How to Work with Stories in the Classroom

Every summer as the new school year approached, I took the chance to reflect on the panorama of history from which I would draw in preparing for the coming year’s classes. Invariably I would immerse myself again in the stories, those collections of people, events and images that our history so richly and colorfully provides us.

I didn’t begin my teaching career that way. Back then I focused on the outline, the big picture of history, its major themes, its political leaders and the most impactful events—all that, in short, which you can quickly get by leafing through a history textbook. It is important to consider all this, of course, and the students do need an overall outline of events (especially in the high school), but it is far better, it seems to me, to start with the story and allow the framework of history to come to meet it.

Oddly enough, I found it much easier to get students to think about history, to engage with ideas, to draw conclusions about what they have learned, and to feel its relevance to life, if you begin with the well-told story. My most successful classes have arisen when I took the time to convey a moment in history the most carefully and vividly, drawing on all my powers of imagination and asking them to do the same.

Alfred North Whitehead put it this way:

"Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow or other it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance."

In short, stories lead you into life. The well-told story gives the hearer (or reader) the space to enter fully into a historical moment. It is easy these days to live on the surface of things, and for many that may be especially true in their history lessons. History, we may easily think, involves the deeds of governments, armies and other institutions; the reality, though, is that it involves people—individuals who got out of bed in the morning and faced the challenges of the day. To forget that—to not imagine our way into a particular place and time, into the hopes and fears of particular people—is to miss out on the experience of history. Entering our national experience through the well-told story allows us to take the dry bones of history and bring them to life.

Stories engage the imagination. We can all draw on our memories to take a jaunt back into a place we have been, a place that may continue to inspire us. Stories taken from history allow us to take another kind of jaunt, only back in time. We step back with our mind’s eye into the distant past, drawing on all our senses to imagine our way into a situation. It is sight which steps forward first, allowing us to “see” it all with our mind’s eye: the landscape, the time of day, the weather and, above all, the people—how they dressed, how they arrived there, their hopes and fears—all that goes into recreating a full-blown scene of human activity.

And stories engage our feelings. If we linger together before a key moment in history, calmly looking at a well-drawn scene, living into the motivations and personalities of the individuals involved, we may find, arising from somewhere deep down in us, some subtle, intimate feelings. Something resounds in us, however quietly, if we take the time to become aware of it. We tap on a life of feeling that is our own inward treasure, and we may even feel more intensely alive.

And that brings me to another side of the place of feeling in the classroom. Adolescents know a great deal about feelings, since they live with them so intimately. Their passing emotional states can arise quickly and latch on to an experience. But history presentations can allow them to quietly engage with a deeper core of their own feeling experience. It may not happen every day, but if from time to time they can sink themselves into a moment in history, go on with their day, and then “sleep on it” in the night, the next morning may find them able to re-discover it, enriched by their own life experience. That can be a gift to the young person, helping her to look with the delicate eye of feeling into significant moments of her own life. It all depends on how fully the teacher goes through the process of deeply engaging herself with that sliver of history, letting it take shape inwardly and then presenting it with interest and, yes, rich feeling.

Stories can act to enliven one's thinking. Here it is especially important to give the story some time to live in you—and in your students. Then, when you lift it again out of your memory, your thinking can fully engage with it. Nothing can more effectively kill the historical experience than prematurely forcing it into the matrix of our preexisting thoughts. But now, having allowed the story to take inner shape, we can meet it again, visualizing the scene once more, re-enlivening the experience with our feeling life. Then, when we bring our thinking to bear on it, we can consider it in fresh ways.

This works especially well when our story brings a person or a group of people face to face with a challenge, whether physical or moral. The Wright Brothers came to a crisis where they almost abandoned their project; Lillian Wald hesitated to take her nursing experience into the slums until a little girl appealed to her; Abraham Lincoln agonized over how to end slavery without losing his chance to preserve the Union. It is a rich experience if a group of young people, having entered deeply into such a situation, can then engage with one another in a thoughtful conversation. When, as often happens, students come to see it from different angles, seeing different approaches, the discussion can lead in interesting, life-affirming directions.

This leads to yet another role of stories: inspiring the moral imagination. What motivates us to take action? Lincoln often went back in his memory to those days of youth where, reading in the firelight, he had immersed himself in the heroic deeds of men and women during the American Revolution; such stories would later inspire him during the darkest days of the Civil War. Their ideals and their sacrifice provided him with the determination that he would draw on as he brought the nation through its greatest crisis.

