05-26-2007, 07:40 PM
<b>Narrative constructions: cultural frames for history</b>.
From: The Social Studies
Date: May 1, 1995
Author: Levstik, Linda S.
<b>The narrative is an effective way to teach history to students. It shapes the events and lives the story is portraying and contextualizes them in culture. Moreover, the narrative moralizes the events being told and helps in developing historical judgment.</b> With some mediation from teachers, the narrative can help students hone an improved sense of its interpretive and tentative aspects. <b>Nevertheless, the narrative is only one piece of the historical puzzle and individuals must learn to take more than a narrative approach to historical understanding.</b>
At least since Barbara Hardy (Meek, Barton, and Warlow 1978) wrote her oft-quoted remark that narrative is a primary act of mind, educators have tried to use narrative as a way to structure new information for young children. Because children's ability to understand and use narrative has generally been assumed to precede their ability to understand and use other genres (Britton et al. 1975; Egan 1988; Moffet 1968), narratives have been seen as particularly useful pedagogical tools in all areas of the curriculum (Egan 1988; Wells 1986).
Specifically, Egan (1979, 1983, 1986) argues that a grounding in story, with its emphasis on human response to historical events, is the beginning of historical understanding. Even in our civic discourse, history is often framed as the "story" of a particular people, place, or event (Barber 1992). Politicians in the United States refer to "the American story," and it is not uncommon to find textbooks similarly rifled. The form and content of the "American story" (or stories), for instance, provide a frame within which American history is created and critiqued. Individuals and groups can understand themselves as standing within, outside of, or in opposition to whatever version of the American story is being told. <b>Seen in this way, historical stories become powerful cultural forces. Yet it is this link between history and narrative that is generally overlooked in discussions of the impact of narrative on historical understanding in children. </b>
<b>Narrative as a Cultural Frame for History </b>
In order to understand the way in which narrative functions in shaping historical stories, it is first necessary to clarify what is meant by the term narrative.
Generally, work on narrative/ history connections has defined narrative in terms of story-like features. In particular, narrativity is seen as having spatio-temporal and causative elements common to stories and to such nonfictional accounts as biographies, autobiographies, and traditional histories. According to Traugott and Pratt (1980), <b>narrative is "a way of linguistically representing past experience, whether real or imagined"</b> (248). Narrative events are perceived as connected and significant; a <b>narrative is expected to go somewhere, to have some point or conclusion</b> (Toolan 1988). Whether an author operates within this definition of narrative or against it, the resultant text is still created and understood within a particular sociocultural context. There is, however, a difference between acknowledging the power of narratives such as these to shape historical understanding and assuming an uncritical intellectual and academic primacy for narrative.
Claims regarding the primacy of narrative, especially in the thinking of young children, have begun to come into question. Research by Pappas (1991) indicates that children's ability to "process" information texts - texts generally using expository rather than narrative structures - is much greater than had been thought. But there are issues beyond those of how well children process non-narrative texts, especially in relation to historical understanding. If, for instance, text genres are seen as cultural forms and thinking involves "the intentional manipulation of cultural forms" (Geertz 1983), then the use of different genres takes on new meaning in curricular decision making and the "naturalness" of one genre over another becomes more problematic. This does not mean that narrative is not a powerful tool in developing historical thinking but rather that we must think more carefully about how different genres operate in relation to historical understanding.
<b>The Discourse of Disciplines or Domains </b>
Geertz (1983) argues that academic disciplines should be seen as social activities in a social world. They serve as ways of distinguishing broad traditions of intellectual - and discourse - styles. In this view, human thought is "a collective product, culturally coded and historically constructed" (14). Individual disciplines or domains such as history represent attempts to organize and make sense of human experience. As cultural artifacts, they can both illuminate our world and block our view. In either case, however, thought is shaped by and expressed in particular text genres (cf. Barber 1992). Although narrative is only one of several genres commonly employed by modern historians, it remains a "naturally occurring" (actually used by historians) genre in the discipline or domain of history. As such, it serves an important function and deserves critical attention in a history curriculum. Hayden White (1980) describes narrative as a "metacode" transmitting transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality. <b>Narrative, he argues, "solves the problem of how to translate knowing into telling"</b> (5-6). Put another way, <b>narrative transforms chronology (a list of events) into history (an interpretation of events). </b>
<b>Translating Knowing into Telling </b>
The transformative power of narrative does more than allow a reader to look into other lives and times. It is not a simple matter of telling the story. Rather, narrative shapes the events and lives it depicts and embeds them in a culture. As one ten-year-old explains, "The social studies book doesn't give you a lot of detail. You don't imagine yourself there because they're not doing it as if it were a person" (Levstik 1989). Narrative, on the other hand, is generally perceived "as if it were a person." In narrative, the voice of the "teller" and the tale that is told are both heard. The narrator's voice, carried through the nuances of a culturally embedded language, asserts authority and elicits a degree of trust (Toolan, 1988).
