Victorian Life: How did the Whitwick Colliery disaster effect the local community?
This PPT is designed to provide you, the teacher, with everything you need to teach your pupils about the Whitwick Colliery Disaster of 1898.
Through a series of six lessons, using primary evidence, pupils will begin to understand for themselves what life was really like for a coal mining community in the late Victorian period.
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Teaching idea
Through a series of six lessons your pupils will explore the enquiry question, “How did the Whitwick Colliery disaster effect the local community?”
Pupils will work like historians, using primary and secondary sources such as personal letters, census records, newspaper accounts, historical maps, photographs (both historical and modern), and historical films.
The lessons centre on three characters within the community: two young miners and a wealthy landowner. By examining these individuals, they will learn how the disaster affected different people and their families in unique ways.
Pupils will study the background of the local area in the late Victorian period, gaining insights into daily life and how the community has evolved. They will investigate how events unfolded on the day of the disaster and be encouraged to empathise with various community members affected by the tragedy.
Learning aims and outcomes
- To understand how people’s lives have shaped this nation
- To understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference, and significance
- To make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, and frame historically valid questions
- To understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims
- To understand the connections between local, regional, national, and international history
Prior knowledge
No prior knowledge is needed, although it would be useful to know a little background about the Victorian period and where it fits on a timeline.
Extended learning and useful links
Film: The Black Minute – watch actor perform a play about the Whitwick Colliery Disaster to a class of school children
Film: A day in the life of a coal miner
Teaching Activity: What was life like for Victorian Children? Did it get any better?
Teaching Activity: Were the Victorians like us?
Teaching Activity: What was life like for Victorian school children?
Teaching Activity: What do we know about the reign of Queen Victoria?
