Teach Secondary Issue 14.7

Off the Shelves Brilliant titles for you and your students to explore ConversationswithThirdReich Contemporaries: FromLuke Holland’sFinalAccount (StefanieRauch,UCL,£45/openaccessPDF) The ‘Contemporaries’ of the title are individuals who were children or teens during the Hitler years. Rauch assigns themdifferent categories – ‘victims’, ‘perpetrators’, ‘bystanders’ – but it soon becomes clear just howmalleable these roles are.With sufficient toleration and tacit approval, bystanders can become accomplices to, or even perpetrators of the Nazi regime’s crimes. Given how the book grapples with questions of complicity, responsibility and accountability, it could be a useful source of inspiration for discussion topics in history and PSHE lessons. Hearing the views held now and back then from people who lived through the era as children provides an important warning for our times, and gives us an illuminating alternative perspective of the period. ReviewedbyTerry Freedman bit.ly/Eclecticism Level UpYourLessonPlans (TeresaKwant,Jossey-Bass,£22.99) This book is awash with ideas that are frequently presented in the formof bullet points,making it easy to skimthrough, select a couple of ideas that you like and put them into practice.The commentary surrounding the suggestions presents some sound advice and is refreshingly light on academic jargon.While on balance I would recommend Level Up... as a useful resource to have on hand, it should be noted that it’s written for anAmerican audience, so don’t expect the schemes of work formaths and literacy to fully align with our own. It also seems to havemore of a primary focus, though that’s not to say that many of its featured ideas can’t be adapted.A few of the suggestionsmay take some time for busy teachers to prepare and implement – but it’s nevertheless a great book to dip into and draw creative inspiration from. ReviewedbyTerry Freedman Listen In:HowRadioChanged theHome (BeatyRubens,Bodleian,£30) As told in this history of the wireless, in 1922 just 150,000 people regularly listened to the radio. Fewer than 20 years later, that number had expanded to 34million. Radio was once the cutting edge in home entertainment.A couple of generations before the first internet cafés were opened, someone attempted prettymuch the same thing by opening a ‘radio café’ in an electrical shop. Enthusiasts of themediumbuilt radio sets of their own. The advent of the radio had a huge impact – particularly on the speed of broadcast news – and even prompted the adoption of ‘standard time’ across the country. Listen In contains contemporary photographs, adverts and even cartoons, all presented in the sumptuousmanner you’d expect fromthe Bodleian. It’s a fascinating and detailed document of the game-changing impact of an historically consequential technology. ReviewedbyTerry Freedman 38 teachwire.net/secondary