One form of historical narrative, the historical novel, has elicited positive student response in certain classroom settings (Levstik 1986, 1993). In this type of narrative, an author holds a magnifying glass up to a piece of history, providing humanizing details often left out of broad survey history texts. If the novel is accurate history and engaging literature, the reader finds out how some people felt about history, how they lived their daily lives, what they wore, how they spoke.
These details are an integral part of the transcultural messages of which Hayden speaks, but they are not, of course, the whole message. Rather, the author organizes details to further the narrative. Kermode (1980) calls this an "arbitrary imposition of truth," but it is not arbitrary at all. Rather, it represents history within a sociocultural frame "that is the source of any morality that we can imagine" (White 1980, 18).
<b>Moralizing History </b>
In well-written narratives, readers encounter the human capacity for both good and evil in a framework that generally invites them to sympathize with, or at least understand, the protagonist's point of view. One of the most striking features of studies of children's response to historical narratives (Levstik 1986, 1989, 1993) is the frequency with which they explain their interest in historical topics in terms of "needing to know" about a topic, of wanting to learn "the truth," or "what really happened." <b>This search for "truth" is both an issue of ethics and morality and of narrative structure. </b>Narrative changes historical data by forming a story that implies certain things to the reader. White (1980) suggests that one of the implications of narrative is the moralization of the events depicted.
This aspect of narrative operates on several levels. To begin with, narrative conflict and sequencing invite the reader to see history as "caused" (Rabinowitz 1987). The reader assumes that first events cause subsequent events unless there is a contrary indication. As one child explained, "Even if it weren't all true, it could have been true, and it could have happened like that" (Levstik 1989). On another level, the conflict at the heart of most narratives implies that at least two versions of the story are possible. The possibility of alternate points of view raises two issues. First, as the story enlists the readers identification with a particular perspective, it may also raise issues of morality that influence the child reader's search for "truth." Second, the reader may also come to expect history, at least in its narrative forms, to be interpretive and to involve moral issues. After reading several historical novels, a fifth-grade child explains her frustration with the textbook version of the American history:
"[The textbook] just says that Americans were right, but it doesn't tell you exactly why they were right, or why the British fought" (Levstik 1989, 117).
This type of engagement, it seems to me, is crucial to meaningful historical study.
If history is just chronology, there is little reason to "understand" it. If, on the other hand, it involves the interpretation of vital moral and ethical issues, it not only requires understanding, it is also relevant to the way in which we come to understand ourselves and the world around us. Bardige's (1988) study of adolescent moral development in the context of a literature-based history curriculum, points out another consideration in attending to the moral and ethical dimensions of history. She notes that history instruction that emphasizes greater and greater degrees of abstraction, while trying to maintain a neutral or "objective" stance, can increase children's feelings of impotence and lead to their inability to take action against evil.
<b>Developing Historical Judgment </b>
Historical interpretation is not confined, of course, to narrative moralizing. It is also a matter of weighing evidence and holding conclusions to be tentative pending further information. As Bardige (1988) notes, there is a tension here between helping children see multiple perspectives and leaving them unable to take any kind of stand, because all perspectives are perceived as equally good. This delicate balance is especially interesting to consider in light of the findings in two studies of the impact of narrative on historical understanding (Levstik 1986, 1989). In neither study did historical fiction appear to trigger student questions about an author's correctness of interpretation. Rather, children seemed to value the "truthfulness" of the historical fiction and use it as the standard against which other information was measured. Spontaneous skepticism was evident in the way children viewed their social studies text, and they generally recognized that another perspective could have been represented in a particular story, but it required teacher intervention to lead children to consider alternatives to a literary interpretation of history seriously. This response to historical narrative places on authors and teachers a double obligation to create and select historical narratives that are both good literature and careful, accurate history. It also means that special attention must be paid to how teachers mediate texts.
