The Point of Change
In the "Wallbank Brewery" project, Dorothy included a “point of change”:
... we've chosen that the point of change that makes this important to be got into and lived with - because it becomes ours as we work on it - is that the Rising Sunne Inn … is starting a initiative to stop a feud that has lived in this village for 150 years, when there was a terrible disaster in the Brewery.
So the initiative to bring this whole thing to the curriculum, is that somebody’s got to stop [the] quarrelling round here; and so our innkeeper is really going to initiate all the changes, because the modern people are carrying all this history in their very souls.
Source: “Rolling Role: Applied in the Primary Classroom” video series, Tape 1 (University of Newcastle, 1994).
In the project, after Dorothy introduced the children to a map of the village, she showed them a large mock-up of a local newspaper (which had been created by a group of students). One of the items in the "newspaper" was a "Letter to the Editor," from the owners of the Rising Sunne inn. Dorothy gave out copies of the letter to the children, and asked them to see what sense they made of it...
She then asked them to mark things that seemed important. She told them:
I’m marking all the things that seem to me very important. For example, this word “forgive” and this word “forget,” seems to me to have something to do with the trouble. What are they forgiving and forgetting? … Are there any other words you think should be – are really important, that we ought to understand properly?
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