chapter 1-- Challenge of Literature
aesthetic art
social origin and social affect
novelists displays the web of human relationships
can literary material contribute to students images of the world, self, and the human condition
teachers scrutinize social values
students tentative interpretations supported by the text
what ideas do we advance
teaching literature is the conscious/unconscious reinforcement of ethics
chapter 2 -- The Literary Experience
not what we ought to read
readiness to read
links
living through
students as individuals gather resources in relation to the page
transaction is not interaction but construction to and from ; it is spiral and continual
meaning not in the text, not in the reader
uniqueness of the transaction between the read and text, both having social origins and social effects
chapter 3 -- The Setting
unabridged gulf between anything the student might feel about the book and what the teacher-critic thinks the pupil should notice
background as a tool, not a crutch
self reliance for reading
value literary experience
free to grapple
focus on what the work evokes during not on what is required after
choices of work
chapter 4 -- What Students Bring to Literature
students context vs. the texts' contexts
stock responses are responses to self not the text
readings are partial
students have conditional primary responses
responses colored by personal factors
we tend to project something out of our own experiences
mnemonic irrelevance i is interpretation unsupported by the text
dignity and beauty of human life
more than expose to art -- develop a conscious resistance to and awareness of social forces
revisit old , prior interpretations
chapter 5 -- Broadening the Framework
free exchange of ideas
understanding is a complex personal process
linking the word to what it points to in the human world
focus in on the students' own sense of the work and his desire to clarify and refine his perception of it
group discussion
background or frontloading only when students feel the need for it
Does what the student brings do justice to the text's potential?
May 5, 2013
Barton and Levstik: Empathy and Perspective Recognition
Stuart Foster maintains that historical inquiry "remains primarily cognitive, not an affective, act and one that is chiefly dependent upon knowledge, not feeling or imagination."
Barton and Levstik see historical inquiry differently. They agree that empathy and sympathy should be separated. We cannot imagine another's experience as if it were our own; however, they see the value in empathy in a pluralist democracy. They argue "to engage in meaningful deliberation with those whose ideas differ from our own , we must do more than understand them -- we must care about them and about their perspectives" (207).
Joan Skolnick, Nancy Dulberg, and Thea Maestra "conceptualize empathy as involving both affective engagement and the primarily cognitive task of perspective taking. This requires imaginative intellectual and emotional participation and suggests that empathy might best be thought of as two distinct tools:One invites us to care with and about people in the past, to be concerned with what happened to them and how they experienced their lives...
On case study presented her was set in eighth grade where students learned about 19th century women; at first they considered women to be treated as slaves. An nquiry based unit was set up with questions such as How did women in the movement feel about those who were not? What percent of the population of women were involved in reform? Were there places where reform wasn't discussed? Students gathered data to answer these questions and developed an exhibit to display at a local university. "As each group's presentation developed, it became clear that they recognized that experiences and perspectives differed depending on individual beliefs and values, as well as their group's social, cultural, and political positions." On exhibit on industrialization used images of hands -- a millworker, an economically privileged woman, and an enslaved woman -- to describe differences in conditions and perspective among those involved in or benefiting from various aspects of textile production. Such perspective recognition is possible at this age.
But how do we go beyond, as Hesford suggest? How do we understand that our own perspectives depend on historical context? "They are not necessarily the result of logical and dispassionate reason but reflect the beliefs we have been socialized into as members of cultural groups" (219).
Barton and Levstik acknowledge that and say they "dislike" the implication that anyone can "actually take the perspective of another." Thus, they talk about empathy as perspective recognition. 1) the recognition that at any given time in history was characterized by multiple perspectives, 2) the recognition that our own attitudes, beliefs, and intentions are historically and culturally situated. The goal of deliberation is to reach agreement on the future, and that requires consideration of the likely consequences of actions. Empathy and perspective recognition helps with understanding the consequences,and so students should not only evaluate the causes of historical events and the construction of its "reality," but on their outcomes.
Barton and Levstik see historical inquiry differently. They agree that empathy and sympathy should be separated. We cannot imagine another's experience as if it were our own; however, they see the value in empathy in a pluralist democracy. They argue "to engage in meaningful deliberation with those whose ideas differ from our own , we must do more than understand them -- we must care about them and about their perspectives" (207).
Joan Skolnick, Nancy Dulberg, and Thea Maestra "conceptualize empathy as involving both affective engagement and the primarily cognitive task of perspective taking. This requires imaginative intellectual and emotional participation and suggests that empathy might best be thought of as two distinct tools:One invites us to care with and about people in the past, to be concerned with what happened to them and how they experienced their lives...