<b>Teacher Mediation</b>
One of the most common sociocultural contexts within which both history and narrative operate is individual classrooms. Within classrooms, teachers have the opportunity to mediate some of the ways in which history, narrative (and other genres), and learners come together. In research by Bardige (1989) and Levstik (1986, 1993), children were studied as they responded to history and historical literature. In Bardige's study, children kept journals in which they recorded personal feelings, observations, opinions, and questions about the material they were encountering. The intent of the journals was to provide a forum for "facing history" and "facing one's self" and was a written conversation between students and teacher (90). In my (Levstik 1986) study of a sixth-grade class, the teacher used journals, but she also organized response groups. Because children often read multiple books on a topic, they had several opportunities to reen-counter ideas and issues from previous discussions. For instance, children reading holocaust literature returned several times to a discussion of Hitler's "bravery."
One student declared that Hitler was brave for wanting to take on the whole world. Others disagree, and the discussion moved on. But several children were still concerned. Was he brave? Could an evil man be considered brave? They returned to their reading to see if they could make sense of the questions raised in discussion. In a later response group, another student shared information from a biography that he was reading. He suggested that Hitler was insane. The first student nodded, perhaps recognizing a way out of her original dilemma: "It was insane bravery." By providing opportunities to encounter and reencounter a topic, the teacher also provided a context for communal construction of meaning. Students adjusted their ideas, not just in response to the text or to teacher comment, but on the basis of interactions with their peers (Wells and Chang-Wells 1992).
In addition, the teacher encouraged reference to multiple sources of information. When a dispute over the accuracy of historical information arose, the teacher arbitrated first by having students check each author's credentials and then by sending students to the library to look for confirming or non-confirming information. In doing so, the teacher directed children to other "naturally occurring" genres in the domain of history. In other words, she provided a number of opportunities for students to engage in historical discourse and to practice using some of the variety of text genres commonly used in that discourse.
In another study (Levstik 1993), a first-grade teacher also used a variety of genres in presenting history to her students, often emphasizing the tentative nature of the information they encountered. Her students had been studying the history of the earth and had heard several stories about the end of the dinosaurs. She invited children to speculate about what they thought might have happened to the dinosaurs:
Child 1: The weather changed, and all the flowers died, and the plants got frozen.
Teacher: And do we know this for a fact?
Child 2: No.
Teacher: No, we think that's a very good. . .
Child 1: Idea.
In each case, teachers arranged an environment in which there were opportunities to propose ideas, test them in interaction with peers and/or the teacher, and modify or retain them. Although children were expected to begin with a personal response: "It made me sad" or "It made me think that I could do that too," they were also encouraged (often required) to move beyond narrative. In the sixth grade, journals and response groups provided opportunities to ponder historical data before students selected and presented history-related projects. In the first grade, the teacher presented a piece of literature, helped children construct word webs to outline what they thought they knew and wanted to find out, and then provided a variety of extension activities culminating in a class discussion and class-produced "story."
<b>Conclusion </b>
It would seem important in the development of any mature historical understanding that learners see history as a human enterprise made up of interpretations, subject to revision and expressed through a variety of genres. The structure of narrative appears to encourage readers to recognize the human aspects of history, and, with some mediation, to develop a better sense of its interpretive and tentative aspects. In addition, narrative may help students maintain a balance between the abstractions of history as an intellectual exercise and history as an ongoing, participatory drama. <b>But narrative is only one piece of the puzzle, for history is more than narrative. It is also learning to sift evidence before it has been shaped and interpreted. It is putting one's own time and place into a broader perspective and seeing oneself as making choices that are, cumulatively, historic.</b>
This requires more than a narrative approach to history. Rather, well-crafted, carefully selected narrative can motivate interest and spur inquiry into historical topics. The task of the teacher is to help students focus that interest, to judge the interpretations appearing in narrative, to make sense out of alternative points of view, and to make careful historical judgments. Questions of fact and interpretation raised in this context can be used to initiate historical inquiry, refer students to other sources, including the full array of nonnarrative genres, and provide a forum for the presentation of student interpretations. This, I think, is a crucial and often overlooked component to thinking and learning in history. This type of mediation also helps guard against the uncritical acceptance of literary constructions of history. The power of narrative is not an unmitigated good. As has already been noted, the impact of narrative operates regardless of the accuracy of the historical content it carries or the particular interpretive frames within which it operates. In other words, a good story can mask bad history and blind students to other interpretations. The power of the truth imposed by narrative constructions of history, can well mean that children will believe bad history if the narrative is compelling or that they will ignore good history if the narrative is insipid. This should serve as a caution to those currently involved in trying to "narratize" the curriculum. Little fine literature is produced by committee; little first-rate history grows from a steady diet of myth and legend. And there is no evidence that a history curriculum based primarily in narrative and storytelling is either good pedagogy or good history.
