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1.2 Historical perspectives on storytelling in teaching
As history teachers, we love telling stories. It is integral to how we communicate about and conceptualise the past; however, we hate it when students tell us those same stories. “Improve your explanation/ analysis/ exploration of the key concept,” and “reduce your narrative description” will be familiar target for improvement to many history students around the country.⁶Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised however at such narrative responses if they have initially encountered the information in the framework of a story. The new GCSE assessment structure, with its focus on ‘second order concepts’, fights against this. For our students, the marks are in the analysis rather than the anecdotes. History’s appeal often lies in the story-telling aspect of the discipline. Academic historians love nothing more than telling the stories of their specialism, and often use the micro-narratives to very effectively unlock the macro picture. As history teachers we often teach the events as an unfolding narrative. Perhaps this comes form a motivation of keeping the story interesting as an unknown with the edges of the historical map gradually revealing themselves, or maybe a desire to rationalise the decisions of those involved in the events by contextualising them with as little hindsight as possible.We tell small stories of individual sources, or people, or moments of particular resonance, to hook and engage our audiences of mixed ability and interest, which tends to work. Students bite the bait and start to ask questions. However, these questions are often limited to “what happens next?” and derivatives thereof. Finally, we then attempt to draw together diffuse strands and themes in the final lesson or two – even only as revision tasks – and ask the students to produced their analyses. This gives precious little chance to develop their disciplinary skills as a historian, which necessarily involves looking back at the whole picture to analytically assess it.
As a result of this narrative approach we can face the problem of enabling our students to produce deeper analytical responses that move far beyond description and into the much more complex conceptual construction of history. It’s a tough cycle to break. Daniel Willingham has explored the cognitive psychology behind the human mind’s natural tendency to privilege stories: “History is a natural story; it has the four Cs of a memorable story —
causality, conflicts, complications, and character—built in… For teachers, an important way to make use of story in history is through the generous use of trade books that treat history as biography, historical fiction, or a narrative.” ⁷Teaching History began in 1976 with the goal of providing history teachers at all levels with the best and newest teaching ideas for their classrooms. We invite you to join us as a contributor, a reviewer, and a subscriber, and to share your best ideas with other teachers who care for the future of history. We were founded in 1906 by a small group of history teachers and academic historians to support the growing need for good history resources in schools. The first stated aims included the need to support teachers, to encourage the teaching and learning of history, the need to research and distribute ideas on the teaching of history and to represent the needs and interests of teachers of history to government departments and other authorities with control over educationIn the 1970s and 1980s, the use of history of science in science education was controversial.⁸ In the three last decades attitudes have changed, but the question of best practice has not been definitively answered: What type of historical knowledge should be incorporated in pedagogical contexts, and how? This essay discusses features of historically informed narratives that are suitable for teaching science from upper secondary education on, looking in particular at cases in the history of biology. The essay argues that such narratives should focus on the evolution of fundamental concepts and theories in a given scientific discipline, not on the life and work of one or a few scientists; that a story’s historical content must be carefully selected and heavily contextualized in order to serve pedagogical needs; and that storytelling techniques should be actively used to engage students.