On case study presented her was set in eighth grade where students learned about 19th century women; at first they considered women to be treated as slaves. An nquiry based unit was set up with questions such as How did women in the movement feel about those who were not? What percent of the population of women were involved in reform? Were there places where reform wasn't discussed? Students gathered data to answer these questions and developed an exhibit to display at a local university. "As each group's presentation developed, it became clear that they recognized that experiences and perspectives differed depending on individual beliefs and values, as well as their group's social, cultural, and political positions." On exhibit on industrialization used images of hands -- a millworker, an economically privileged woman, and an enslaved woman -- to describe differences in conditions and perspective among those involved in or benefiting from various aspects of textile production. Such perspective recognition is possible at this age.
But how do we go beyond, as Hesford suggest? How do we understand that our own perspectives depend on historical context? "They are not necessarily the result of logical and dispassionate reason but reflect the beliefs we have been socialized into as members of cultural groups" (219).
Barton and Levstik acknowledge that and say they "dislike" the implication that anyone can "actually take the perspective of another." Thus, they talk about empathy as perspective recognition. 1) the recognition that at any given time in history was characterized by multiple perspectives, 2) the recognition that our own attitudes, beliefs, and intentions are historically and culturally situated. The goal of deliberation is to reach agreement on the future, and that requires consideration of the likely consequences of actions. Empathy and perspective recognition helps with understanding the consequences,and so students should not only evaluate the causes of historical events and the construction of its "reality," but on their outcomes.
Barton and Levstik: Inquiry
In How We Think by John Dewey, Dewey argued that although beliefs about what is true can rest on any number of foundations -- tradition, authority, imitation, and so on -- important beliefs should be grounded on evidence. They should result form "conscious inquiry into the nature, conditions, and bearings of the belief." Reflective thought, Dewey says,is "active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends."
Begin with a problem -- a felt difficulty or some perplexity, confusion, or doubt. "This was followed by an attempt to define the problem clearly and to suggest a possible solution, hypothesis, or theory to resolve it -- or better still, according to Dewey, a variety of alternative solutions. The implications of these solutions or hypotheses would then be considered, and empirical observation or experimentation would take place to see which best matched the evidence. This provided the basis for conclusions -- beliefs grounded in evidence" (187).
Inquiry engages students in the process of knowledge construction.
"Given that some students begin with prior knowledge more closely matching the historical perspectives sanctioned at school, it seems likely that some will be better positioned to understand and benefit from a curriculum delivered through textbooks, lectures, or other transmission-oriented methods. That is, those students whose prior knowledge already reflects the dominant historical narratives of school will be better able to comprehend and retain the new information they encounter at school, even if the instruction is poorly delivered. Meanwhile, those students whose prior knowledge conflicts with school history (or which is simply unconnected to it) will have more difficulty mastering a curriculum that does not meet them halfway.As a result, initial differences among students will increase the longer they are in school, with one group of students unlikely to encounter challenges that expand their perspectives while the other groups become increasingly alienated from the curriculum and are provided with little validation of their own ideas" (189-90).
Allow students to pursue their own investigations and reach their own conclusions. Critical to a democratic pluralism is reaching conclusions based on evidence.
They key, however, is the felt difficulty. So the task for teachers is to facilitate this before moving students to their work. The questions cannot arise from "reproducible student pages" but from students' own concerns about the past (or present). The meaning making comes from the felt difficulty; otherwise, it is just analysis or reading without purpose without constructions. The whole point is to recognize and move beyond such recognition that our understanding of the world is constructed and that we construct meaning, too.
Begin with a problem -- a felt difficulty or some perplexity, confusion, or doubt. "This was followed by an attempt to define the problem clearly and to suggest a possible solution, hypothesis, or theory to resolve it -- or better still, according to Dewey, a variety of alternative solutions. The implications of these solutions or hypotheses would then be considered, and empirical observation or experimentation would take place to see which best matched the evidence. This provided the basis for conclusions -- beliefs grounded in evidence" (187).
Inquiry engages students in the process of knowledge construction.
"Given that some students begin with prior knowledge more closely matching the historical perspectives sanctioned at school, it seems likely that some will be better positioned to understand and benefit from a curriculum delivered through textbooks, lectures, or other transmission-oriented methods. That is, those students whose prior knowledge already reflects the dominant historical narratives of school will be better able to comprehend and retain the new information they encounter at school, even if the instruction is poorly delivered. Meanwhile, those students whose prior knowledge conflicts with school history (or which is simply unconnected to it) will have more difficulty mastering a curriculum that does not meet them halfway.As a result, initial differences among students will increase the longer they are in school, with one group of students unlikely to encounter challenges that expand their perspectives while the other groups become increasingly alienated from the curriculum and are provided with little validation of their own ideas" (189-90).
