February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Ray O’Hanlon
It’s much bigger than envisioned in the original plan. It’s also creating a lively debate.
But no matter what your view on the just-minted New York State Great Hunger curriculum, there’s no arguing that where there was a huge void in the teaching of the Famine story to students in New York State public schools, there is now a comprehensive body of work that will keep many thousands of students busy in the semesters ahead.
The curriculum, the final version of which is presently at the printers in Albany, is made up of 150 standalone lessons dealing with everything from "What Were the Causes of the Famine?" to "How History Becomes Poetry."
When the printers finish their work in a few days, 8,000 copies of the curriculum will be sent to public schools from Buffalo to Brooklyn, where it will be made available to teachers working with fourth graders and on up to high school seniors.
The curriculum will also be provided to any private school in the state that requests it.
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"It’s not a book per se. The curriculum comes in the form of loose-leafed pages with a menu of separate lessons designed to address New York State’s learning standards," said Dr. Maureen Murphy of Hofstra University’s Department of Curriculum and Teaching.
It was Murphy who, in 1998, was handed the demanding and delicate task of coordinating the birth of the curriculum in the wake of legislation passed earlier by legislators in Albany and signed by Governor George Pataki.
Pataki’s testy exchange of letters with then British Ambassador John Kerr was just an early signal that the thorny matter of British culpability for the Great Hunger was always going to be looming over a curriculum that is part of the state’s overall human rights curriculum, which already covers other hot-button issues such as slavery and the Holocaust.
The culpability argument has not entirely gone away and already some critics are saying that the finalized New York curriculum doesn’t fully satisfy the view that the Famine was a form of genocide with perfidious British fingerprints all over it.
Dr. Murphy, not surprisingly, takes strong issue with those who claim that the curriculum dodges the hottest political potato in the ongoing argument over the Great Hunger’s origins and effects.
"We do look very, very closely at British colonialism and the legacy of the Famine," Murphy said recently.
"But the curriculum is not entirely about politics. We are also attempting to teach students about issues such as hunger and homelessness today and how knowledge brings responsibility.
"We are trying to get kids to think about big issues about which there is no overall agreement, and over which historians still argue."
Murphy, who is clearly conscious of a boundary line between academics and politics, admitted that the curriculum might not be what some people had in mind.
"But our constituency is made up of teachers and students. It’s not a political constituency," she said.
Murphy began her work in 1998 with the expectation of a curriculum containing just 24 lessons.
But so engaging was the subject matter to Murphy and her team of writers, teachers and advisers on both sides of the Atlantic that the original plan mushroomed to the point that 150 lessons took shape.
Given the recent 150th anniversary of the Famine’s outbreak, the final number does have an appropriate ring.
"Our job," Murphy said, "is to train kids to think like historians. The issue is, can they read with understanding? Can they write with clarity and make judgments?
"Perhaps the curriculum is not everybody’s cup of tea, but it is appropriate for our teachers and students. And it draws people in."
And draw it did last week when middle and high school students and teachers from a select group of five schools were invited to Hofstra for a day in which they could view and comment on the curriculum at first hand.
"The day went very well," Murphy said.