Narrative Matters

Teaching History through Story

Dr Grant Bage, Grant Bage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135699734
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In recent years there has been a massive revival of interest internationally in what story can offer to education. This book covers a range of issues at the heart of teaching history, such as the use of talk, the pitfalls of narrative as a pedagogical tool, translating curriculum content into lessons, story telling and story making. It also questions what it means to teach, the difficulties for teachers of remaining constructively critical of policy, and their own practice, during periods of national legislation and change.

Chapter 1

The Story of this Book

A history of the world, yes. And in the process, my own. The Life and Times of Claudia H. The bit of the twentieth century to which I’ve been shackled…Let me contemplate myself within my context: everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents. (Lively, 1987, p.1)

Foreword

Since you are reading these words you may already be questioning what history and stories can offer to learning, curious about them as education. Suffusing your reading are personal experiences of and public debates about schooling, from which we construct our own stories and histories of education. This book weaves both threads to concern itself with history and stories in education. In education, history and stories exist simultaneously as curricular artefacts but also as individuals’ lived experiences. Public and private, professional and personal, for teaching and learning: we shall be exploring histories and stories as, of and therefore in educations plural. So, be forewarned. This work will attempt to persuade you, through evidence and rhetoric, that stories and histories are practical methods to teach through, as well as fundamental ideas to become cultured with.

I am now a hostage to your fortunes with this book. I dare not compute the years it has cost, and in minutes you may toss it aside. Nevertheless your reading instantaneously designates this a joint venture in which I challenge you to participate. You cannot agree with everything I say, and despite my admission of advocacy I harbour no ambition to make you. My only desire is that this book will stimulate you to think again about its and your own histories and stories. As a starter I can supply as evidence descriptions of people and events, some settings for context and discussion of the roles of author and genre. I can even offer endings or storylines to assist your reading. Since it is you, though, who decides the meaning of what you read, the resolution of our enterprise now lies in your hands.

Descriptions of People and Events

Empirically, most educational evidence derives from descriptions and interpretations of people and events, viewed through experience and theory. Hexter (1972) sketched a similarly simple code for historical evidence in which the second record is our own internalized experience, through the eyes of which we interpret the external first record evidence—eyewitness accounts, bureaucratic records, etc. Much of this book’s data started life as first record empirical evidence created by the author through:

• interviewing teachers, other educators and children;

• tape recording lessons led and shared—‘participant observation’;

• observing and discussing teaching in schools, lessons and courses;

• observing and discussing learning with children in lessons and schools;

• collecting outcomes from children’s learning, especially talk and writings;

• a journal of such observations and field notes.

These were complemented by first record theoretical evidence:

• critical reading of educational, historical, philosophical and literary texts;

• analysis of official documents and reports;

• quotations from media sources including classroom materials.

Relations between empirical and theoretical evidence and first and second records are more problematic than this suggests. My participation in and recording of educational events soon, sometimes even simultaneously, entwined first record interpretations with second record prejudices. To help account for the practical theory-building that resulted I also therefore open my second record through:

• autobiographical explorations;

• edited journal entries and reflections;

• critical self-analyses;

• reflexive commentaries upon the first and second records.

Brookfield (1995) and Shulman (1987) described similar sources, the former emphasizing those internal to the teacher or classroom, the latter those external. All will be drawn on in forthcoming pages, spiced by my own prejudice that evidence is to argument what description is to prose: something that convinces the reader not so much of the writing’s truth as of its trustworthiness and authenticity.

In creating my first record I have been methodologically eclectic for several reasons. Firstly, this book often describes classrooms I have taught in, and I have had to use the mixed bag of research tools within reach of an unfunded, practising teacher. Secondly, a singular educational research method can dominate or even manipulate data (Stubbs, 1983). Thirdly, there is no ‘single conceptual framework or adequate shared vocabulary for describing classroom events and processes…’ (Edwards and Westgate, 1987, p.52). Lastly, history as a discipline has eclectically influenced the educational, ethnographic methodologies to which I have been most attracted (Hitchcock and Hughes, 1989). As Fischer argued:

No method exists independently of an object. None can be vindicated except in its application; none can be proclaimed to the world as The Method; and none is other than a useful tool. No historical method is in any sense an alternative to heavy labour in historical sources. None can serve as a substitute for creativity. (1970, p.xxi)

My ‘heavy labour in the [educational] sources’ used five ethnographic strategies of naturalistic observation, teaching or helping, eavesdropping, observing in everyday work, and observing over an extended period of time (Edwards and Westgate, 1987, pp.74–5). Major elements of this book’s first record evidence also derive from workaday experiences of teaching in scores of courses, schools and classrooms alongside thousands of teachers and children for which no formal or particular records exist. I am indebted to them and have, wherever practicable, offered this text for their scrutiny. Alongside the better-documented aspects of my second and first records, information from tactics akin to informal mass-observation (Calder and Sheridan, 1985) helped shape the tacit pedagogic knowledge that this book then explicitly remakes.

How can we understand such tacit pedagogic knowledge? Some argue that as teachers we often describe our work without any ‘explicit theory of learning’ (Cortazzi, 1991, pp. 132–3). Yet, since the stuff of pedagogy is to present, formulate and invoke interpretations, teachers are not ‘passive providers of data’ but ‘active agents with an interest in what appears for the record’ (Denscombe, 1984, p. 115). My own research practice reflected such complexities. As in pedagogy, I cared about the record—initially whether a PhD would be awarded and now whether you as reader will enjoy this book. As in pedagogy, research was influenced by current consuming demands and interests as well as optimistic and predetermined plans. As in pedagogy I adopted various identities: sometimes creating data for later interpretation as an historian, sometimes interpreting it in the field like an anthropologist, and on numerous occasions collecting it for no obvious reason at all, in the manner of a manic antiquarian. As in pedagogy I also remain uncertain about how to interpret my multiple participations in many events that have become data. I have imagined, planned, taught, discussed, observed, shared, analysed, recorded, criticized and written up much of the teaching in this book, yet the precise significance of each element remains tantalizingly variable. Approaching reflection and research as a story has helped me navigate such shifting sands.

