Using Storytelling in the History Classroom

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic forcing the school and our History department to deliver lessons virtually we have been discussing in our departmental meetings how we can engage our students in the usual capacity. We decided that being a good history teacher is generally geared around your ability to bring the past to life, relate it to contemporary issues and being able to tell a really engaging story. Our department obviously achieves this through a number of strategies, but the final point that portrays our ability to tell a really engaging story was one that we thought we could develop further during these trying times. Over the course of the break, I revisited a book that was provided to our department by our T&L coordinator entitled ‘Making every history lesson count’ by Chris Runeckles. Runeckles places a special emphasis on the History teacher's ability to ‘tell the story’. The rationale behind this thinking was that history specialists should not waste the opportunity to tell the students a great story that they know exceptionally well from years of practice, the teacher feels extremely comfortable and as a result can place emphasis on aspects of the story that they know will captivate the class and generate genuine interest (the need for this interest has never been more essential in this current virtual climate). Runeckles suggested that the benefits of this approach can be supported by evidence with psychologists finding that stories are ‘psychologically privileged’ and we have a greater ability to remember information when presented as a narrative. ‘History, unlike other subjects don't have to search for the story within the content, they just need to ensure that it is not lost amongst all of the other teaching clutter’. Moving forward, the history department at Markham has decided to introduce the idea of macro stories that have been outlined in the book. This will involve us essentially starting each unit with a one lesson narrative overview that summarizes the whole topic that will be covered in the following weeks. In doing this we are aiming to provide the students with a skeleton story outline that will be fleshed out as we progress through the unit, in turn, allowing the students to add layers of analysis and inference that helps them build a picture that Runeckles suggests allows students to not just see the narrative but also the detail and important historical concepts such as cause and effect. The book comments that “in this way, the teaching can be rooted in the story, but also recognises that the teacher's role in delivering history does not start and finish with the narrative”.

Sources: Making every history lesson count; Runeckles.Chris; Crown House 2018