Our children deserve the richest curriculum we can give them. There is certainly a place in that curriculum for narrative, as I have argued here and elsewhere. Relying primarily on narrative, however, deprives our students of full access to history and to the intellectual excitement that a variety of genres of literature can provide. In particular, relying on narratizing as the primary pedagogy for history instruction can too easily become a solo performance requiring no more of children than their passive attention. Even when children enjoy the performance, they are missing the opportunity to be historical inquirers - makers of historical interpretation.
<b>REFERENCES </b>
Barber, B. 1992. An aristocracy of everyone: The politics of education and the future of America. New York: Ballantine.
Bardige, B. 1988. Things so finely human: Moral sensibilities at risk in adolescence. In Mapping the moral domain, edited by C. Gilligan, J.V. Ward, and J.M. Taylor. Cambridge: Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
Britton, J., Burgess, T., Martin, N., McLeod, A., and Rosen, H. 1975. The development of writing abilities. London: Macmillan.
Egan, K. 1983. Accumulating history. In monograph, History and theory: Studies in the philosophy of history. Belkeft 22: Wesleyan University Press.
-----. 1986. Teaching as storytelling. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Egan, K., and D. Nadaner. 1988. Imagination and education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Geertz, C. 1983. Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Kermode, F. 1980. Secrets and narrative sequence. Critical Inquiry 7(1): 83-101.
Levstik, L. S. 1986. The relationship between historical response and narrative in a sixth-grade classroom. Theory and Research in Social Education 14: 1-15.
-----. 1989. Coming to terms with history: Historical narrativity and the young reader. Theory Into Practice. 28(2): 114-9.
-----. 1993. Building a sense of history in a first-grade class. In Advances in Research in Teaching, Vol. 4, edited by J. Brophy. New York: JAI Press.
Levstik, L. S., and C. C. Pappas. 1987. Exploring the development of historical understanding. Journal of Research and Development in Education 21: 1-15.
Meek, M., A. Warlow, and G. Barton. 1978. Introduction. In The cool web, edited by M. Meek, A. Warlow, and G. Barton. New York: Atheneum.
Moffett, J. 1968. Teaching the universe of discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Pappas, C. C. 1991. Fostering full access to literacy by including information books. Language Arts 68: 449-62.
Rabinowitz, P. J. 1987. Before reading: Narrative conventions and the politics of interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Toolan, M. J. 1988. Narrative: A critical linguistic introduction. London: Routledge.
Traugott, E., and M. L. Pratt. 1980. Linguistics for students of literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javonovich.
Wells, G. 1986. The meaning makers: Children learning language and using language to learn. Portsmouth, N. H.: Heinemann.
Wells, G., and G. Chang-Wells. 1992. Constructing meaning together. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.
White, H. 1980. The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Critical Inquiry 7 (1):5-27.
LINDA S. LEVSTIK is a professor of social studies and humanities education at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
<i>COPYRIGHT 1995 Heldref Publications</i>
From: The Social Studies
Date: May 1, 1995
Author: Levstik, Linda S.
<b>The narrative is an effective way to teach history to students. It shapes the events and lives the story is portraying and contextualizes them in culture. Moreover, the narrative moralizes the events being told and helps in developing historical judgment.</b> With some mediation from teachers, the narrative can help students hone an improved sense of its interpretive and tentative aspects. <b>Nevertheless, the narrative is only one piece of the historical puzzle and individuals must learn to take more than a narrative approach to historical understanding.</b>
At least since Barbara Hardy (Meek, Barton, and Warlow 1978) wrote her oft-quoted remark that narrative is a primary act of mind, educators have tried to use narrative as a way to structure new information for young children. Because children's ability to understand and use narrative has generally been assumed to precede their ability to understand and use other genres (Britton et al. 1975; Egan 1988; Moffet 1968), narratives have been seen as particularly useful pedagogical tools in all areas of the curriculum (Egan 1988; Wells 1986).
