Katy's Reflection
Our research question: How did fashion evolve as a consequence of the contribution of British women to the war efforts during the First World War?
The interdisciplinary unit involved the two subjects of English and history coming together to build the idea of World War I. My group, which includes myself, Alice and Millie, decided to focus on how the women’s roles and contributions to the war affected their fashion. My group and I made three artworks, which included a diary entry for each date (before, during and after the war). We made the diary entries as if there had been a character made up and she was talking in each of the diary entries. In this reflection, how the unit affected my subject specific understanding of the experience, the benefits and drawbacks of studying the war from two perspectives, how the subject lessons contributed to the exhibition task, and the role of the excursion to Ypres, will be talked about.
The subject specific lessons (history and English) did not help my group with our specific topic in any way and it contributed in a negative way due to the fact that our topic was about women and their roles and fashion, however women were not talked about in the lessons. For the history part, it was possible to find information on the internet about women, however it would have been nice to be able to talk about it in class with everyone’s contribution, and when it came to the English perspective, my group and I wanted to write diary entries from before, during and after the war, however it was extremely difficult to find any examples that were legible and any that had anything to do with their roles and their fashion. It would have been somewhat helpful in the English classes to be given examples of diary entries (not necessarily women) just to get the idea of how they wrote and about their experience.
The benefits of studying the First World War in these two perspectives of history and English is the fact that in history it is very interesting to know about how it started and who got blamed for starting it, etc., seeing as for me I have never gotten taught about it before so it was very informative. For English, I also found it interesting to read poems and a book on what it was like for the men who were at war and their environment. Drawbacks of studying the First World War in these two perspectives however include the fact that in English poems were studied a lot, and it would have been nice to broaden these sources to other written pieces, which would have been exciting to read. For history, I think that the class should have possibly done more group work on a specific area of the topic and possibly present it so that everyone has a better understanding, as I find this a good way to learn about a topic, which may be helpful for others as well.
The excursion to Ypres did not help my group and I when it came to our specific topic. There was only one time that I observed in one of the museums where on a movie screen there was a short film where the fashion of the women was available, however not that much information was given, and I this was the only time that women were mentioned. Nonetheless, it did help me understand the First World War more because it is better to see it in person and experience it than read about it and watch a documentary. It was emotional to see all of the cemeteries but it was good that they took us there seeing as it made the experience more personal and effective.
In conclusion, for my topic, it would have been very helpful to learn about the women as well and their roles in World War I however this was not the case. This did not make it impossible to research about seeing as our history teacher helped us with getting sources and we managed to research ourselves, but I think that the women’s roles were also important and should have been mentioned in the lessons. It is not Ypres or our fault that there was no available information for us, it was just a disappointment to not get any further information, however the excursion was still helpful and educational and definitely broadened my knowledge about the unit.
The interdisciplinary unit involved the two subjects of English and history coming together to build the idea of World War I. My group, which includes myself, Alice and Millie, decided to focus on how the women’s roles and contributions to the war affected their fashion. My group and I made three artworks, which included a diary entry for each date (before, during and after the war). We made the diary entries as if there had been a character made up and she was talking in each of the diary entries. In this reflection, how the unit affected my subject specific understanding of the experience, the benefits and drawbacks of studying the war from two perspectives, how the subject lessons contributed to the exhibition task, and the role of the excursion to Ypres, will be talked about.
The subject specific lessons (history and English) did not help my group with our specific topic in any way and it contributed in a negative way due to the fact that our topic was about women and their roles and fashion, however women were not talked about in the lessons. For the history part, it was possible to find information on the internet about women, however it would have been nice to be able to talk about it in class with everyone’s contribution, and when it came to the English perspective, my group and I wanted to write diary entries from before, during and after the war, however it was extremely difficult to find any examples that were legible and any that had anything to do with their roles and their fashion. It would have been somewhat helpful in the English classes to be given examples of diary entries (not necessarily women) just to get the idea of how they wrote and about their experience.
The benefits of studying the First World War in these two perspectives of history and English is the fact that in history it is very interesting to know about how it started and who got blamed for starting it, etc., seeing as for me I have never gotten taught about it before so it was very informative. For English, I also found it interesting to read poems and a book on what it was like for the men who were at war and their environment. Drawbacks of studying the First World War in these two perspectives however include the fact that in English poems were studied a lot, and it would have been nice to broaden these sources to other written pieces, which would have been exciting to read. For history, I think that the class should have possibly done more group work on a specific area of the topic and possibly present it so that everyone has a better understanding, as I find this a good way to learn about a topic, which may be helpful for others as well.
