Thursday, January 15, 2009

Getting Students to Read Historical Novels

Literacy and Social Studies should go hand-in-hand. It’s a natural blending of two powerful forces that can enhance the learning and understanding of our students.

Literacy can take several forms, from understanding the organizational methods used by a textbook to deciphering a population graph to comparing historical maps to…. reading nonfiction as well as fictional books with a historical basis. This isn't just limited to history: any of the social studies -geography, economics, psychology, government, etc. - fall into this realm.

There are many advantages to using these written resources – especially fictional – in the Social Studies classroom. It can add color and character to otherwise dry places and figures. It can add a depth of reasoning as to why people did what they did, and often fiction can do this in a way that nonfiction cannot.

Many Social Studies teachers hesitate to encourage their student to read ‘historical fiction’ because, well, it’s fiction! But, with a good selection of material and a process to help the students gain a true understanding of history, historical fiction can be a very useful resource.

One of the blogs that I follow is Speaking of History, created by Eric Langhorst from Liberty, MO. In his blog, Langhorst provided a list of books, a form to use with students to enable them to get the most out of the reading, as well as a podcast describing the process. It’s a worthwhile thing to read and listen to. Click on Speaking of History to go to the blog entry.

Essential question: Is historical fiction a valuable tool to use in our Social Studies classrooms to enhance the understanding of the students?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I too have looked at Langhorst's web site, and I tunes ususally downloads some of his podcasts.
An interesting book regarding the fictional quality of history itself is Ann Curthorys and John Dockers's book aptly titled "Is history fiction?"
One can also look at the postmodern historians and the "turn to language" for information regarding the fictional narrative of history.