Specifically, Egan (1979, 1983, 1986) argues that a grounding in story, with its emphasis on human response to historical events, is the beginning of historical understanding. Even in our civic discourse, history is often framed as the "story" of a particular people, place, or event (Barber 1992). Politicians in the United States refer to "the American story," and it is not uncommon to find textbooks similarly rifled. The form and content of the "American story" (or stories), for instance, provide a frame within which American history is created and critiqued. Individuals and groups can understand themselves as standing within, outside of, or in opposition to whatever version of the American story is being told. <b>Seen in this way, historical stories become powerful cultural forces. Yet it is this link between history and narrative that is generally overlooked in discussions of the impact of narrative on historical understanding in children. </b>
<b>Narrative as a Cultural Frame for History </b>
In order to understand the way in which narrative functions in shaping historical stories, it is first necessary to clarify what is meant by the term narrative.
Generally, work on narrative/ history connections has defined narrative in terms of story-like features. In particular, narrativity is seen as having spatio-temporal and causative elements common to stories and to such nonfictional accounts as biographies, autobiographies, and traditional histories. According to Traugott and Pratt (1980), <b>narrative is "a way of linguistically representing past experience, whether real or imagined"</b> (248). Narrative events are perceived as connected and significant; a <b>narrative is expected to go somewhere, to have some point or conclusion</b> (Toolan 1988). Whether an author operates within this definition of narrative or against it, the resultant text is still created and understood within a particular sociocultural context. There is, however, a difference between acknowledging the power of narratives such as these to shape historical understanding and assuming an uncritical intellectual and academic primacy for narrative.
Claims regarding the primacy of narrative, especially in the thinking of young children, have begun to come into question. Research by Pappas (1991) indicates that children's ability to "process" information texts - texts generally using expository rather than narrative structures - is much greater than had been thought. But there are issues beyond those of how well children process non-narrative texts, especially in relation to historical understanding. If, for instance, text genres are seen as cultural forms and thinking involves "the intentional manipulation of cultural forms" (Geertz 1983), then the use of different genres takes on new meaning in curricular decision making and the "naturalness" of one genre over another becomes more problematic. This does not mean that narrative is not a powerful tool in developing historical thinking but rather that we must think more carefully about how different genres operate in relation to historical understanding.
<b>The Discourse of Disciplines or Domains </b>
Geertz (1983) argues that academic disciplines should be seen as social activities in a social world. They serve as ways of distinguishing broad traditions of intellectual - and discourse - styles. In this view, human thought is "a collective product, culturally coded and historically constructed" (14). Individual disciplines or domains such as history represent attempts to organize and make sense of human experience. As cultural artifacts, they can both illuminate our world and block our view. In either case, however, thought is shaped by and expressed in particular text genres (cf. Barber 1992). Although narrative is only one of several genres commonly employed by modern historians, it remains a "naturally occurring" (actually used by historians) genre in the discipline or domain of history. As such, it serves an important function and deserves critical attention in a history curriculum. Hayden White (1980) describes narrative as a "metacode" transmitting transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality. <b>Narrative, he argues, "solves the problem of how to translate knowing into telling"</b> (5-6). Put another way, <b>narrative transforms chronology (a list of events) into history (an interpretation of events). </b>
<b>Translating Knowing into Telling </b>
The transformative power of narrative does more than allow a reader to look into other lives and times. It is not a simple matter of telling the story. Rather, narrative shapes the events and lives it depicts and embeds them in a culture. As one ten-year-old explains, "The social studies book doesn't give you a lot of detail. You don't imagine yourself there because they're not doing it as if it were a person" (Levstik 1989). Narrative, on the other hand, is generally perceived "as if it were a person." In narrative, the voice of the "teller" and the tale that is told are both heard. The narrator's voice, carried through the nuances of a culturally embedded language, asserts authority and elicits a degree of trust (Toolan, 1988).
One form of historical narrative, the historical novel, has elicited positive student response in certain classroom settings (Levstik 1986, 1993). In this type of narrative, an author holds a magnifying glass up to a piece of history, providing humanizing details often left out of broad survey history texts. If the novel is accurate history and engaging literature, the reader finds out how some people felt about history, how they lived their daily lives, what they wore, how they spoke.
