was pleased to see the whole class becoming involved in comparisons and connections between events from different periods, which is a higher level skill.