What AS91232 asks you to do
A perspective has five parts, and students usually give one
- Point of view — the position taken. He opposed the site.
- Attitudes — how the person regarded the people and things involved. He regarded the council as competent and the campaigners as sentimental.
- Beliefs — what they held to be true about the world. He believed public money should be spent on works that produced a return.
- Reasons — why they held the position. This is the part that turns an opinion into a perspective.
- Actions and responses — what they did. Voted, wrote, organised, subscribed, stayed away. An action is the best-evidenced part of any perspective, because actions leave records.
- A submission that gives positions and no reasons has listed opinions. All five parts are named in the standard, and the last two carry the most weight.
Perspective is not the same as bias, and not the same as being wrong
- Everyone has a perspective, including the people you agree with and the historians you rely on. It is a position on the world, not a defect in it.
- A perspective can be entirely accurate. Two people can agree on every fact and hold different perspectives, because they differ on what the facts mean and what should follow.
- Judging a past perspective by today's standards ends the analysis. Saying an 1906 opponent was wrong is a conclusion everyone already shares and it earns nothing.
- The historical question is what the position looked like from where the person stood: what they knew, what they assumed, what they had at stake, and what alternatives seemed available.
- Explaining is not endorsing. This is worth saying to yourself explicitly when the perspective is one you find objectionable, because the work is the same either way.
The three places perspectives can come from
- Named individuals. The strongest when the sources exist — a letter, a speech, a vote, a diary. You can attribute precisely.
- An identified historical context. A group's position, established from the period — what farmers, or unionists, or a church, or a council collectively held. Weaker on attribution, stronger on representativeness, and it needs several sources to establish.
- Historians' viewpoints. Two historians reading the same event differently, and why. This is the option students overlook, and it is often the easiest to evidence, because historians write down their reasoning in a way participants rarely do.
- A strong submission usually uses at least two of the three, because they fail in different ways.
Choosing an event with real disagreement in it
- The standard requires different perspectives, so the event has to contain genuine disagreement — not a difference in emphasis.
- The best events have a decision in them. A vote, a choice between options, a dispute with sides. A decision forces people to declare a position, which is what generates the evidence.
- Check that the disagreement is evidenced, not inferred. You need people saying or doing different things, in sources you can get.
- Two well-evidenced perspectives beat four thin ones. Depth is what the descriptors reward, and significant supporting evidence at Excellence means substantial evidence per perspective.
- The context must have relevance for 21st-century New Zealand students — the standard says so, and it is usually satisfied by any topic your school has chosen.
What discernment means, and why it decides Excellence
- Merit is depth. Excellence is depth and discernment. Discernment is judgement between perspectives.
- Three forms it takes:
- Which is better evidenced — one perspective may rest on a single letter and another on a vote plus a campaign.
- Which is more representative — one person's view may or may not stand for a group, and saying which is a judgement.
- What accounts for the difference — why these two people, in the same place at the same time, saw it differently. This is the strongest form.
- Discernment is not more perspectives. Adding a fourth is coverage; judging between two is discernment.
Worked Example
Worked example
A student writes this about a perspective in the Waipuna borough dispute (invented, written for these pages — a council's 1906 resolution that women were ineligible to stand):
Rebuild it as a five-part perspective.
Answer:
Step 1 — diagnose. Three sentences: a position, a guess about a belief, and a present-day judgement. The reason is missing, the action is missing, and the last sentence closes the analysis rather than opening it.
Step 2 — point of view, from the evidence rather than from assumption. One ratepayer perspective, evidenced by a letter to the Waipuna Herald in April 1906 signed "A Ratepayer of Twenty Years", held that council seats should be filled by men with commercial experience.
Step 3 — reasons, in the writer's own terms. His stated reason was the nature of the work: borough business was "the management of drains, contracts and loans", and he argued it belonged to "men who have met a payroll".
Step 4 — beliefs, inferred carefully and labelled as inference. Behind that reason sits a belief about qualification — that public office follows from demonstrated commercial competence rather than from citizenship. Notice what he does not argue: he never claims women should not vote, though they had voted nationally since 1893, and he never appeals to the law. He is arguing about fitness, not about rights.
Step 5 — attitudes. He regarded ratepayers as the relevant public, signing himself by his twenty years of rates rather than by any office or expertise — so he treated financial contribution as the source of standing.
Step 6 — actions and responses. He wrote to a newspaper to be published. That is a public act intended to persuade, and it is evidence that he expected the argument to carry weight with other ratepayers — which tells us something about Waipuna that his opinion alone does not.
Step 7 — remove the present-day judgement and replace it with a historical one. Instead of this was a sexist attitude, write: the argument's shape is more revealing than its conclusion. He chose the ground of competence rather than of principle, which suggests a principled objection was already weak in public — and the campaign that answered him five years later chose the same ground.