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."