One
key point in the article worth emphasizing is the fact that historical fiction
is still fiction. Fiction may be more appealing than a history textbook and
perhaps more entertaining and engaging, but using historical fiction to help
students think about the past poses challenges as well.
So, how can we use historical
fiction to promote critical thinking and “counter the often static and
monolithic view of the past”? Diamond cites the work of Sara Schwebel, author
of Child-Sized Fictions of the Past in
U.S. Classrooms, as one answer. Schwebel stresses an interdisciplinary
approach, in which students think about different accounts and points of view
in order to interrogate historical fiction as an “historical argument” rather
than simple facts or historical truth.
We think the interdisciplinary and
multi-text approach is key to helping students think critically and see those
different points of view in any kind of text. And we want to underscore how
students today, more than ever, need to develop this intellectual skill of
thinking critically about the information they are receiving or consuming.
Whether we are teaching historical fiction, history, literature, or even
science, students need to move beyond relatively simple questions of validity
and reliability of sources; they need to assess the accuracy of information in
terms of shades of grey, not just black and white.
Like Diamond and Schwebel, we think
the key to getting students to interrogate challenging issues is to present
them with what we call text clusters -- combinations of texts, including
multimedia texts -- that represent different perspectives in relation to a
complex issue. For example, we built a
unit around the issue of African-American domestic labor in connection with
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. We
use visuals of Aunt Jemima, excerpts from an interview with white women raised by black nannies, and a powerful audio clip of an interview with Dorothy Bolden,
an African-American domestic labor organizer, in order to get students to think
critically about how Scout’s perspective about Calpurnia is shaped and limited by
her place in the world of Macomb.
Does
Scout’s blinkered view of Calpurnia make her narrative in Mockingbird less accurate? Yes, and in literary studies we have a
term for that lack of accuracy on the part of the narrator: Scout is an unreliable
narrator. The fact that Mockingbird
is constructed around the storytelling of an unreliable narrator, however,
doesn’t make it less valuable as a text: it makes it more valuable. It
underscores how important it is for readers to think critically about the
story, about what Scout is and is not telling us, about the gaps and
distortions in her views, particularly in relation to Calpurnia. Adding other
perspectives through relevant literary and nonfiction texts, including those
that offer different avenues into Calpurnia’s world, opens up the conversation
for students.
To be
clear: this practice of careful, suspicious reading, supported by multiple
texts, makes us careful readers not just of historical fiction but of all text.
It is, as Diamond notes, very much in keeping with the Common Core. And very
valuable in a world in which thinking critically about disinformation and fake
news need to be part of every teacher’s task.
