“The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.”
Back when I was studying for my PGCE, I wrote my dissertation on storytelling in teaching History. I uncovered several sources that supported the use of storytelling both from a pedagogy and psychology point of view. Indeed, the so-called Father of History, Herodotus wrote in a narrative form. History non-fiction appears regularly in the book charts. It is not because people love to devour the facts and details of History nor is it because people want to critically analyse the historiography but because people love a story and history has the best.
That is not to say that we don’t want our students to be able to explain, analyse and evaluate history. Of course, we do! But I would argue that to be able to do this they must first be able to tell the story.
Current pedagogy encourages teachers to use retrieval practice. Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve certainly supports the science behind this. The science tells us it is important to pick up concepts at regular intervals and I do not doubt this. However, I would argue that this is done badly in the teaching of History. Too often retrieval practice is reduced to a quick pop quiz at the beginning or end of the lesson, where students recall fact about History. They will in time, if retrieval practice is working, be able to tell you who was the president of the US at the Potsdam conference, what year the Revolt of the Northern Earls took place and even the number of votes the Nazi’s got at the 1932 election. But is this useful? I would suggest not. It may be useful in science to memorise an equation but the number of crimes in the Black act is an incidental detail.
Having taught GCSE History for 10 years, I can give you the overall narratives of the topics I teach without having to refer to textbooks or the internet. If you asked me who was the Russian premier during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I may have to check. Because these details are not the History. The story is the history, and our students get better grades when they know the story.
When we pursue the details and teach the history in fragments, for example, teaching a lesson on the consequences of the Munich Putsch, we risk losing the story. Students end up with fragments in their minds and no way to stick them together. Higher ability students are often able to piece this together themselves, but the lower ability students struggle. I remember a student a few years ago cam out of her Cold War exam distraught. She hadn’t remembered what happened at Yalta nor which of the Berlin Crisis was which, but she did well on the consequence question. She had been asked the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union. She had written about capitalism in Russia and had summed it up in the phrase “Levi’s and Pepsi”. She was of course right and the reason she remembered this was because we had listened to a podcast by a woman who was 13 at the time, and her telling of her experiences. The student in question was on paper very low band, but she remembered the story.
To give an example, both my own children took GCSE History. My eldest unfortunately, is a bit too much like me and thought he could just wing it through school. On the night before his exam, he came to me in a panic because, in his own words, “I don’t know any of it!”. So as a good mum I did my best. I sat down with him and his revision books and started to reteach the whole of Crime and Punishment! I quickly realised there was no way we could cover a fraction of the course in the time we had so I told him the story. The story of Crime and Punishment in England from the Romans to now. I told it in Chronological order, I linked events backwards and forwards, I even included silly asides. The next day he sat the exam. I am proud to say he got a B in that exam. Not from knowing the details or even from knowing how to answer the questions (although that does help, and I will be writing more about that another time) but from being able to tell the story.
Once an overall narrative is understood it is much easier for the student to begin to analyse it. Once they have the story of Elizabeth’s reign in their heads, they know the challenges she faced and problems she overcame, as a story, they can then begin to see how the events tie together. From that they can explain how the Religious Settlement led to the Revolt of the Northern Earls, then they can analyse which of the plots posed the greatest threat and finally evaluate to what extent the weather was a major cause of the failure of the Spanish Armada.
So, we should be interleaving and connecting the stories. There are simple ways to do this. Storyboarding and narrative accounts are obvious tools, but drama and films play their part also. I do not pretend to have a solution to this, but I strongly believe that as history teachers we should be thinking about the story we tell first and foremost.