Allow students to pursue their own investigations and reach their own conclusions. Critical to a democratic pluralism is reaching conclusions based on evidence.
They key, however, is the felt difficulty. So the task for teachers is to facilitate this before moving students to their work. The questions cannot arise from "reproducible student pages" but from students' own concerns about the past (or present). The meaning making comes from the felt difficulty; otherwise, it is just analysis or reading without purpose without constructions. The whole point is to recognize and move beyond such recognition that our understanding of the world is constructed and that we construct meaning, too.
Barton and Levstik: Affordances and Constraints of the Narrative of Freedom and Progress
If we can agree for the moment that education is about cultivating a participatory democracy -- preparing citizens to participate in pluralist democracy, a transnational democracy -- then we can agree with Barton and Levstik that "interpreting U.S. history as a story of freedom and progress limits' students preparation for pluralist democracy." 1)"Many of the colonists who came to the North America , for example, were not pursing political or religious freedom but were seeking economic opportunity, and this continued to motivate immigration" to this day.2) "Similarly, the country's foreign policy has not always been motivated by the desire to spread freedom throughout the world; to take just two examples, military interventions in Guatemala and Iran in 1954, although justified in the name of freedom, replaced elected leaders with dictators favorable to U.S. interests" (177). The argument here is that if students do not recognize then they cannot go beyond recognizing to act -- if they do not recognize that the government sometimes has opposed freedom rather than supported it, these citizen-students will not be able to make the sort of informed judgments required by citizens.
Of course, we've discussed how narratives simply -- any narrative has to -- but this one reduces the motivation for many historical episodes to the single, unobjectionable goal of freedom.
Barton and Levstik show how emphasizing freedom essentializes the causes of historical events and then goes on to show how emphasis on progress essentializes the consequences of events. "Colonization, Westward expansion, industrialization: All these must have been examples of progress...so there is little reason to consider their potentially negative effects on American Indians small farmers, or laborers." The narrative of progress, therefore, becomes this defense of status quo "because it characterizes historical change as both beneficial and inevitable." Students have no alternative framework within which to make sense of these discrepancies. "Without some way of considering both positive and negative consequences of events, the ability to deliberate over the common good will be seriously impoverish," they argue (178). We have to create space for a more flexible framework for reading our world, and that includes a transnational framework (to expand the American pluralist framework the authors seem to be asking for). Students of this century need an education that allows for multiple narratives that make space for citizens to "fill in the gaps" with questions rather than common sense notions of the individual, freedom, and progress. "This sense of national purity and righteousness discounts dissenting viewpoints and dismisses aspirations not grounded in the quest for freedom (as defined in contemporary U.S. terms).
"Our national narrative misrepresents the causes of historical events, deflects attention from their negative consequences, and dismisses alternative perspectives. Yet it provides a powerful foundation for those who seek justice, and it offers hope for the future. The task for history education -- perhaps its most difficult challenge -- is to resolve the tension between these advantages and disadvantages, to enable students to use this too for activism and hope without being blinded by its drawbacks" (180).
First, we have to teach students that the American narrative is, like all narratives, a construction rather than a mirror of reality. The concept of freedom was used rhetorically: political rights to women and minorities; economic autonomy used by labor radicals and socialists; a rallying cry for struggle against fascism in WWII; businesses appropriated it for "free enterprise'; freedom was appropriated against communism in the Cold War. Discuss freedom and its role in the nation's past as something quite dynamic and rhetorical rather than some static notion.
Second, engage students in the consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of historical changes and events. Who benefited? How? Who suffered How? For example, the rise and fall of bound labor, the transition from rural agriculture to urban industrialization; the creation and expansion of rails and highways; passage of Jim Crow laws; the war in Iraq. Challenge students to move beyond simplified perspectives that see such topics as uniformly positive or negative. [as the Maya unit shows, I hope]
Consider a wider range of evidence and interpretation than narrow stories of progress can provide.
Of course, we've discussed how narratives simply -- any narrative has to -- but this one reduces the motivation for many historical episodes to the single, unobjectionable goal of freedom.
