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Welsh Heritage Competition
Welsh Heritage Schools Initiative, joint winners of the Secondary Schools category, 2010
Year 9 Heritage Group – Aaron Strickland, Nyle Birch, Ben Bainham, Robert Greenaway, Kimberley Nutt, Lewys Thomas, Curtis Jones, Connor Edge, Corrie Barlow & Simon Drury.
Each year the Welsh Heritage Schools Initiative Committee invites all schools in Wales to enter heritage projects in a nationwide competition. The word "heritage" is interpreted in the widest sense, to include people and their social history, religion, traditions and culture; the world of work, agriculture, industry, finance, commerce, science, technology, arts and sport.
Given the rich vibrant history of the locality the difficult task at Oakdale was deciding what aspect of our heritage should be investigated and entered into the competition. Thus an on-going and evolving project titled ‘Oakdale: a community and its people’, began. Pupils in Year 9 looked at the history of our locality from 1750 to present day encompassing, the Chartist story, the process of industrialization, the building of the village of Oakdale including the Miners Institute, the impact of wars, life in the 60’s, the Miners Strike and the future of the community.
It was a huge undertaking, looking at the democratic process involved not just looking at Chartism but inviting former MP Don Touhig into school, pupils visited St. Fagan’s with members of the community to talk with Senior Curator Gerallt Nash to find out why Oakdale’s Institute was moved, members of the community came into school to be interviewed about their life in the past. Pupils also interviewed vast numbers of people in the community, establishing transcripts and audio and video footage.
Given the huge amount of research undertaken it was decided that it needed to be disseminated within the community to become a living heritage project and thus alongside the recreation of commemorative plates of our collective memory of the past, a web blog was established, designed and populated by a group of 10 intrepid Year 9 students, which can be found at www.oakdalecomprehensive.com under the History section.
The work with local residents and Linc Cymru added a further dimension to our understanding of our community and it’s past and proved to be a valuable part of the project and one of the greatest opportunities to extend the traditional boundaries of the classroom. In combining all of these strands together in an electronic format meant that our past has become a continually evolving learning forum for the twenty first century, which would not have been possible without the interest and enthusiasm of the pupils and the involvement of the community.
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