Such stories, well-told and well-imagined, can uplift, can give direction to the human spirit, can cultivate a determination to act out of honesty and compassion. And they can fire the imagination, which to be effective must always be a moral imagination. They may lie latent for years and then, whether consciously or unconsciously, stir us to take action in the face of injustice, to come up with a new idea for one’s community, or to bring people together in producing something of service to society. This was true in the early days of the Republic, and it is still very true today.

And What About Facts?

"Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the mind of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them."
—Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Now, these lines at the beginning of Dickens' great novel, as spoken by Mr. Gradgind, are hardly the model for our teaching of history. He considers youngsters as little machines into which we have to pour our facts, so that they can all fit together in such a way that the children grow into useful adults. Fantasy? Imagination? Strip them away!

Facts have their place, of course. There are those facts—perhaps a hundred of them (make a list for yourself sometime), along with a dozen or so dates—that no one should ever leave home without. This requires little time to learn and only an occasional review.

Our task, however, is to strike the right balance between the facts—the skeleton of history—and the vivid portrayal of events and people—the sinews and muscles. Again, Mr. Whitehead expressed it well:

It must never be forgotten that education is not a process of packing articles in a trunk. Such a simile is entirely inapplicable. It is, of course, a process completely of its own peculiar genus. Its nearest analogue is the assimilation of food by a living organism: and we all know how necessary to health is palatable food under suitable conditions.

Finding the Right Stories

One young history teacher once asked me, Where do you get all those stories? Stories are the lifeblood of history teaching. But how do we choose them? It is not really so different from other subjects of study. When a teacher engages her students with biology, she will begin with her own fascination for, say, the movement of earthworms in the soil. The art history teacher may present a Dutch landscape painting and ask students to consider with him just how the colors and forms work together. In each case we bring something with which the students can deeply engage with their hearts as well as their heads. What is the experience telling us? How do our feelings and thoughts bring us new insights?

It is no different with history. We first look out in our mind's eye over the canvas of American history, and let our attention come to focus on a particular time and place. It might, for instance, be the building of the Erie Canal. We imagine, as concretely as we can, the men laboring as they cut through the rock near Rochester. Or we imagine the new towns arising along the way and the kinds of people who come to dwell there. Or we can consider the way people transported goods before the canal. We can imagine an immigrant family journeying westward on a canal boat, silently watching the world go by. What hopes and dreams would they have? Stories—if we have truly made themselves our own—engage the feelings; we draw on their whole being to draw them deeply into a particular time and place.

Using this as a way in, we now allow questions to arise in us: What led to its construction? What was the vision that inspired those who conceived it? What problems did it address? What changes might it bring to the lives of those who built it, or lived alongside it, or worked on it, or made use of it? What problems were presented by its construction? Lake Erie stood hundreds of feet higher than the Hudson River at Albany. How can a boat go up to a higher level? Can students themselves come up with a solution? How did a lock work? And how, anyway, does a boat move through the canal? How does a canal cross a river? The questions take us ever deeper into the subject, while allowing their thinking to work in a way that is full of life.

From there we can step back and place it all in time and space. What were the years of construction? How does it fit in to the other events and issues within the nation? Summarize the challenges that the canal addressed, the technology and labor it required, and the effects it brought. These facts are often all that students may read in a textbook. Presenting them with such a summary may be useful, but only when they have already gone through this process: first, allowing them to engage the subject—through story, through inner imagination—with their feelings; second, letting questions arise that activate their thinking; and, finally, to connect it to the framework of American History.

But there is one more thing that remains to be done. Through the story we have been engaging them with their feelings, allowing them then to feel how their thinking takes hold of the situation, and finding the context in which this particular slice of human experience fits into the surrounding history. We now look to find a way by which the students can take it further—in discussion, or art, or writing...some form of expression that draws on their whole being. It might arise out of the subject itself, or we might bring something to class—perhaps from the present day—that sheds a different light on the issue at hand.

How Do We Tell Such Stories?

Now the answer to this may seem obvious to you, and if that is the case, great! You are a natural storyteller. And whether you are a teacher or not, I hope you will tell these and other stories; it is the best way to make them your own. But I have heard from teachers and students alike that they can't learn an entire story. Well, if by that you mean memorize—and I have heard this—then of course not. But you can learn it! We can all tell a vivid story. You have had an adventure, perhaps climbing a mountain, getting a little lost, taking shelter during a lightning storm, then finding yourself stumbling about in fog only to have it lift, opening up a new vista. It was your experience, and you could describe it with vividness and rich feeling.