Barton and Levstik show how emphasizing freedom essentializes the causes of historical events and then goes on to show how emphasis on progress essentializes the consequences of events. "Colonization, Westward expansion, industrialization: All these must have been examples of progress...so there is little reason to consider their potentially negative effects on American Indians small farmers, or laborers." The narrative of progress, therefore, becomes this defense of status quo "because it characterizes historical change as both beneficial and inevitable." Students have no alternative framework within which to make sense of these discrepancies. "Without some way of considering both positive and negative consequences of events, the ability to deliberate over the common good will be seriously impoverish," they argue (178). We have to create space for a more flexible framework for reading our world, and that includes a transnational framework (to expand the American pluralist framework the authors seem to be asking for). Students of this century need an education that allows for multiple narratives that make space for citizens to "fill in the gaps" with questions rather than common sense notions of the individual, freedom, and progress. "This sense of national purity and righteousness discounts dissenting viewpoints and dismisses aspirations not grounded in the quest for freedom (as defined in contemporary U.S. terms).
"Our national narrative misrepresents the causes of historical events, deflects attention from their negative consequences, and dismisses alternative perspectives. Yet it provides a powerful foundation for those who seek justice, and it offers hope for the future. The task for history education -- perhaps its most difficult challenge -- is to resolve the tension between these advantages and disadvantages, to enable students to use this too for activism and hope without being blinded by its drawbacks" (180).
First, we have to teach students that the American narrative is, like all narratives, a construction rather than a mirror of reality. The concept of freedom was used rhetorically: political rights to women and minorities; economic autonomy used by labor radicals and socialists; a rallying cry for struggle against fascism in WWII; businesses appropriated it for "free enterprise'; freedom was appropriated against communism in the Cold War. Discuss freedom and its role in the nation's past as something quite dynamic and rhetorical rather than some static notion.
Second, engage students in the consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of historical changes and events. Who benefited? How? Who suffered How? For example, the rise and fall of bound labor, the transition from rural agriculture to urban industrialization; the creation and expansion of rails and highways; passage of Jim Crow laws; the war in Iraq. Challenge students to move beyond simplified perspectives that see such topics as uniformly positive or negative. [as the Maya unit shows, I hope]
Consider a wider range of evidence and interpretation than narrow stories of progress can provide.
Barton and Levstik: Teaching for the Common Good
Narratives of Individual Achievement and Motivation
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." Karl Marx
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson explain narrative thusly: "Typically, a narrative begins with one situation; a series of changes occurs according to a pattern of cause and effect; finally, a new situation arises that brings about the end of the narrative." Tom Holt suggests narrative is "some temporal order that is inherently causal." Kenneth Burke's pentad -- actor, action, goal or intention, scene, and instrument --" calls attention to how our expectations of narrative are shaped, and thus help us think through the affordances and constraints of narrative as a tool for teaching history"(131).
Of course, an English class is about the text rather than seeing the text as a tool to get at something else. English sees the texts as the goal; the text holds the discourses and representations we are reading for. Whereas history, as Barton and Levstik seem to say, sees narrative as a tool for teaching history. I don't think I would say that I see narrative as a tool for teaching.
The story schema, the narrative structure, influences students reading of a text. Research by Jean Mandler have shown that people have a mental story schema structured around common components. Barton and Levstik explain that when people hear a strong in which elements of narrative are missing, then have a harder time remembering the story accurately and "often go so far as to fill in the missing parts based on their overall understanding of the story and their own assumptions of how the world works" (132). Barton and Levstik found narrative simplifications in their own studies of children. Students tend to use narrative to make sense of what they've learned but in doing so collapse a gradual and long-term historical process into a single discreet event. For example,"on student explained the origin of slavery in North America...'during the Revolutionary War and stuff, people sailed down to Africa...to like get away from the war, and they found these black people, and they thought they were monkeys or animals, and they thought they were really neat, and they crowded them up on boats and stuff, and sold them'" (134). Furthermore, the causal nature in narratives seems to lead students to talk about history with causal connections found in narratives. "People no longer believed in witches because that belief was disproved in a single court case or through the discoveries of medical science; Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech, and Whites realized that they shouldn't be prejudiced; women gained equal rights because people 'figured it out' that women were equal to men" (135). [And this has me thinking now that our work in the 21st English classroom is to draw attention to this common way of reading the world and trouble it with other texts by making the contexts and systems more visible or worth uncovering.]