Settings and Contexts

Enough of descriptions (or data-types). Alone they say little about the story to come. What of the settings in which they were created? It is worth the reader knowing that most of the first record for this book derives from the period 1989–98. During this time I was successively: a class teacher for Y6 children, an advisory teacher in history teaching across the age range 5–16 and now a university teacher and researcher. Previous to that, my intellectual second record had also been informed by teaching most subjects in 9–13 middle schools, but especially English; by taking a couple of history degrees and working in a fair range of locations beyond formal schooling and the education sector. Therefore, practically a decade of storied pedagogy preceded this book’s birth in February 1989 as a research project on teaching through oral history. Because oral history interviews seemed to bristle with narrative I started collecting wider evidence about related activities such as storytelling, educational drama and role playing in history. Simultaneously the government was also shifting its attitudes towards school history, via the NC. I was appointed as an LEA advisory teacher for history in 1990. Subsequently teaching NC history in scores of schools, and preparing support materials and running courses for perhaps thousands of teachers has enabled me to develop and test ideas about story and history up to the present day. These years have also seen education and pedagogy embroiled in political debate and media controversy. My eclectic evidence base, the sometimes anecdotal, autobiographical style of writing and the self-criticism of the research questions, is a conscious attempt to contribute to this debate not just by improving teaching, but by bridging academic research with practical pedagogy. The book does not claim to be a true story but does aspire to be a real and critical story about teaching in England in the 1980s and 1990s.

Keeping Critical

Keeping critical is hard work. A recent example chronicled teachers and kindergartenaged children learning through family as well as fictional stories: ‘we need real people, real family members to tell us this part of who we are’ (Paley, 1997, p.85). Adult educators similarly need stories to belong to, as my own 1991 research note suggested:

Research is in many ways about power…and freedom. My particular research story acknowledges this power relationship. I am one teacher in a small county in a small country in a privileged corner of a chaotic world. I chose to teach because of my possession of a set of perceived democratic and liberal values…In turn these work on and are worked upon by government actions and ideas which need examination at the least, and perhaps critical resistance.

Some claim that teachers naturally synthesize analysis with anecdote (Cortazzi, 1991, p. 132), others that:

One does not have to spend a long time in the teacher’s lounge to hear them swap stories…about cases…a difficult child, a good class, maths materials…Case knowledge is characteristic of practitioners who work with people: teachers, lawyers, physicians. (Gudmundsdottir, 1991, p.211)

Even so, it is not necessarily easy for such stories to maintain a critical stance on their contexts. Fitting anecdotes satisfactorily into stories for improvement or political meta-narratives requires a confident and self-monitoring profession: ‘A research tradition which is accessible to teachers and which feeds teaching must be created if education is to be significantly improved’ (Stenhouse, 1975, p. 165). Such a tradition seems essential given increasing governmental control over curricular and inspection systems; stories as research can assist. My own autobiographical record reflects a perhaps typically uneasy compromise between resisting and critically mediating torrents of educational change.

Journal, April 1990

I know there is excellence as well as idiocy in the previous practice of schools and present reforms. My task is to sift these through and build on what I perceive…works well with children. One side of me says ‘fight back in a struggle’…the other ‘you win and children win by taking the best bits from everybody’, regardless of source.

Although authoring such stories may have helped my pedagogy, long experience suggests that simultaneous research and teaching can be daunting. The key often turns with a few words, lessons and ideas of special significance to us. For me there have been two: talk and story.

Journal, 1992

If I ask what is and has effective history teaching been for me, I pretty soon come up with a one word answer: talk…the potential of student talk, the power of teacher talk and the relationship between the two. This is especially problematic in history, with tensions between curricula claiming that students develop understanding through their own talk about historical problems…and that history transmits knowledge relying heavily upon teacher talk…I wish both to shift the ground and introduce my own evidence to make better personal sense of teaching and advising…And although I have long practised it, I am only recently articulating how the teaching I enjoy most is when I am telling or empowering the telling of stories. By ‘enjoy’…I mean that I find it professionally and personally satisfying…effective in a manner that distinguishes it from other classroom activities.

Keeping critical can start by reflecting upon such experience and is as necessary for policy-makers as practitioners. Consider this observation on a previous curriculum reform, in which pedagogy was sketched as a tradition supported by a wide range of rational and irrational arguments:

Traditional teaching patterns have not and will not be changed by exhortation or by new materials…What is required is to begin a process of change, involving teachers themselves in questioning current practice and drawing up and supporting new definitions of practice. (Goodson, 1978, p.47)

Are times so changed that we can afford to ignore such experience? We may be better advised to keep sharply critical of current curriculum projects, especially those led by central authorities with massive political stakes in their supposed success and effectiveness.

Authors

Following Stenhouse (1978) and the principle that, like history, educational theory should reveal its sources should I now offer readers the personal archive through which I have swum? In all probability you might drown in it, and anyway a word limit of 70,000 curtails this ambition. I shall therefore modify it. Having taken thousands of pages of notes from books and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Glossary
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Story of this Book
• Chapter 2: Story in the Bones
• Chapter 3: Making Meaning of Story and History
• Chapter 4: History, Stories and Talk
• Chapter 5: Storied Traditions of Pedagogy
• Chapter 6: Why Stories Need Critics
• Chapter 7: Making Tradition Critical?
• Chapter 8: Translating Stories
• Chapter 9: Story Across the Curriculum?
• References
• Index