Page 208 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

180 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
they formulate and remember in story form. The stories are built around one or a small group of central figures and include attention to their goals, strategies undertaken to accomplish those goals (often involving solving problems or overcoming obstacles in the process), and the outcomes of these actions for the central figures and others in the story. The narrative format provides a natural way to remember a great many of the details used to fill out the story, organized within the goal-strategy-outcome “story grammar.”
This makes the narrative format a powerful vehicle for teachers to use in helping stu- dents bridge the familiar to the less familiar. Children can understand information about long ago and far away when the information is represented as stories of people pursuing goals that the students have done themselves, can be shown, or can be helped to imagine. Just as children can understand fictional creatures (e.g., Hobbits) and worlds (e.g., Harry Potter’s) conveyed through narrative formats, they can understand stories about life in the past or in other cultures, so long as the depicted events lie within their own experi- ences or imagined based on those experiences.
Many aspects of elementary social studies are amenable to representation within nar- rative structures, especially those that involve human actions that occur in steps, stages, or series of events unfolding over time. History is the most obvious example. Although it has its abstract and analytic aspects, much of history involves reconstructing stories of specific events (e.g., the American Revolution) or changes over time (e.g., in modes of transportation). Studies of children’s historical learning indicate that much of what they retain about history is organized within narrative structures, usually compressions of larger trends into stories that focus around goal-oriented activities or conflicts involv- ing a few key figures (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Brophy & VanSledright, 1997). They tend to think of the American Revolution, for example, as a fight between King George of England and George Washington and other Americans who resented his taxes and unfair treatment, not as a protracted and multi-faceted conflict between a sovereign nation and a federation of colonies about to become a nation.
Elementary-grade children may be limited in their ability to understand the geopo- litical aspects of the past, but they can understand wars as stories of attempts to gain control over land or other resources, voyages of discovery as attempts to satisfy curi- osity and acquire riches, immigration as attempts to escape oppression or exploit economic opportunities, and so on. Most historical events and trends involved people engaged in goal-oriented behavior, and thus can be conveyed using narrative formats.
Although it is less commonly recognized, narrative formats also are well suited to conveying information about many of the geographical and social science aspects of social studies, especially those involving human actions related to cultural universals. To teach about societies and cultures, whether past or present, teachers can construct narratives explaining how the people meet their basic needs for food, clothing, and shel- ter within the affordances and constraints of local climate and natural resources, how they communicate and travel locally and across longer distances, and how they act both individually (or as families) and collectively (through their governments) to meet needs and pursue agendas.
These stories will provide frequent opportunities to introduce basic concepts and principles of geography, economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. Because they focus on humans engaged in goal-oriented behavior, they also provide fre- quent opportunities to explore causal relationships and make explicit the human inten- tions and economic or political processes that underlie and explain human behavior but often go unrecognized and thus unappreciated by children. Stories about how key inven- tions made qualitative changes in people’s lives, about why Americans eat relatively more
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