Perhaps, then, the most valuable aspect of narrative as a tool or worth reading to initiate a conversation about how to read the discourses that shape "reality" or representations of reality is that narratives are familiar to students. So then, perhaps, narrative is a tool for learning the discourses that shape our understanding of the world -- so English teachers might be using narrative as a tool to make visible how the structure of a text attempts to shape ways of knowing -- rhetoricality! Narrative "narrow our perceptions of reality": 1) "because narratives are so common, so widely used in our attempts to make meaning of the world, it is easy to forget that they have been intentionally constructed -- that someone has sifted through the evidence and made decisions about where the story begins and ends, who the agents are, and how the actions are causally related...that they mediate our access to history...students do not seek alternative explanations or viewpoints; the narrative they encountered were so powerful that they were not spontaneously critical of them" (137) ; 2) the actual substance of the construction of the narrative is a problem; "a narrative necessarily includes some things and omits others whether agents, events, or causes), and there are gains and losses with each of the inclusions and omissions" (e.g., elite White men included; women, minorities and poor excluded). When narratives do include other populations, the causal feature of narratives still oversimplify or limit insights about the past and present (perhaps by showing how minorities were manipulated or essentializing the group). Of course, there is not solution to this problem of narrative in that there is no correct way to establish the correct or right content of any historical narrative, but the authors want to recognize and trouble the problem of narrative.
"For many educators, the term narrative implies a particular type of story, one focusing on the struggles and triumphs of individuals and emphasizing personal perceptions and interpretations. This concern with individual consciousness has been an integral part of the development of contemporary Western literature, particularly as reflected in the novel, and so it is hardly surprising that educators prefer such narratives. The literary works used from kindergarten through 12th grade almost always feature the experiences of individuals, and students learn to interpret behavior in terms of individual motivation and achievement. Even when educational researchers use narrative methods, they are concerned primarily with engaging participants in reconstruction of their individual experience as a way of making meaning out of their lives and careers" (150).
Yet, Barton and Levstik want point out in this chapter that these personal narratives are not the only type of narrative. Narratives are told about nations, social groups, institutions, landscapes, and weather. Recently, however, educators are emphasizing the individual in historical fiction, biographies, and response activities for the purpose of engaging students and helping them understand the human dimension of the subject. There are, of course, other advantages: 1) builds on students' prior experiences; 2) motivates them to learn about distant time periods and places; 3) and alerts them to the role of human agency. For students to act or take responsibility for the common good, or to go beyond recognition as Hesford suggests, students must believe they have a role to play in creating the future. But, I think we can anticipate from these the problems of this method: 1) it can deflect attention from the larger structural conditions that provide the contexts within which human action occurs; 2) students may be misled to think that individuals can bring about any change they desire regardless of cultural, economic, or political forces impacting their lives; and 3) they will miss out on the narrative that suggests change requires collective action as people work together (which the Maya unit hopefully argues). Thus, Barton and Levstik argue that history education must help students better understand the context within which such human agency operates, and I argue that English can and must do this, too.
Can the narrative be read for agents who are not individuals but collective groups -- coal miners, immigrants -- abstract political or geographic entity -- Canada, the Roman Empire -- an element of social structure -- landholding patters, trade relations -- or cultural belief -- witchcraft, racial attitudes?
In an example about 6th graders reading about a historical event, B and L talk about how the students reflected on how they would have responded if put in the same situation as individuals about whom they read in biographies, historical fiction and other works of history. The students speculated on the nature of bravery and inhumanity and the motivations for each -- "what might have led Hitler to undertake such insane actions or why ordinary people joined the Nazis' cause." The emotional relevance of the stories and students' personal identification with the characters in the stories were "among the most salient characteristics of their interest in history" (154).
While this is helpful to an extent, it is problematic in the sense that the assignments or reading of these stories leads students to imagine that which was unimaginable and to relate to something which they can't possibly equate to their own lived lives (depending on the history studied).
What are the drawbacks of overemphasizing individual choices, responses, and actions in the first place? In history or in the English classroom?
B and L discuss a study of fourth and fifth graders. They were all interested in and motivated by learning about people in the past, but "disturbingly, they explained all historical events as though they were about individuals; they almost completely ignored the impact of collective action, as well as the role of societal institutions such as political, legal, and economic systems" (156). Individual attitudes , for example, "are inadequate as explanations for racism or sexism because they leave out such crucial factors such as socially sanctioned norms and beliefs, the role of the legal system in creating and sustaining systems of oppression, and the economic underpinnings of slavery and patriarch" (156). Students and teachers understand the events very differently. For example, when asked to explain the result of the French and English expansion in North America, students "did not suggest that the two colonizing countries might go to war over territory, but rather that French and English settlers might get into a war because they 'didn't like each other that much.'" (156). Is this a misinterpretation or an alternate interpretation, a narrow reading? a wrong reading? In a debate about colonists being upset about high taxes where students represented colonies and England -- "despite seemingly careful preparation and scaffolding by the teacher regarding the political context -- quickly degenerated into an argument about whether colonists should be free form their 'mom's' control." (157). One students say that the American Revolution was fought so that we "wouldn't be bossed around by the Queen." Students essentialize causes attributing processes and systems to personal rivalry among individual monarchs , motivations of individuals, neglecting the political and economic contexts that shaped their actions.
