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From: Monica R. Edinger <edinger>
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2000 05:49:06 +0000
The issue of biography is one that fascinates me. One of my current activities on the side (I'm a full-time classroom teacher)is as a "Teacher Partner" on a NEH project to create historical inquiries on the web using digitized primary sources. The time period is narrow (US history 188020) and I thought I would focus on biography since it seems to be such a staple assignment in our schools. So I'm curious about where and when this assignment tends to occur. Is it part of social studies or language arts? Is it more likely to be an elementary school assignment or middle school?
My interest in building some web?sed activities around the lives of significant people of the era is partly because I want kids to get past the typical simplistic and superficial look at an individual's life. With the web, kids can contextualize their knowledge with primary sources.
For example, I'm building an introductory activity around Helen Keller. I figured she would be one of the most familiar as well as intriguing individuals of the period for many kids. Additionally, there is a lot of kid?cessible digitized primary source material about her. Kids may well know her from simple biographies or The Miracle Worker and I want to encourage them to look at her first autobiography (The Story of My Life written in her early twenties), letters, poems, photos, objects and so on. My hope is to get them to think about what made her so compelling in her time and still today. Or not, for that matter. (Maybe she is not so significant at all. For one, there is a fascinating episode about her inadvertently plagiarizing a poem.) Sort of a different take on the "What is a Hero?" question often used with kids and biography.
This is not unlike what I do with Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, real people behind "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."
I'm also terribly interested in the learning and teaching history. I've written before (maybe not on ccbcnet, but many times on child_lit and in publications) about my concerns with the use of historical fiction in the teaching of history in schools. I think that nonfiction may be even more problematic. At least with historical fiction there is a vague understanding that it may not all be real and needs some contextualizing. However, there is too often , I fear, a presumption with nonfiction that it is by and large all true and right. So kids are told to read a biography and any will do.
I'm realizing that writing about the past occurs on a continuum. There is historical fiction which is based on historical truth (whatever that is; if Marc Aronson is reading this, please don't trounce me on this!) but openly fictionalized. Next is faction, that term coined someplace (I saw it used some years ago in the New York Times), those quasi-autobiographies/memoirs like Morris's book about Reagan, Dutch
(where he put himself in as a character). And then there is that kitchen sink phrase, "nonfiction" too often assumed as totally true all the time.
Well, I've been convinced (notably by Marc) that all of this (fiction, faction, nonfiction) is constructed knowledge. None of it can be totally true; it is always filtered through the writer's eyes. I've tended to argue that best of all is to use primary sources, but they are subjective too.
Still, I think the best approach is to contextualize, contextualize, contextualize. Give the kids lots of stuff to bring to their reading of a particular biography. Teach them to read and think critically. Not to be so in an awe of an author that he/she can't be challenged. That we shouldn't assume that just because it is written down that it is right. haven't done a specific biography unit, but I do a study of the Pilgrims in depth and the real people of the settlement so that is a sort of look at biography. Certainly, I used a great deal of nonfiction written for children in the unit.
Megan asked how to encourage kids to look for more than a longer-than0-pages book about someone important. I think it is all about immersion. Kids can be immersed in a time period and then be avid to learn more about the individuals they come across. Or they can be immersed in thinking about biography itself. What is this thing where we tell or read about other people's lives? How would we feel about it (I have the peculiar experience of someone studying my family in great detail and, let me tell you, it is very weird); to have someone ferret out details of our lives and decide what they mean? How about using biographies as models to take apart and study and then do one of someone you know?
Okay. I could (and have already) go on and on about this topic. But I've already done so about Alice so I yield the floor!
Monica
Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York NY edinger at dalton.org monicaedinger at yahoo.com
Received on Thu 02 Nov 2000 11:49:06 PM CST
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2000 05:49:06 +0000
The issue of biography is one that fascinates me. One of my current activities on the side (I'm a full-time classroom teacher)is as a "Teacher Partner" on a NEH project to create historical inquiries on the web using digitized primary sources. The time period is narrow (US history 188020) and I thought I would focus on biography since it seems to be such a staple assignment in our schools. So I'm curious about where and when this assignment tends to occur. Is it part of social studies or language arts? Is it more likely to be an elementary school assignment or middle school?
My interest in building some web?sed activities around the lives of significant people of the era is partly because I want kids to get past the typical simplistic and superficial look at an individual's life. With the web, kids can contextualize their knowledge with primary sources.
For example, I'm building an introductory activity around Helen Keller. I figured she would be one of the most familiar as well as intriguing individuals of the period for many kids. Additionally, there is a lot of kid?cessible digitized primary source material about her. Kids may well know her from simple biographies or The Miracle Worker and I want to encourage them to look at her first autobiography (The Story of My Life written in her early twenties), letters, poems, photos, objects and so on. My hope is to get them to think about what made her so compelling in her time and still today. Or not, for that matter. (Maybe she is not so significant at all. For one, there is a fascinating episode about her inadvertently plagiarizing a poem.) Sort of a different take on the "What is a Hero?" question often used with kids and biography.
This is not unlike what I do with Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, real people behind "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."
I'm also terribly interested in the learning and teaching history. I've written before (maybe not on ccbcnet, but many times on child_lit and in publications) about my concerns with the use of historical fiction in the teaching of history in schools. I think that nonfiction may be even more problematic. At least with historical fiction there is a vague understanding that it may not all be real and needs some contextualizing. However, there is too often , I fear, a presumption with nonfiction that it is by and large all true and right. So kids are told to read a biography and any will do.
I'm realizing that writing about the past occurs on a continuum. There is historical fiction which is based on historical truth (whatever that is; if Marc Aronson is reading this, please don't trounce me on this!) but openly fictionalized. Next is faction, that term coined someplace (I saw it used some years ago in the New York Times), those quasi-autobiographies/memoirs like Morris's book about Reagan, Dutch
(where he put himself in as a character). And then there is that kitchen sink phrase, "nonfiction" too often assumed as totally true all the time.
Well, I've been convinced (notably by Marc) that all of this (fiction, faction, nonfiction) is constructed knowledge. None of it can be totally true; it is always filtered through the writer's eyes. I've tended to argue that best of all is to use primary sources, but they are subjective too.
Still, I think the best approach is to contextualize, contextualize, contextualize. Give the kids lots of stuff to bring to their reading of a particular biography. Teach them to read and think critically. Not to be so in an awe of an author that he/she can't be challenged. That we shouldn't assume that just because it is written down that it is right. haven't done a specific biography unit, but I do a study of the Pilgrims in depth and the real people of the settlement so that is a sort of look at biography. Certainly, I used a great deal of nonfiction written for children in the unit.
Megan asked how to encourage kids to look for more than a longer-than0-pages book about someone important. I think it is all about immersion. Kids can be immersed in a time period and then be avid to learn more about the individuals they come across. Or they can be immersed in thinking about biography itself. What is this thing where we tell or read about other people's lives? How would we feel about it (I have the peculiar experience of someone studying my family in great detail and, let me tell you, it is very weird); to have someone ferret out details of our lives and decide what they mean? How about using biographies as models to take apart and study and then do one of someone you know?
Okay. I could (and have already) go on and on about this topic. But I've already done so about Alice so I yield the floor!
Monica
Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York NY edinger at dalton.org monicaedinger at yahoo.com
Received on Thu 02 Nov 2000 11:49:06 PM CST
