Teaching as Story Telling
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 19:31:54 +0200
Subject: The dilemma of objectivity and narrativity - some feed back on the story model-
Narrative and history teaching briefly.
The use of story in history teaching has not been common in the Danish
tradition of history didactics. This is mainly due to the close relation
between history as a scientific discipline and history as a school
subject. The latter has mostly been regarded as "sunken science", and
not as having its own identity. Narrative was abandon in the school
subject because of its moralising and artistic aspects. To be considered
real science, history had to discard it's stortelling
elements.
For the vast part of the century, therefore, storytelling has been in the
process of vanishing from the curriculum. It has been considered a method
of nationalistic indoctrination, inappropriate for teaching in the school,
because it contradicted the ideal of the scientific approach. Instead
of storytelling, the student was either to memorize vast amounts of
objective "facts" or imitate the scientific methodology. In the 1980's,
however, the storytelling aspect of history teaching is in focus once
again. Mainly because of it's quality with regard to motivation and
identity. It brings tension and identification into those historical
facts that were supposed to be the ideal, but never were regarded with
the same interest by the children as by the scientists.
The fusion of storytelling and history teaching is however not as
straightforward as it may seem.
The problem.
From the child's point of view, narratives hold a strong case. A number
of disciplines in the fields of human science has accentuated it`s
importance since the beginning of the 1980Ēs.
What is more and more often refered to as narrative psychology, covers
various approaches to the concept of story and the human mind, and all
seem to point in the same direction. Narrative has not just to do with
literature and fiction, but is a basic cognitive instrument used by man
to impose meaning, order and intention to a chaotic world. And as Hayden
White has pointed out, even the scientific discourse form of academic
history, may reveal itself as story telling, bearing more resemblance
with the epic forms of literature than science.
What is also of interest is the fact that children show greater
competence in narrative thinking than in paradigmatic thinking. As you
point out, narratives can be viewed as an abstract concept, that even
small children actually manage. And as Katherine Nelson's script-theory
emphasizes, there is an astonishing resemblance between the child's first
comprehension of the world in the form of scripts, and the basic
characteristic of a narrative (Nelson 1985). The psychologist Jerome
Bruner has even made the comparison between a 2 year old girl's
narratives in her bedtalk and the Russian formalist Tudorov and his
concept of fabula (Nelson 1989 p.90).
But are we then to discard any scientific knowledge that does not convert
to a storytelling form? Or to paraphrase Jerome Bruner's concepts, how
much are we to bend the paradigmatic truth, in order to fit the
believability of the narrative mode, that seem to predict so much
success as an organizing principle in curriculum planning?
The discipline of scientific history searches for the objective truth of
the past, and in spite of various attemps to discard this search as either
social construction, relativism or even literature, there still is a
core of objective knowledge that obligates us in our curriculum
planning. But the story form often conflicts with this objective
knowledge.
Take as for example the moralizing aspects that are conveyed in the
story form. Are we allowed to moralize in modern history teaching?
Leopold von Ranke and his famous dictum, to find out "wie es eigenlich
gewesen ist" was originally formulated as a protest against the
moralizing history writing of the enlightment. According to Rank the
discipline of history was not to deliver judgement on the past, but to find
out out what actually happend. (although he and his contemporaries also
validated literary qualities in history writing)
The connection between moral and story is essential, because it can not
be eliminated. The moralizing aspect comes within the very binary
structure of the story form. The plot tells us about our "canonicality"
(Bruner 1986), and as Hayden White tells us:"where in any account of
reality, narrativity is present, we can be sure that morality or
moralizing impulse is present too"( White 1986)
This moralizing impulse and contradiction with the objective knowledge
of history is also present in your use of the story model. The story of
the vikings' invasion of England, tend to take a rather moralizing turn
in your narration of it. Barbarism lose to civilisation, because the
vikings came to realize that "the joy of building outlasts the shallow
pleasure of destruction" (Egan 1988)
The basic dichotomy between civilisation and the barbarism of the
vikings, may be regarded as conflicting with the objective knowledge we
have about the vikings, ( and this is not just because of my danish
nationality). One can easily point out some aspects that do not fit
this stereotype. In fact there has been a great effort during the last 20 years
from schools and museums to alter the common picture of the
swordswinging beserkers with horns on their helmets. The vikings were also
peacefull merchants and settlers, (take for instance the presentation of
vikings at the museum of York), and the female sex were blessed with
more freedom and independence than elsewhere in christianized
Europe. And the vikings' success as conquerors was not just due to
brutality, but in great degree based on minimal coast defence due to
inner conflicts in the countries they plundered.