Students need to understand changes in legislation, political representation, and collective actions that bring about institutional changes. Not only does focusing on individual beliefs and actions misrepresent events, it leaves students"ill equipped to understand institutional racism and other forms of discrimination today, when individuals are less likely to publicly affirm personal prejudices" (157).
I will argue that fictionality creates a distance, but it seems that students do not notice distance in historical fiction. There isn't this awareness that they are only getting partial understanding of an event or a context and need to do more reading. Willis suggests that focusing on, for example, "the brutal or inhumane treatment of slaves in their everyday lives provided students with a 'moral discourse' but not a political one; issues of civil and political rights remain, even though the specific moral issues surrounding the mistreatment of slaves disappeared with the end of the practice" (158). There are political topics that have relevance long after "the specific brutality of slavery has disappeared" and this is really what is lost when the study of history has been limited to narratives of individual experiences.
McKeown and Beck suggest that what is happening with narratives is that the telling and reading are indicative of surface narratives. M and B critique textbooks for the shallow nature of their narratives not adequately explaining abstract concepts like taxation and representation. When students were faced with a text that was "not entirely comprehensible to them," they "imposed order on it -- and the order they imposed derived from their familiarity with the actions and intentions of individuals" (159). And so was this habit of mind part of their early education or part of human nature or some cognitive development/capacity issue?
M. Anne Britt did a study about the Panama Canal with elementary students asking them to retell what they had read and discovered a problem with their reading. Students focused on the sub story rather than the main story; in other words, from a sociocultural perspective, "what was notable about these retellings was that every student retold the same substory -- that of how workers at the canal overcame disease. The main story they failed to retell, was about how the United States received permission to build the canal" (159). They interpreted the text using a tool with which they were familiar, the narrative of individual actions (or the hero narrative in part, a Western ideology of the individual, perhaps). Perhaps, then, topics requiring an understanding of politics or economics is best left for later grades? Or might the issue be with the sort of narratives we are reading or how we are taught to read?
In Northern Ireland, students almost never learn about the experiences of any specific individual in history, either famous, common, real, or fictional? Is this narrative, then, a Western or American tool for education that creates a citizenry interested only in the individual? Is this why we are struggling with attention to a common good?
Focusing on individual narratives, some suggest, is a cultural tool. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen found that "within families, the most common narratives people hope to pass on to their children was about how an individual can make the world a better place for the next generation. "Even when dealing withe contemporary social relations, public discourse in the United States most often focuses on individuals: Inequality, for example, is blamed on inadequate personal drive, whereas structural constraints, group interests, and collective action are downplayed or dismissed. This stands in distinct contrast to the United Kingdom, where discussions of social class and economic structure are an accepted part of public debate" (161).
What I am arguing in the English classroom is to read these narratives -- and include third person narratives that show the collective -- but to put first person narratives (fiction or memoir) into conversation with other texts to show the discourses that shape "reality" or "truth."
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." Karl Marx
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson explain narrative thusly: "Typically, a narrative begins with one situation; a series of changes occurs according to a pattern of cause and effect; finally, a new situation arises that brings about the end of the narrative." Tom Holt suggests narrative is "some temporal order that is inherently causal." Kenneth Burke's pentad -- actor, action, goal or intention, scene, and instrument --" calls attention to how our expectations of narrative are shaped, and thus help us think through the affordances and constraints of narrative as a tool for teaching history"(131).
Of course, an English class is about the text rather than seeing the text as a tool to get at something else. English sees the texts as the goal; the text holds the discourses and representations we are reading for. Whereas history, as Barton and Levstik seem to say, sees narrative as a tool for teaching history. I don't think I would say that I see narrative as a tool for teaching.
