On the morning of May 25, 1812, a tremendous explosion rocked Felling Colliery near Gateshead, County Durham. Blasts shot up each of the two mine shafts, showering the surrounding area with coal dust which blocked out the sunlight. The noise of the explosion was heard as far as six kilometres away.

Ninety-two people died in the disaster. In fact, only 30 people who were underground at the time survived. The cause of the blast was fire damp (methane).

The explosion had destroyed the majority of the winding equipment used to lower and raise the miners from the shafts. However, one machine remained undamaged and this was brought into place over the shaft.

Rescuers were lowered by hand to the bottom of the shaft and there they found survivors amid the wreckage. By 12pm, 33 miners had been brought out alive. Three of these, all children, died within a few hours.

The rescuers tried to get further into the mine but they were beaten back by choke damp, the poisonous gas produced by the explosion of fire damp. Choke gas killed three times more miners than the actual explosion.

The rescuers decided to seal off the mine and starve the shafts of oxygen to put out the fires. Six weeks after the explosion, they entered the mine and began the terrible task of recovering what was left of the bodies. By now wives and mothers could only recognise their loved ones by the personal possessions they had carried with them.

Our history department decided to use this event as part of the “Britain 1750-1900” module for Year 8, using the statistics available for the numbers of miners in the various jobs in the pit on the day of the explosion, their ages and the numbers of those killed in each job.

Though this works well enough in a formal classroom, I was keen to see how the pupils would respond to undertaking the same tasks in an ICT room using Microsoft Excel-generated graphs to handle the statistical work.

The data the pupils looked at were:

A The jobs of the miners

1. Wagon drivers: they drove the horse wagons which carried the coal to the bottom of the shaft.

2. Putters: these miners pushed, pulled or carried small carts containing several baskets of coal.

3. Hewers: their job was to cut the coal away from the coal face using pick axes.

4. Deputies: they maintained the mine by checking on or putting in place the timber props for the roofs of the passageways. They also exploded pockets of gas.

5. Trappers: they were responsible for opening and shutting trap doors forcing fresh air to parts of the mine which were being worked. This did not need much strength.

B The number of miners who did each job below ground; and the number of those killed

Job No. in job No. killed

Hewers 50 34

Putters 30 28

Trappers 22 17

Wagon drivers 8 5

Deputies 5 1

C The ages of half the miners killed in each job

This source should be enough to give a reliable average age for the miners killed in each job.

Hewers: 53, 48, 46, 28, 21, 28, 36, 35, 22, 45, 40, 24, 65, 21, 20, 22, 42 (17 out of 34 killed)

Putters: 14, 17, 23, 10, 19, 17, 12, 14, 14, 20, 22, 18, 13, 18 (14 out of 28 killed)

Trappers: 11, 9, 14, 15, 13, 10, 10, 10, 8 (nine out of 17 killed)

Wagon drivers: 13, 10, 12 (three out of five killed)

Note: Those killed in the above jobs total 85. However, a further seven people were killed in various other occupations taking the total to 92. These have not been included to prevent the exercise from becoming too complex.

The ICT activity

Pupils need to have access to a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel to convert these statistics into graphs and to enter formulae for working out the average ages of those who were killed.

1. (a) First pupils look at data source B. They open an Excel spreadsheet and type in these statistics in separate columns (A, B, C, etc) under the correct column headings (“Number in the job” and “Number killed”). Once the figures have been entered they should then highlight the completed table and click on the “chart wizard” in the tool bar. This will provide access to several choices of graph to present the statistics, such as column, bar or pie.

(b) Pupils then have to choose the graph they think is the most effective way of presenting the data and explain their reasoning behind choosing it.

2. Pupils then look at data source C. Their task here is to work out the average age of the miners killed in each job. Excel will do this very quickly. First pupils need to type in four columns on a spreadsheet, each headed with one of the jobs done. All the ages for each job should then be typed in under the relevant column (as shown left). At the bottom of each column, pupils then need to type in the formula to work out the average age of those killed in each job. For example, for the hewers in column A of the spreadsheet, ages should be keyed in starting with row 2 through to row 18, with the Excel formula =sum(a2:a18)17 underneath in row 19.