So from a objective point of view the basic binary can be blurred, and
the moral even reversed. The shallow, static and suppressing system of
feudalism based on the exploitation of peasants, tamed the progessive
expansion of the vikings, that even managed to build free independent
communities of peasants as far away as Iceland and Greenland.
Communities that were later given up as Scandinavia became more
integrated in the christian culture of medieval Europe. Another
independent tribe had been tamed and colonizied by a eurocentristic and
cultural imperialism, as so many since. A story echoed in the last two
centuries of colonial history and its conquences for the original
cultures of the third world.
The truth is of course somewhere in between. The barbarians were not
quite so barbarian as we would like them to seem in order to fit our
narrative, and the civilized world not at all the pure incarnation of
humanity.
But are we then allowed to impose such a chessboard conception on
reality, when we know that the objective truth is much more complicated
and of a colour in between.
One may of course bring forth the argument, that the moralizing and
objectivity rejecting "sins" of the story form serves a good cause. It
meets the child with a concept of narrativity which provides human
meaning in time, causality, and intention, makes history much more
comprehensible. But on the other hand, are we not obliged to tell the
truth, and immunize against the abuse of history? A lot of malevolence
in the history of the 20th centry like nationalism, the third Reich and
the Cold War have all been legitimized and wrapped in well-formed
stories.
How are we to bend objectivity against narrativity?
In hope of recieving some "synthesizing" reflection on the dilemma,
Peter Hallgard Christensen
E-mail: haii@post4.tele.dk
Bruner J.S. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard Univ.Press
White H. (1987) The cotent of the Form. John Hopkins Univ.Press
Nelson, K. (1985) Making sense. Academic Press
Nelson, K. Narratives from the Crib. Harvard Univ.Press
Dear Mr. Christenesen,
Thank you for your long and thoughtful comments on the tension between adhering to a narrative and using its engaging power and also adhering to some conception of objectivity. I don't think, in the end, that the conflict is quite so stark or problematic as you suggest.
At one point you ask: "But are we then to discard any scientific knowledge that does not convert to a storytelling form?" I'm not sure what knowledge cannot be converted to narrative form, especially for young children. I mean, the demands of narrative are not uniform or monolithic or simple. One may represent all kinds of knowledge in narratives without needing to falsify. Narrative provides a shaping of the knowledge, it isn't a competing kind of knowledge. Also, I should emphasize that I am interested in narrative particularly for the earlier years of schooling. As I argue more extensively in my recent book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding, I see education as involving an increasing emergence and use of scientific kinds of thinking, among other cognitive modes, but that one cannot start there very well. One begins, as we have historically begun in cultures throughout the world, with mythic forms of thought out of which more "paradigmatic" forms emerge. What we see happen historically is what I argue we should deliberately encourage educationally.
I agree that my Viking narrative is a bit oversimplified. (The Norwegian and Swedish translations of Teaching as Story Telling have a rather better example. My Swedish translator, Barbro Solbe, made clear that the goings on in an English marsh were hardly what mattered to a Scandinavian learning about the history of their Vikings.) The more balanced view of the Vikings that you present could also be presented in a narrative, of course. What you criticize, properly, in my example is not so much something made necessary by the use of a narrative, but the falsification that I engaged in--and might equally have engaged in had I represented it "objectively." It is not, also, that the "more complicated" picture is always truer and less engaging. The task for us as teachers is always to find the more exciting narrative form that best represents the fullest picture of the past appropriate for our students at any time.
Your observation about the Nazi use of a powerful narrative is a good point. But, again, it is not the narrative that is crucial there, it is the falseness, the lies. Narrative doesn't, by itself, provide any guarentees of any kind--it provides us only with a tool, and, like any tool, it can be misused. The trick is to use the tool for the approrpiate purpose in the appropriate circumstances.
The more basic question of how we move from story to theory, as I have put it in The Educated Mind, and elsewhere, is precisely the topic of that book. I think we best do it by moving from what I have called a mythic kind of understanding of the world, to a romantic one, to a philosophic one. It is in that philosophic understanding that theories reach their most energetic use. But I want to protect against the abuse of theory by further developing an Ironic understanding.
I have put your comments on the Teaching as Story Telling Web Page. I hope you do not mind that I made a few editorial changes as I did so--some small spelling items, and other little language items. Please let me know if this bothers you. Thanks again. I hope my comments help. If not, do point out where you remain skeptical.
With best wishes,
From: peter christensen
To: kieran_egan@sfu.ca
Kieran Egan