The story schema, the narrative structure, influences students reading of a text. Research by Jean Mandler have shown that people have a mental story schema structured around common components. Barton and Levstik explain that when people hear a strong in which elements of narrative are missing, then have a harder time remembering the story accurately and "often go so far as to fill in the missing parts based on their overall understanding of the story and their own assumptions of how the world works" (132). Barton and Levstik found narrative simplifications in their own studies of children. Students tend to use narrative to make sense of what they've learned but in doing so collapse a gradual and long-term historical process into a single discreet event. For example,"on student explained the origin of slavery in North America...'during the Revolutionary War and stuff, people sailed down to Africa...to like get away from the war, and they found these black people, and they thought they were monkeys or animals, and they thought they were really neat, and they crowded them up on boats and stuff, and sold them'" (134). Furthermore, the causal nature in narratives seems to lead students to talk about history with causal connections found in narratives. "People no longer believed in witches because that belief was disproved in a single court case or through the discoveries of medical science; Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech, and Whites realized that they shouldn't be prejudiced; women gained equal rights because people 'figured it out' that women were equal to men" (135). [And this has me thinking now that our work in the 21st English classroom is to draw attention to this common way of reading the world and trouble it with other texts by making the contexts and systems more visible or worth uncovering.]
Perhaps, then, the most valuable aspect of narrative as a tool or worth reading to initiate a conversation about how to read the discourses that shape "reality" or representations of reality is that narratives are familiar to students. So then, perhaps, narrative is a tool for learning the discourses that shape our understanding of the world -- so English teachers might be using narrative as a tool to make visible how the structure of a text attempts to shape ways of knowing -- rhetoricality! Narrative "narrow our perceptions of reality": 1) "because narratives are so common, so widely used in our attempts to make meaning of the world, it is easy to forget that they have been intentionally constructed -- that someone has sifted through the evidence and made decisions about where the story begins and ends, who the agents are, and how the actions are causally related...that they mediate our access to history...students do not seek alternative explanations or viewpoints; the narrative they encountered were so powerful that they were not spontaneously critical of them" (137) ; 2) the actual substance of the construction of the narrative is a problem; "a narrative necessarily includes some things and omits others whether agents, events, or causes), and there are gains and losses with each of the inclusions and omissions" (e.g., elite White men included; women, minorities and poor excluded). When narratives do include other populations, the causal feature of narratives still oversimplify or limit insights about the past and present (perhaps by showing how minorities were manipulated or essentializing the group). Of course, there is not solution to this problem of narrative in that there is no correct way to establish the correct or right content of any historical narrative, but the authors want to recognize and trouble the problem of narrative.
"For many educators, the term narrative implies a particular type of story, one focusing on the struggles and triumphs of individuals and emphasizing personal perceptions and interpretations. This concern with individual consciousness has been an integral part of the development of contemporary Western literature, particularly as reflected in the novel, and so it is hardly surprising that educators prefer such narratives. The literary works used from kindergarten through 12th grade almost always feature the experiences of individuals, and students learn to interpret behavior in terms of individual motivation and achievement. Even when educational researchers use narrative methods, they are concerned primarily with engaging participants in reconstruction of their individual experience as a way of making meaning out of their lives and careers" (150).
Yet, Barton and Levstik want point out in this chapter that these personal narratives are not the only type of narrative. Narratives are told about nations, social groups, institutions, landscapes, and weather. Recently, however, educators are emphasizing the individual in historical fiction, biographies, and response activities for the purpose of engaging students and helping them understand the human dimension of the subject. There are, of course, other advantages: 1) builds on students' prior experiences; 2) motivates them to learn about distant time periods and places; 3) and alerts them to the role of human agency. For students to act or take responsibility for the common good, or to go beyond recognition as Hesford suggests, students must believe they have a role to play in creating the future. But, I think we can anticipate from these the problems of this method: 1) it can deflect attention from the larger structural conditions that provide the contexts within which human action occurs; 2) students may be misled to think that individuals can bring about any change they desire regardless of cultural, economic, or political forces impacting their lives; and 3) they will miss out on the narrative that suggests change requires collective action as people work together (which the Maya unit hopefully argues). Thus, Barton and Levstik argue that history education must help students better understand the context within which such human agency operates, and I argue that English can and must do this, too.
Can the narrative be read for agents who are not individuals but collective groups -- coal miners, immigrants -- abstract political or geographic entity -- Canada, the Roman Empire -- an element of social structure -- landholding patters, trade relations -- or cultural belief -- witchcraft, racial attitudes?
In an example about 6th graders reading about a historical event, B and L talk about how the students reflected on how they would have responded if put in the same situation as individuals about whom they read in biographies, historical fiction and other works of history. The students speculated on the nature of bravery and inhumanity and the motivations for each -- "what might have led Hitler to undertake such insane actions or why ordinary people joined the Nazis' cause." The emotional relevance of the stories and students' personal identification with the characters in the stories were "among the most salient characteristics of their interest in history" (154).