The excursion to Ypres did not help my group and I when it came to our specific topic. There was only one time that I observed in one of the museums where on a movie screen there was a short film where the fashion of the women was available, however not that much information was given, and I this was the only time that women were mentioned. Nonetheless, it did help me understand the First World War more because it is better to see it in person and experience it than read about it and watch a documentary. It was emotional to see all of the cemeteries but it was good that they took us there seeing as it made the experience more personal and effective.
In conclusion, for my topic, it would have been very helpful to learn about the women as well and their roles in World War I however this was not the case. This did not make it impossible to research about seeing as our history teacher helped us with getting sources and we managed to research ourselves, but I think that the women’s roles were also important and should have been mentioned in the lessons. It is not Ypres or our fault that there was no available information for us, it was just a disappointment to not get any further information, however the excursion was still helpful and educational and definitely broadened my knowledge about the unit.
Millie's Reflection
Alice's Reflection
For this unit in history we have been studying the first world war and the goal for the unit's end was that in multiple groups we would create a series of exhibitions to display on exhibition night and we were provided with the statement of inquiry: The experience of Total War affects both individuals and societies. The change it brings about is reflected in different forms of personal and cultural expression. To begin the project we divided into groups of 3,4 or 5 with people of similar interests as you in regard to WW1. After these groups were made the official topic was selected, researched and finally a mode of creative communication was created to display as an exhibition piece. In my group the topic that we selected to research was World War 1 according to women's fashion in Britain and how the women's roles impacted that, we chose this because our group was made up off all girls, who all had an interest in fashion and also we are all British. This topic was completely relevant to the statement of inquiry above for this relates to the way that individuals are impacted (the women) and we also looked at how this changed the roles of women in society in the long run. It was simple to choose this topic for all three of us had had this in mind before beginning the project and therefore we all agreed on what we had to do easily and quickly, formulating the research questions however was a little more difficult. The research question that we came up with in the end was "How did fashion evolve as a consequence of the contribution of British women to the war efforts during the First World War?" To justify the relevance of this research question I can say that it is very specific, relates to the statement of inquiry and of course revolves around the change that the war brought on in the UK. This difficulty was caused by a bit of confusion in formulating what we were researching into words and also making it as specific as possible and in order to do this we had to think about: what, when, where, why and how. Next we had to think about who would research what and in order to do this we divided out the research questions and each took on one of the subquestions and part of the main research question, in doing this we were quite time efficient however I must say that it was not altogether successful. This was due to a lack of time for towards the end of the project and there were particular questions left un answered and then someone else who the question was not assigned to had to rush in and do it for them and in effect creating an unfair distribution of work, which was a bit of an issue throughout the whole project. After dividing up the research the research of course had to be carried out and for this we did not have much time to do so although we did have the Ypres trip yet for our group this was quite pointless for we were unable to gather any information at all really apart from images of women in action. Throughout the research we successfully managed to gather information from many different, (primary and secondary) valid sources for example we used images from Ypres museums, online podcasts and also personal diary entries, we also formulated three clear and thorough source evaluation from these sources. At this point of course the website had to be created in order to document all of the information gathered and to communicate it to our audience, I personally created the entire website and it proved to be very time consuming and challenging. This was because I had to incorporate the images that we had taken, create the layout to be easy to use and clear, choose colour themes that suited the topic and also write all of the information that we gather and were required to have available on our website. Seeing as I personally did all of these things I of course believe that I did this very well and that our website is full of relevant, interesting and clear information and from the feedback I got from users of the website at the exhibition they believed this too. Due to this we had to adjust out planning slightly and I was no longer required to do any of the research, even though I actually did do some because at the end of the project I felt that the other member of my group had given up and left the finishing touches to me (coming back to the unfair balance of work). Moving on to the actual exhibition creation, we choose to channel what we were researching through art for fashion is an art form already and this seemed to work well. In order to do so we created a series of 3 artworks of fashion before, after and during the war (these can be seen under the exhibition section of our website). Originally we planned to divide the artworks up so that we had to do one each but like the research in the end it ended up with Katy doing all three seeing as I was so busy with the website and Millie was occupied with other tasks. This was also unfair just as the division of the website was. In regard to the actual exhibition evening everything done then was fair and divided equally including the presentation of our exhibition and the setting up of our exhibition area. To summarise I feel as if the whole project had to be completed in and unreasonably short time period for what was required of us (especially being in a group of 3) and this resulted in a lack of effort from some members of the group and overall an unfair division of work for some had to do substantially more than others and there was a bit of a scramble to get stuff done in the last moments that we had before the exhibition.