These details are an integral part of the transcultural messages of which Hayden speaks, but they are not, of course, the whole message. Rather, the author organizes details to further the narrative. Kermode (1980) calls this an "arbitrary imposition of truth," but it is not arbitrary at all. Rather, it represents history within a sociocultural frame "that is the source of any morality that we can imagine" (White 1980, 18).
<b>Moralizing History </b>
In well-written narratives, readers encounter the human capacity for both good and evil in a framework that generally invites them to sympathize with, or at least understand, the protagonist's point of view. One of the most striking features of studies of children's response to historical narratives (Levstik 1986, 1989, 1993) is the frequency with which they explain their interest in historical topics in terms of "needing to know" about a topic, of wanting to learn "the truth," or "what really happened." <b>This search for "truth" is both an issue of ethics and morality and of narrative structure. </b>Narrative changes historical data by forming a story that implies certain things to the reader. White (1980) suggests that one of the implications of narrative is the moralization of the events depicted.
This aspect of narrative operates on several levels. To begin with, narrative conflict and sequencing invite the reader to see history as "caused" (Rabinowitz 1987). The reader assumes that first events cause subsequent events unless there is a contrary indication. As one child explained, "Even if it weren't all true, it could have been true, and it could have happened like that" (Levstik 1989). On another level, the conflict at the heart of most narratives implies that at least two versions of the story are possible. The possibility of alternate points of view raises two issues. First, as the story enlists the readers identification with a particular perspective, it may also raise issues of morality that influence the child reader's search for "truth." Second, the reader may also come to expect history, at least in its narrative forms, to be interpretive and to involve moral issues. After reading several historical novels, a fifth-grade child explains her frustration with the textbook version of the American history:
"[The textbook] just says that Americans were right, but it doesn't tell you exactly why they were right, or why the British fought" (Levstik 1989, 117).
This type of engagement, it seems to me, is crucial to meaningful historical study.
If history is just chronology, there is little reason to "understand" it. If, on the other hand, it involves the interpretation of vital moral and ethical issues, it not only requires understanding, it is also relevant to the way in which we come to understand ourselves and the world around us. Bardige's (1988) study of adolescent moral development in the context of a literature-based history curriculum, points out another consideration in attending to the moral and ethical dimensions of history. She notes that history instruction that emphasizes greater and greater degrees of abstraction, while trying to maintain a neutral or "objective" stance, can increase children's feelings of impotence and lead to their inability to take action against evil.
<b>Developing Historical Judgment </b>
Historical interpretation is not confined, of course, to narrative moralizing. It is also a matter of weighing evidence and holding conclusions to be tentative pending further information. As Bardige (1988) notes, there is a tension here between helping children see multiple perspectives and leaving them unable to take any kind of stand, because all perspectives are perceived as equally good. This delicate balance is especially interesting to consider in light of the findings in two studies of the impact of narrative on historical understanding (Levstik 1986, 1989). In neither study did historical fiction appear to trigger student questions about an author's correctness of interpretation. Rather, children seemed to value the "truthfulness" of the historical fiction and use it as the standard against which other information was measured. Spontaneous skepticism was evident in the way children viewed their social studies text, and they generally recognized that another perspective could have been represented in a particular story, but it required teacher intervention to lead children to consider alternatives to a literary interpretation of history seriously. This response to historical narrative places on authors and teachers a double obligation to create and select historical narratives that are both good literature and careful, accurate history. It also means that special attention must be paid to how teachers mediate texts.
<b>Teacher Mediation</b>
One of the most common sociocultural contexts within which both history and narrative operate is individual classrooms. Within classrooms, teachers have the opportunity to mediate some of the ways in which history, narrative (and other genres), and learners come together. In research by Bardige (1989) and Levstik (1986, 1993), children were studied as they responded to history and historical literature. In Bardige's study, children kept journals in which they recorded personal feelings, observations, opinions, and questions about the material they were encountering. The intent of the journals was to provide a forum for "facing history" and "facing one's self" and was a written conversation between students and teacher (90). In my (Levstik 1986) study of a sixth-grade class, the teacher used journals, but she also organized response groups. Because children often read multiple books on a topic, they had several opportunities to reen-counter ideas and issues from previous discussions. For instance, children reading holocaust literature returned several times to a discussion of Hitler's "bravery."
