The role of narrative in our classrooms

"Narrative is one tool students use to make sense of history, as they take the variety of historical people and events they have learned about, both in and out of school, and collapse them into a simplified cause-and-effect chain with each of the expected elements. Perhaps the most important affordance of this tool is that it aids students in their search for coherence in history" (Barton and Levstik, p. 136).

This chapter on narrative structure in the history classroom was an excellent and illuminating piece of work. This passage in particular allows the reader to understand the rationale that many teachers use for the narrative structure of their curriculum. Essentially, the narrative serves as a large-scale work of metacognition, whereby the students can contextualize and simplify the content, even individualize their understanding. The argument is also that this would make the content more engaging and accessible, thereby promoting greater retention by students. This argument is not totally without merit, and indeed the use of narrative in the American history classroom is so ubiquitous that most of us actually have trouble conceiving an alternative form of teaching history. As the passage above reminds us, it really is a grand way to string together different effects, examine causality and contextualize different events.

As beautiful as it may seem, not all is well with the narrative structure. The most obvious drawback has to do with the fact that it has the effect of simplifying everything that is taught. A number of studies cited in the text repeatedly showed that all the historical knowledge students showed was in the context of the narrative. Interestingly, students did recall basic facts, but often out of order and always in the context of the narrative. Therefore, it is obvious that there is some danger in using the narrative as a framework for the history classroom, but most American teachers see it as inevitable and would continue to frame their classes around it.

In an instructional context, it is very obvious to see how the narrative structure could be used. Basically, it works as a sort of meta-instruction, a kind of bare bones instruction in to which students and teachers alike can insert information. However, the teacher needs to be constantly assessing and monitoring the narrative to ensure that the information taken away is not only correct, but that it also contains a certain depth for students to grasp. Furthermore, it needs to emphasized that there are different types of narratives for consideration. Not only are we dealing with the overall narrative of the class (for example, that of European or American history), but we are also dealing with a number of smaller narratives that will complement the principal one. For instance, narratives about the lives of individuals can provide insight into the lives of those who changed their society, on the one hand, and on the other can provide insight into the daily lives of the average person during a certain time period.