This you can do. It becomes more of a challenge when it comes to, say, the journey of Lewis and Clark. How do we tell it so it doesn't become a gray rendition of the facts and events? I would suggest that you begin by finding one moment in that long drama that you can make vivid to yourself. Settle in to it, letting the images and sounds and feelings arise. If you can do it particularly well for one or two key moments of the story, you will be amazed at how much the rest of the story comes to life, as well. A history presentation should not be an overwhelming task. Just start small, live into it, and the rest will come.

Early in my teaching life, I began to ask my students to make their own history presentations. I learned over time that I should ask them to do what I have just described. First find a story that is manageable, such as the Apollo XI mission to the moon. Find a book on the space missions and read the several paragraphs or pages devoted to this particular mission. Once you have the broad strokes of what happened, identify one key moment—something that particularly interests you—and read everything you can about it. Find books devoted solely to the Apollo missions. Look for eyewitness accounts. You might read several accounts of the last few minutes, for example, when communication with earth was cut off, when those of us watching back home could only sit and wait. Would we ever hear from them again? I would then ask the students to give a one-minute “pre-presentation” to the class of such a central moment. Use your dramatic abilities! Don't forget to use your senses, imagining your way into it with your full being. If you can see the moon approaching and hear the crackle of the instrument panel, or feel the capsule shift directions, then we will be able to have the experience, too. Later, when you give your actual fifteen-minute presentation—so I would tell them—your whole report will come alive.

This is how I have approached most of the stories in this book. Yes, in each case there is an overview of what happened. But I have selected certain moments within the broader story and have developed them with greater vividness. In each case I could have chosen other moments. Perhaps you will. Sometimes they are there because they make dramatic sense: those minutes, for instance, when Charles Lindbergh flew toward Le Bourget airport in Paris after dark, hoping that they hadn’t gone home and turned off the runway lights (they hadn’t.) Or, to show the deeper significance of what happened at Little Rock Central High School in 1957, I might portray the moment Elizabeth Eckford stepped off the bus and had to walk into a screaming crowd. There are quieter moments, too, such as when the Wright Brothers set themselves to build a home-made wind tunnel to determine the proper form of the wing and the propeller. Or it could be the moment when the young lawyer, John Adams, decided he would come to the defense of the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre—even at the risk of his own career. Each such moment can not only bring a subject to life, it can lead you—and, if you are a teacher, your classes—to consider more deeply such themes as courage, creativity and justice. Whatever moment you choose, live into it deeply and it will provide your class with a window into history that can set in motion secret stirrings in their hearts. And this may awaken into impulses for initiative in their adult lives…perhaps decades hence.

Working With A Story

With so much history to learn, why would we stop to tell a story so involved as say, the presentation here on Lincoln or the Wright Brothers? And, besides, aren't adolescents there to engage their thinking? What role would such a story play?

Yes, it is possible to get so involved with our story-telling that the overall sweep of history, with all of its interlocking themes and issues, gets missed. Furthermore, it is possible to regale students with stories without engaging their thinking. But to teach history without giving a central place for the well-crafted story is to deprive students of a fundamental tool for understanding—and for their own self-expression.

The key to good history teaching is to bring the students fully into a situation with as much colorful detail and vivid characters as you can muster. Failing to do this sends you down the road to an intellectual treatment of events that both removes the life from your teaching and the possibility of engendering creative and morally purposeful thinking. And, believe me, I have failed—over and over—in both these respects, all because I didn't take the time to bring them into the lifeblood of a human situation.

Take the story with which we began, the “Liberators.” The following day one might ask students to share moments that arise most vividly in their imaginations. By eighth grade it makes little sense to retell the entire story, as one might do in the earlier grades. But sharing some key moments may give the members of the class the opportunity to call again on their imaginations.

This story presents us inevitably with the question: What was it that led them to act as they did? What would cause them to go against direct orders and undertake an action that verged on mutiny? After all, people often hesitate to act even when they don't face negative consequences. How many people would have stood up for a slave family when everything stands in the way—laws they are bound to follow, officers giving direct orders to stand down, the strong possibility of facing a court-martial? And yet act they did. We will find other examples of such actions in our study of American History. The question invariably becomes: not, Why does injustice exist or continue? but, rather, Why do people go against so many obstacles, inner and outer, to confront injustice? Why do people act? And where do they summon the inner resources to make a difference?

I hope that the stories in this book will inspire you to develop them in your own way, with your own style. However you use them, I hope that they will be a catalyst for your own journey into history. And you will be on your way to discovering yet other moments in our nation’s history, allowing you to develop those themes which will have the most meaning for the students sitting before you.