One student declared that Hitler was brave for wanting to take on the whole world. Others disagree, and the discussion moved on. But several children were still concerned. Was he brave? Could an evil man be considered brave? They returned to their reading to see if they could make sense of the questions raised in discussion. In a later response group, another student shared information from a biography that he was reading. He suggested that Hitler was insane. The first student nodded, perhaps recognizing a way out of her original dilemma: "It was insane bravery." By providing opportunities to encounter and reencounter a topic, the teacher also provided a context for communal construction of meaning. Students adjusted their ideas, not just in response to the text or to teacher comment, but on the basis of interactions with their peers (Wells and Chang-Wells 1992).
In addition, the teacher encouraged reference to multiple sources of information. When a dispute over the accuracy of historical information arose, the teacher arbitrated first by having students check each author's credentials and then by sending students to the library to look for confirming or non-confirming information. In doing so, the teacher directed children to other "naturally occurring" genres in the domain of history. In other words, she provided a number of opportunities for students to engage in historical discourse and to practice using some of the variety of text genres commonly used in that discourse.
In another study (Levstik 1993), a first-grade teacher also used a variety of genres in presenting history to her students, often emphasizing the tentative nature of the information they encountered. Her students had been studying the history of the earth and had heard several stories about the end of the dinosaurs. She invited children to speculate about what they thought might have happened to the dinosaurs:
Child 1: The weather changed, and all the flowers died, and the plants got frozen.
Teacher: And do we know this for a fact?
Child 2: No.
Teacher: No, we think that's a very good. . .
Child 1: Idea.
In each case, teachers arranged an environment in which there were opportunities to propose ideas, test them in interaction with peers and/or the teacher, and modify or retain them. Although children were expected to begin with a personal response: "It made me sad" or "It made me think that I could do that too," they were also encouraged (often required) to move beyond narrative. In the sixth grade, journals and response groups provided opportunities to ponder historical data before students selected and presented history-related projects. In the first grade, the teacher presented a piece of literature, helped children construct word webs to outline what they thought they knew and wanted to find out, and then provided a variety of extension activities culminating in a class discussion and class-produced "story."
<b>Conclusion </b>
It would seem important in the development of any mature historical understanding that learners see history as a human enterprise made up of interpretations, subject to revision and expressed through a variety of genres. The structure of narrative appears to encourage readers to recognize the human aspects of history, and, with some mediation, to develop a better sense of its interpretive and tentative aspects. In addition, narrative may help students maintain a balance between the abstractions of history as an intellectual exercise and history as an ongoing, participatory drama. <b>But narrative is only one piece of the puzzle, for history is more than narrative. It is also learning to sift evidence before it has been shaped and interpreted. It is putting one's own time and place into a broader perspective and seeing oneself as making choices that are, cumulatively, historic.</b>
This requires more than a narrative approach to history. Rather, well-crafted, carefully selected narrative can motivate interest and spur inquiry into historical topics. The task of the teacher is to help students focus that interest, to judge the interpretations appearing in narrative, to make sense out of alternative points of view, and to make careful historical judgments. Questions of fact and interpretation raised in this context can be used to initiate historical inquiry, refer students to other sources, including the full array of nonnarrative genres, and provide a forum for the presentation of student interpretations. This, I think, is a crucial and often overlooked component to thinking and learning in history. This type of mediation also helps guard against the uncritical acceptance of literary constructions of history. The power of narrative is not an unmitigated good. As has already been noted, the impact of narrative operates regardless of the accuracy of the historical content it carries or the particular interpretive frames within which it operates. In other words, a good story can mask bad history and blind students to other interpretations. The power of the truth imposed by narrative constructions of history, can well mean that children will believe bad history if the narrative is compelling or that they will ignore good history if the narrative is insipid. This should serve as a caution to those currently involved in trying to "narratize" the curriculum. Little fine literature is produced by committee; little first-rate history grows from a steady diet of myth and legend. And there is no evidence that a history curriculum based primarily in narrative and storytelling is either good pedagogy or good history.
Our children deserve the richest curriculum we can give them. There is certainly a place in that curriculum for narrative, as I have argued here and elsewhere. Relying primarily on narrative, however, deprives our students of full access to history and to the intellectual excitement that a variety of genres of literature can provide. In particular, relying on narratizing as the primary pedagogy for history instruction can too easily become a solo performance requiring no more of children than their passive attention. Even when children enjoy the performance, they are missing the opportunity to be historical inquirers - makers of historical interpretation.
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LINDA S. LEVSTIK is a professor of social studies and humanities education at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
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