Pupils are then asked: (a) What is the average age of those killed in each job?

(b) Can you explain why the average age for hewers that were killed was much higher than that for trappers? (Look at data source A for clues.) 3. Pupils are then given the following task:

“More hewers were killed than any other type of miner. This proves that hewers had the most dangerous job.” Explain why you agree or disagree with this statement. Source B should provide some ideas.

The benefits of ICT

ICT lends itself to group work, partly because pupils usually have to share computers and collaborate. So the teacher has to assess the contribution made by individual pupils. A variety of approaches are possible: observing individuals within the group as they work; questioning them afterwards; and assessing them via an individual task.

Assessing the work of individuals as they are engaged on the set task - formative assessment - is straightforward but not always possible. For example, asking one girl about her response to question 3, about identifying the most dangerous job, showed she had failed to grasp the point of the question. She said: “The hewers’ job was the most dangerous because more hewers were killed than in any other job.”

When I suggested that she take another look at the graph and, in particular, the columns for the number of putters working and killed, she immediately realised that the putters had the most dangerous job even though fewer of them were killed (graph 1). The graph enabled her to see that the proportion of putters killed was much higher than that of hewers and that this, therefore, made it the most dangerous job.

This illustrates that for those pupils who had mastered converting raw statistics into graphs (although these needed to be appropriate for the task and not all the graphs chosen were suitable - see graph 2, which is much less useful than graph 1), the questions could be readily tackled. The pupils were able to draw conclusions from the evidence more readily once the statistics were converted into Excel-generated graphs. Clearly, ICT significantly facilitated this process, as these comments from pupils make clear:

“We decided to use a bar graph because we can see the proportion of the workers that were killed in each job against how many people there were working in that profession.”

“I think this is a good graph because you can compare the amount of deaths to the amount of people. It is really clear and obvious which job is the most dangerous.”

“From the evidence you can see that putters had the most dangerous job.”

The same point applies to the skill of devising the appropriate formulae - such as the formula used to add up all ages and work out the average which pupils typed into the row below the age data for each job type. The use of formulae enabled the pupils to arrive at the average ages of those killed much more quickly than conventional methods. Once these average ages were established, they were able to suggest a hypothesis for why the average age for hewers (35) was much higher than that for putters (18), for example:

“The average age of the hewers was much higher than the average of the putters because the hewers were hitting the rock, but the putters were just placing coal into the wagons. Therefore, the putters required much less physical strength.”

Potential problems

It came as no surprise that boys’ groups took to this lesson readily. Research suggests that boys are generally more willing to commit their ideas to a computer screen via a word-processor than they are to paper with a pen. For one thing, such work is more easily corrected and the technology aspect is more appealing to them.

There were no mixed-sex groups in the lesson I taught, but there is clearly a potential problem in that boys may well tend to dominate the computer in these circumstances and teachers should give some consideration here as to how pupils should be grouped together.

Problems arise when pupils have to share a computer. Two to a computer just about works as both are able to make some input, but there is a danger of one assuming a controlling role while the other merely watches. This was certainly the case where groups of three shared a computer - inevitable in a class of 33 Year 8s. Here there was some evidence that the extra pupil led to some falling off of interest for the “third” pupils, who felt marginalised.

The dominance of the more ICT-literate pupils does at least allow the lesson to flow more quickly. Those pupils who were unfamiliar with Excel took up a lot of my time on the purely ICT aspects of the task. This meant that I had less time to spare for the history element.

It is likely that these Year 8 pupils would have arrived at the same conclusions using conventional non-ICT methods. However, it is doubtful whether they would have done so as quickly and unequivocally.

Finally, it is perhaps worth asking whether progress in developing specifically historical skills should depend so much on making progress in ICT skills. A lot, therefore, depends on work undertaken by the school ICT department and close collaboration with these colleagues is essential when considering this kind of approach to teaching history.

For further information on the mining disaster, visit the Durham Mining Museum website at www.dmm.org.uk It contains the names, ages and jobs of all the miners killed in 1812 together with other details.

Neil DeMarco is head of history at a school in Buckinghamshire, a teacher adviser for ICT training, and author of textbooks for KS3 and GCSE