From: Monica R. Edinger <edinger>
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 06:10:53 +0000

I'm a fourth grade teacher in New York City. Some of my overarching questions throughout the year are: What is history? Who tells it? What sources do we use to learn about the past? How can we be sure of their reliability? Who is privileged? Who is marginalized? Why? These came about over the years as I moved away from a textbook and lockstep social studies program to one that presses my students to think critically about the issues of the past and how they affect us today. There were many reasons for this, but a major one was my determination to have my students see cultures outside and often far away from their own as real and significant. I also wanted them to leave my classroom always being a bit skeptical about what they read about the past even if their next year's teacher didn't continue this explicit focus. A lot of our work is with primary sources. Not only do my students learn how to garner information from them as do adult historians, but they learn that primary sources can be inaccurate too. For one unit they write historical fiction. Before they begin I immerse them into many aspects of the time, people, and place with a variety of experiences with informational books and media, primary sources (letters, journals, art, and objects), and books especially for children on the topic. Of the later we look especially carefully at works of historical fiction to figure out how accurately the author has portrayed the time and people.

Elsewhere I've expressed my concern about the way teachers use historical fiction as a primary means of instructing children about other places and times. I see and read of its use too often as a motivating device as if history is otherwise just too boring or too difficult for young children to understand or in a "kill two birds with one stone" way -- as both history and literature. I'm bothered that children get the idea that history has to be sweetened up with fiction to be understood and enjoyed. I'm bothered by the blurring of two very distinct disciplines: literature and history. I'm bothered by the opinion that children are not capable of thinking critically about writing. Most of all I'm bothered by an adult attitude that history is tedious and dull and motivation must be through fiction. In point of fact real historical narratives are just as amazing if not more so than fiction. This is not to denigrate such great writers of historical fiction as Erdrich. (I greatly enjoyed and admire The Birchbark House.) This has to do with how this material is used in classrooms which is, I suspect, the main way it is read by children. Not, I would guess, independently. Debbie Reese, for example, provides examples from her daughter's classroom where The Birchbark House is being used in a reading group. Others recommend or rail against comparing it with the Wilder books. Either way historical fiction in classrooms tends to be used didactically.

The issues raised here about historical fiction about American Indians applies, in my opinion, to all works of historical fiction. ( Actually, it applies to nonfiction as well, witness the current controversy about Morris's biography of Reagan and the continuing debate about faction.) However, since our national history is especially horrific on this particular topic we teachers have a particular obligation, it seems to me, to be aware and make our students aware of the way authors (real people behind books) create these books with all their stereotypes, their strengths and weaknesses, their accurate and inaccurate information, their use and misuse of sources. All their warts and flaws. Don't underestimate children and their ability to consider deeply the nature of truth.


Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York edinger at dalton.org
Received on Fri 15 Oct 1999 01:10:53 AM CDT