Current skepticism regarding the use of history of science in science education often overlooks an important historical fact. Historical knowledge did not become a preferred tool to teach science in the decades that followed Stephen Brush’s infamous and much-commented-on 1974 article-“Should the History of Science Be Rated X?”—but the scarcity of historically informed science education did not prevent growing criticism of science. Controversies sustained by specialists in a dozen or so academic publications, such as the so-called Science Wars of the 1990s, have been overemphasized at the expense of a more obvious observation: standard pedagogical approaches to science education have been poorly effective. Science education has often taken the shape of presenting excessively theoretical, abstract, and dry forms of knowledge. This technocratic approach relates to the science that we study, as historians, in the same way that a skeleton displayed in a museum relates to the living animal from which it derived. By the 2000s even Brush was stating that “in science education, the historical approach can no longer be considered just a distraction that takes time away from learning ‘real science”.⁹A broader change in perception had taken place.The problems of a technocratic science education have already been targeted by various initiatives that recruited historical knowledge to overcome them. At least two large international communities have been discussing new strategies, especially in periodically organized international congresses and in journals such as Science and Education. Several of the scholars involved have concentrated on the development of historical case studies for the classroom. The main advantage of these proposals is that they can be easily incorporated in the science courses of educational systems with quite distinct structures. By the time students need to have a broader picture of a scientific discipline (say, from upper secondary education on), however, these case-study approaches are insufficient because they typically focus on the work of one or a few actors and overemphasize the social and cultural contexts of scientific discoveries. I propose here a blueprint for a different science pedagogy informed by history, one that aims to explain the long-term evolution of knowledge in scientific disciplines. This pedagogy has concepts rather than scientists as its themes and spans several decades or centuries rather than shorter-focused research periods. Giving center stage to the evolution of scientific concepts and theories allows science students to appreciate that knowledge-making processes are the result of contributions of several agents over long periods of time. These processes have to be presented within a contextualist framework in order to avoid the internalist and whiggish narratives that were so common in earlier historical studies. I believe that the active, self-aware deployment of storytelling techniques is crucial both to construct such pedagogies and to engage students in learning. The year 2023 will mark the 20th year since the first presidential session debuted at the AHA annual meeting.¹⁰ These panels are a powerful tool through which the AHA president may illustrate a particular argument or highlight specific voices. They are one of the president’s final chances in their official capacity to make a case for their view of history and its role in society. In 2022, Jacqueline Jones’s presidential sessions on “Modes of Historical Story-Telling” brought historians’ interactions with the broader public into the heart of the AHA. The sessions demonstrated the promise of historical storytelling in this challenging moment, and highlighted the work of historians in a variety of professions as they combat pernicious narratives about the past. Research suggests that because of its historical nature, the learning of evolutionary biology is problematic compared to that of other science disciplines. While explanations used in historical sciences often employ historical narratives, which are distinct from narratives in other contexts, such as stories, the two types of narratives have structural similarities that suggest the potential role of stories based in the history of science for the teaching of evolutionary biology. Stephen Klassen, a prominent science educator, has studied how stories from the history of physics can promote the learning of and attitudes towards science. Klassen’s pioneering work identifies structural components of stories (narrative elements) that give them explanatory power. To test Klassen’s approach empirically, the present study employed an intervention (The Mystery Phenomenon (MP)) with reference to the history of research on industrial melanism (IM). The episode was chosen for study because it incorporates past scientists’ theories and investigations on IM as a strategy to mitigate misconceptions. The efficacy of the unit was studied by means of a mixed-method approach that compared the learning outcomes and experiences of participants using two versions of the MP (one that employs a story that incorporates Klassen’s structural components and another that did not). To determine if the story approach impacted the learning of science content goals, participants in both groups took the Concept Inventory of Natural Selection (CINS) as a pre and post-test.¹¹ A subset of participants also took part in semi-structured interviews to further clarify the analysis of the CINS results and also to assess the impact of Klassen’s structural components and student attitudes. The study’s results demonstrates that the story version of the MP lesson yielded significant learning gains, and that some of the misconceptions explicitly discussed in the MP lesson displayed significant decreases. In addition, participants expressed positive attitudes to this lesson’s format as a mystery in reference to it as a teaching strategy. Finally, by employing two versions of the MP lesson, this study provides a systemic way for empirically testing the efficacy of stories. Once upon a time, long ago and far away (or perhaps not so long ago), teachers did not use fancy PowerPoint presentations, overhead projectors, or even chalkboards. They simply shared their knowledge through stories. Think back over your years of sitting in classrooms. What are the moments that you most remember? For me, one of those moments was my professor in introduction to psychology spinning the tale of Rosenhan’s pseudopatients, perfectly sane individuals who checked into a mental institution and proceeded to act in normal ways. It seemed like an amazing adventure – what was going to happen to these people in the mental hospital? The class was hanging on his every word.
The odds are that your memorable moments, too, have to do with stories – not theories or definitions or dates, but an unfolding narrative, complete with suspense, drama, or humor, or perhaps a personal anecdote shared by a favorite teacher. Of course, a classroom narrative may be linked to a major discovery, study, or figure in psychology, but it is not always the importance of the discovery alone that allows it to stay fresh over the years. Rather, the means of presenting the information can make it exciting and unforgettable.