@WilliamABerry11

As I was searching for interesting material and resources on World War I, I stumbled across the whole Michael Gove controversy. Immediately after reading some material on this topic, I checked my Twitter feed and saw a tweet from @ERBofHistory. I don’t remember what the tweet was exactly (it was unrelated to WWI), but the important thing was that my mind immediately started making a connection between the Gove controversy and the idea of a rap battle. Gove’s comments on World War I and its portrayal in popular culture piqued my interest because I think the war’s treatment in pop culture is very similar to the way that the war is portrayed in the poetry and fiction from this time period, including the works of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. In my head, I started to envision how these “War Poets” would react to Gove’s comments and what a conversation between these individuals would look like. I thought not only about how these individuals would have different points of view on how the war should be remembered, but also, the role that various perspectives play in helping us to remember history.

Initially, I thought it would be interesting for the students to create a rap battle between Gove and the war poets as a culmination to a unit on World War I, but after Meghan (the teacher whose class will actually be completing this lesson) and I discussed this idea, we decided against it for a couple of reasons. The first strike against this version of the lesson was time. The final lesson we decided upon is a 2- day lesson versus an entire unit, which leaves room for some activities that Meghan was initially planning on including in the unit. The second reason for the change was that creating the rap battle was not as open-ended as we would have liked, as many of the final products would have taken the same shape and form. The focus of the lesson is still historical perspectives, but I think our newer version does a much better job at reinforcing this idea than our initial attempt. Ultimately, this is the lesson we decided on. It’s still in draft form now, but I’ll edit this post and add a link to the final lesson once it’s written up and we have some student products.

I’m happy with where this lesson ended up, but the idea of the rap battle (specifically this rap battle for which I had already written some lines!) was too good to ignore, so we worked my rap battle into the lesson to give me some incentive to actually make the video. The lesson could still be done without the rap battle, but I believe the video will add to the conversations that we have with the students. I also think that I’m going to have a little contest with the kids to see how many World War I references they can catch. There are quite a few obvious ones, but there are definitely a few that they won’t initially pick up on– although they could with some investigation and research on their own time. Ultimately, making the product was fun for me, and I think the students will enjoy it, so in the end, it was time well spent.

An important note about the video:
The final product is my perspective of what a conversation between Gove, Sassoon, and Owen would look like. Much of what these individuals say in the rap is based on my own research (you can see my sources below), but ultimately the lyrics are my interpretations of these sources. And obviously, there is some exaggeration for dramatic effect…this is a rap battle after all. But…this video will be used with a lesson on perspective and viewpoint, so we will actually talk about this in class. Since the students will be reading Gove’s comments and some war poetry as a part of the lesson we have planned, I will ask them to think about how this rap relates to the comments they’ve read and if any of my bias comes through in the video.
These resources helped me produce this video and provided a good basis for this lesson:

• Gove’s Original Statements.
• Garry Sheffield’s Thoughts on World War I (referenced in Gove’s original statements)
• Richard Evans’ Response to Gove
• The poems of Wilfred Owen
• “Memoirs of an Infantry Office”r and other works of Siegfried Sassoon
• Epic Rap Battles of History

A plug for technology integration:
Making this type of product would be an excellent task for students in a variety of subject areas.  I’m thinking it could be especially effective during SOL review time, as teachers often have a lot more time to “play” with and creating a product like this would be a great way to review various concepts and go beyond “just the facts.” As a justification for why you should do this with your students, here is a list of skills that I either practiced or learned while working on this project, :

• Movie editing techniques in Adobe Premiere. All of my previous movie work has been completed in Moviemaker. I’m pretty impressed with Premiere’s capabilities. I’m pretty unimpressed with my abilities to use those capabilities to their fullest potential, but this was a good start.
• Green screen effects – Cool enough that it deserves its own bullet point outside of “movie editing techniques.” As a result of this assignment, I’m getting a green screen for our school – I think the students enjoy using it for a variety of assignments.
• Planning and collaboration – I wouldn’t have been able to complete this project in such a short time frame without the help of a large number of people. I had to plan and think in advance about what would be needed in order to get this done in a timely manner.
• And most importantly…content skills. In this case, history content. I had to research, summarize, and analyze the viewpoints of three different individuals in order to create this movie. This product exemplifies higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy.

Thanks to the following people for helping me put this together:
Mike R., Doug , Mike H., Terri, Emily, My Dad, Debbie, Nicki, Scott, Tom, and anyone I else I forgot.
Videos are cool:
If I were to do this again, there are a lot of things I would do differently. You’ll see that the lip syncing does not match up perfectly and that the size of the background images/videos are sometimes a bit off. This is due to how we filmed/recorded and I really couldn’t fix the issue this time around without recording again (which I don’t have the time for currently). However, I’m still OK with how it turned out.





http://blogs.henrico.k12.va.us/waberry/2014/01/19/epic-rap-battle-of-the-great-war-michael-gove-vs-the-war-poets/