Humanities
Vision:
At Brynllywarch Hall School we recognise that the Humanities AoLE is important to encourage our learners to engage with the most important issues facing humanity, including sustainability and social change, and help to develop the skills necessary to interpret and articulate the past and the present. It is our belief that learner enjoyment will encourage the development of skills that they can transfer into everyday life. We hope to instil in our learners a care and passion for global issues and their role within it, as well as sense of time and their place within it. It is crucial to foster an understanding of religious beliefs and practices different to their own, and to develop a sense of empathy and a sense of cynefin. During our Humanities focused terms, we will commit to leading a topic that focuses on cynefin and puts the local first and links into wider global issues.
Our five What Matters statements can be divided into three categories as follows:
The What Matters statement support and complement each other and cannot be taught in isolation, so we try to plan a broad coverage in each topic, and to attempt to cover all What Matters statements in each academic year. This will be mapped out for each year to monitor and track coverage as the work progresses. Topics will be selected on a whole school level, and Humanities will support the whole school vision for the Curriculum.
What are the What Matters statements and what do they involve?
Enquiry, exploration and investigation inspire curiosity about the world, its past, present and future.
- Encourage enquiry and discovery
- Gather, justify, present, analyse, evaluate
- Intepretating/synthesising
- Build on prior learning and further inform
- Thinking critically
- Draw conclusions, full or partial, open to different interpretations.
- Improve methodology
- Enable reflection
Skills of enquiry will be developed from our youngest learner in the most scaffolded manner and gradually increase in complexity and independence of enquiry.
Reflection skills are paramount to our learners as they can often struggle to reflect on their own learning or progress.
Events and human experiences are complex and perceived, interpreted and represented in different ways.
- Critically review
- Perceptions and interpretations
- Develop self-awareness
- Contexts influence the construction of narratives
- Explore how and why interpretations differ and evaluate validity
- Explore concepts, seek meaning, making judgements.
Beginning with empathy and developing into examining different views on events past and present, learners at Brynllywarch will develop an increasing awareness of interpretations.
Our natural world is diverse and dynamic, influenced by processes and human actions.
- Experience the wonder of the natural world
- Develop spiritual development and wellbeing
- Sense of place and belonging
- Why places, landscapes and environments are changing
- What makes places distinct
- Awareness of interconnection between place and human
- Understand how human and actions affect natural world
- Sustainability and own impact
- Develop belief and philosophy about natural world.
Through both in class and outdoors education, we intend to develop a connection with the natural world, and for our learners to understand its value and importance, and our impact on it as humans.
Human societies are complex and diverse, and are shaped by human actions and beliefs.
- Explore in context of globalised world
- Appreciation of identity, heritage and cynefin
- Develop send of themselves and community, wales and wider world
- Complex, pluralistic and diverse nature of societies past and present
- Develop an empathy of values and beliefs, traditions and ethics different to their own.
- Continuity and change affects own life
- Evolution
- Environment, economic, social, political, cultural processes, human actions, religious beliefs
- Societies are characterised
- Cause, consequence and significance
At Brynllywarch Hall School we will try to foster a sense of belonging and a place in the world through a study of human societies. We will develop the understanding of change, consequence and significance and try to make the study of Humanities relevant to their own lives.
Informed, self-aware citizens engage with the challenges and opportunities that face humanity, and are able to take considered, ethical and sustainable action.
- Create a just and sustainable future
- Interconnected nature of economics/environment/social/sustainability
- Justice and authority
- Develop an awareness of own rights, needs, concerns and feelings of others
- Question and evaluate existing response to challenge
- Justify decisions
- Specifically politically/economically/entrepreneurially
- Develop commitment to justice, diversity and environment
We hope to encourage the learners to take action in the world they belong in. By showing them the rights, needs and feelings of other we hope to instill in them the belief that all of us can contribute and make a difference.
Learners at Brynllywarch will progress through the skills in each what matters statement at a pace that is appropriate to their age and individual needs. For more details on progression steps please see https://hwb.gov.wales/curriculum-for-wales/humanities/descriptions-of-learning/