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Historical Fiction
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From: Monica R. Edinger <edinger>
Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 05:37:02 -0400
Perhaps because I'm the daughter of a historian, I loved doing history as a student and love teaching it. My favorite way to engage children with the past is through the use of real stuff, aka primary sources. My fourth graders, for example, have the best time "translating" a few pages from a 1620 journal of the Pilgrims (no conventional spelling and all sorts of unusual words to figure out) and think it is so cool to discover where the stuff of our Thanksgiving myth originated. Seeking out traces of past immigrant lives on a walking tour of lower Manhattan is fascinating to all of us. Analyzing an old photograph, handling a very old toy, or tasting a recreated colonial meal are all ways my students delight in learning about the past. Seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting the past --- that is what makes it engaging and interesting to my students. I also love introducing them to the heart of doing history --- historical research. They really enjoy digging deep into a variety of sources to ferret out all they can on a particular topic. And by doing so they begin to build a picture, a sense, an image of what a past time was like.
As a result of my experiential and intellectual orientation to the teaching of history I've been very skittish about teaching history with historical fiction. Historical fiction directs the reader too much (all good fiction leads you on a particular story path after all) and I want children to do the work of making up that path for themselves. Historical fiction gives them a particular point of view, but I want them to get a bunch of POVs and then figure out things from themselves. Historical fiction can (as Megan noted) have problems with authenticity and accuracy.
Of course others sources can be inaccurate too, but part of learning how to do history is to learn how to read sources and be alert to possible inaccuracies. I want kids to build their own view of the past, not ride on the coattails of an author of historical fiction.
Good authors provide a path, a point of view, voice and more. At least that is a lot of what I have my students look for in a piece of literature. As a teacher of history I'm doing something different and I feel that the same elements that make fiction great reduce it when it is used to do history. Studying fiction and studying the past involve different skills and intellectual tools to me. Sure, some overlap, but the disciplines are quite different. In one case, an aesthetic stance is privileged, in the other an efferent.
However, for those who have read this far, a couple of years ago (after many a discussion/argument about historical fiction), I began a directed yearlong study of the genre in my fourth grade class. I continued my history work, but at points had the kids read historical fiction and together we analyzed it and considered what made these novels and picture books good works of historical fiction. What, we wondered, had to be in them to make them good? How much history? What about voice, setting, POV, description and all the other stuff that made others grand works of literature good? Did too much factual info deaden them as fiction? Or did they need more? Did they have to be informational? Or just great stories? The kids and I looked at these all year long and then they wrote their own works of historical fiction on a topic we researched and studied in depth (the Pilgrims). I've shown them works where I think the authors did a good job presenting the past and those where I felt it was problematic. (I'm not naming names, but I have one book that has been well-reviewed that reads as if the author first wrote the dialog in today's language and then used her/his word processor to replace contemporary worlds with "old" ones. Contemporary idioms remain and it all clangs wrongly in our ears.) My kids do the coolest job writing their own works of historical fiction since they've really studied both the genre and the period of history in which their stories take place.
Monica
PS I've written a few books for teachers on teaching history and, for anyone interested, will be doing a workshop on teaching history with primary sources at the Donnell Library in NYC on May 22nd.
Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York NY edinger at dalton.org monicaedinger at yahoo.com
Received on Thu 06 May 2004 04:37:02 AM CDT
Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 05:37:02 -0400
Perhaps because I'm the daughter of a historian, I loved doing history as a student and love teaching it. My favorite way to engage children with the past is through the use of real stuff, aka primary sources. My fourth graders, for example, have the best time "translating" a few pages from a 1620 journal of the Pilgrims (no conventional spelling and all sorts of unusual words to figure out) and think it is so cool to discover where the stuff of our Thanksgiving myth originated. Seeking out traces of past immigrant lives on a walking tour of lower Manhattan is fascinating to all of us. Analyzing an old photograph, handling a very old toy, or tasting a recreated colonial meal are all ways my students delight in learning about the past. Seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting the past --- that is what makes it engaging and interesting to my students. I also love introducing them to the heart of doing history --- historical research. They really enjoy digging deep into a variety of sources to ferret out all they can on a particular topic. And by doing so they begin to build a picture, a sense, an image of what a past time was like.
As a result of my experiential and intellectual orientation to the teaching of history I've been very skittish about teaching history with historical fiction. Historical fiction directs the reader too much (all good fiction leads you on a particular story path after all) and I want children to do the work of making up that path for themselves. Historical fiction gives them a particular point of view, but I want them to get a bunch of POVs and then figure out things from themselves. Historical fiction can (as Megan noted) have problems with authenticity and accuracy.
Of course others sources can be inaccurate too, but part of learning how to do history is to learn how to read sources and be alert to possible inaccuracies. I want kids to build their own view of the past, not ride on the coattails of an author of historical fiction.
Good authors provide a path, a point of view, voice and more. At least that is a lot of what I have my students look for in a piece of literature. As a teacher of history I'm doing something different and I feel that the same elements that make fiction great reduce it when it is used to do history. Studying fiction and studying the past involve different skills and intellectual tools to me. Sure, some overlap, but the disciplines are quite different. In one case, an aesthetic stance is privileged, in the other an efferent.
However, for those who have read this far, a couple of years ago (after many a discussion/argument about historical fiction), I began a directed yearlong study of the genre in my fourth grade class. I continued my history work, but at points had the kids read historical fiction and together we analyzed it and considered what made these novels and picture books good works of historical fiction. What, we wondered, had to be in them to make them good? How much history? What about voice, setting, POV, description and all the other stuff that made others grand works of literature good? Did too much factual info deaden them as fiction? Or did they need more? Did they have to be informational? Or just great stories? The kids and I looked at these all year long and then they wrote their own works of historical fiction on a topic we researched and studied in depth (the Pilgrims). I've shown them works where I think the authors did a good job presenting the past and those where I felt it was problematic. (I'm not naming names, but I have one book that has been well-reviewed that reads as if the author first wrote the dialog in today's language and then used her/his word processor to replace contemporary worlds with "old" ones. Contemporary idioms remain and it all clangs wrongly in our ears.) My kids do the coolest job writing their own works of historical fiction since they've really studied both the genre and the period of history in which their stories take place.
Monica
PS I've written a few books for teachers on teaching history and, for anyone interested, will be doing a workshop on teaching history with primary sources at the Donnell Library in NYC on May 22nd.
Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York NY edinger at dalton.org monicaedinger at yahoo.com
Received on Thu 06 May 2004 04:37:02 AM CDT