While this is helpful to an extent, it is problematic in the sense that the assignments or reading of these stories leads students to imagine that which was unimaginable and to relate to something which they can't possibly equate to their own lived lives (depending on the history studied).
What are the drawbacks of overemphasizing individual choices, responses, and actions in the first place? In history or in the English classroom?
B and L discuss a study of fourth and fifth graders. They were all interested in and motivated by learning about people in the past, but "disturbingly, they explained all historical events as though they were about individuals; they almost completely ignored the impact of collective action, as well as the role of societal institutions such as political, legal, and economic systems" (156). Individual attitudes , for example, "are inadequate as explanations for racism or sexism because they leave out such crucial factors such as socially sanctioned norms and beliefs, the role of the legal system in creating and sustaining systems of oppression, and the economic underpinnings of slavery and patriarch" (156). Students and teachers understand the events very differently. For example, when asked to explain the result of the French and English expansion in North America, students "did not suggest that the two colonizing countries might go to war over territory, but rather that French and English settlers might get into a war because they 'didn't like each other that much.'" (156). Is this a misinterpretation or an alternate interpretation, a narrow reading? a wrong reading? In a debate about colonists being upset about high taxes where students represented colonies and England -- "despite seemingly careful preparation and scaffolding by the teacher regarding the political context -- quickly degenerated into an argument about whether colonists should be free form their 'mom's' control." (157). One students say that the American Revolution was fought so that we "wouldn't be bossed around by the Queen." Students essentialize causes attributing processes and systems to personal rivalry among individual monarchs , motivations of individuals, neglecting the political and economic contexts that shaped their actions.
Students need to understand changes in legislation, political representation, and collective actions that bring about institutional changes. Not only does focusing on individual beliefs and actions misrepresent events, it leaves students"ill equipped to understand institutional racism and other forms of discrimination today, when individuals are less likely to publicly affirm personal prejudices" (157).
I will argue that fictionality creates a distance, but it seems that students do not notice distance in historical fiction. There isn't this awareness that they are only getting partial understanding of an event or a context and need to do more reading. Willis suggests that focusing on, for example, "the brutal or inhumane treatment of slaves in their everyday lives provided students with a 'moral discourse' but not a political one; issues of civil and political rights remain, even though the specific moral issues surrounding the mistreatment of slaves disappeared with the end of the practice" (158). There are political topics that have relevance long after "the specific brutality of slavery has disappeared" and this is really what is lost when the study of history has been limited to narratives of individual experiences.
McKeown and Beck suggest that what is happening with narratives is that the telling and reading are indicative of surface narratives. M and B critique textbooks for the shallow nature of their narratives not adequately explaining abstract concepts like taxation and representation. When students were faced with a text that was "not entirely comprehensible to them," they "imposed order on it -- and the order they imposed derived from their familiarity with the actions and intentions of individuals" (159). And so was this habit of mind part of their early education or part of human nature or some cognitive development/capacity issue?
M. Anne Britt did a study about the Panama Canal with elementary students asking them to retell what they had read and discovered a problem with their reading. Students focused on the sub story rather than the main story; in other words, from a sociocultural perspective, "what was notable about these retellings was that every student retold the same substory -- that of how workers at the canal overcame disease. The main story they failed to retell, was about how the United States received permission to build the canal" (159). They interpreted the text using a tool with which they were familiar, the narrative of individual actions (or the hero narrative in part, a Western ideology of the individual, perhaps). Perhaps, then, topics requiring an understanding of politics or economics is best left for later grades? Or might the issue be with the sort of narratives we are reading or how we are taught to read?
In Northern Ireland, students almost never learn about the experiences of any specific individual in history, either famous, common, real, or fictional? Is this narrative, then, a Western or American tool for education that creates a citizenry interested only in the individual? Is this why we are struggling with attention to a common good?
Focusing on individual narratives, some suggest, is a cultural tool. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen found that "within families, the most common narratives people hope to pass on to their children was about how an individual can make the world a better place for the next generation. "Even when dealing withe contemporary social relations, public discourse in the United States most often focuses on individuals: Inequality, for example, is blamed on inadequate personal drive, whereas structural constraints, group interests, and collective action are downplayed or dismissed. This stands in distinct contrast to the United Kingdom, where discussions of social class and economic structure are an accepted part of public debate" (161).
What I am arguing in the English classroom is to read these narratives -- and include third person narratives that show the collective -- but to put first person narratives (fiction or memoir) into conversation with other texts to show the discourses that shape "reality" or "truth."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)