A folktale walked into a history class…
Parikshit Sharma
This article is the story of how a folktale (usually assumed to be a piece of fiction) was a subject of study in our history classes. Moreover, this folktale did not just help us understand an event in history on a deeper level but also shed light on important concepts of the subject. The recollections and reflections that follow, elucidate the rationale behind proposing the development of creative and interdisciplinary curricula and pedagogies that allow for a deeper, more active, and self-driven study in history that is taken up by both the students and the teacher.
In May of 2021, right after I was informed that I was to teach history to the students of 8th grade, I was also told that this year would be the year when these students are to be introduced to history as a distinct discipline or subject, as we call them in schools. Though these students might have been familiar with the term ‘history’, they apparently had never spent dedicated time to consolidate all that they know into defining what ‘history’ is. Having come to know of this, I felt obliged, and at the same time excited, to initiate the course of the year by spending the starting few weeks with my students on some important questions of history. Questions with a conceptual touch to them, such as, ‘What is history and what is not history’, ‘Is there anything called false or true history?’, ‘What do historians do?’, ‘Is evidence always needed in history?’, ‘Is history only about evidence? Or is evidence a small part of it?’, ‘What role does interpretation play in this?’, ‘What is the relationship between the historian and the facts?’, ‘Is history about the truth? Or is it about arguing what the truth is, or could be, or should be’, and many more like these.
Now, it was one thing to prepare a list of such questions and take them to the class, but teaching is not just pretending to be a question paper and walking up to the student. Though asking questions is an essential part of teaching, so is participating with the students in creating possible or probable answers to those same questions, and to work with them to form different kinds of theses on any subject(s) by exposing them to different kinds of ideas on the same. As Singer argues, “If we are going to teach students about history… we have to have some idea what each discipline includes. I am referring not only to information about the past and present – that part is laid out effectively in textbooks – but also to ideas about how practitioners of these disciplines work, insights into the motivation of people and societies, opinions about the way the world operates and changes, and theories about the connections among past, present, and future.” (Singer 2003, 20). So, considering Singer’s argument, I found that it became a necessity for myself to practice a pedagogy that allowed me to partake, with my students, in the whole process of learning what the discipline of history offered us or wanted us to learn from it.
As the kind of pedagogy that called for my attention became clear, the question of ‘why to teach history’ also seemed to come to a resolution. As we began classes with the module filled with the above-mentioned questions called ‘Introduction to History’, my students and I collectively came to certain understandings about the nature of the discipline that we were being exposed to. For instance, in a discussion about historical facts and their interpretation, and how different historians have different interpretations, how these historians also interpret the facts with their own biases and limitations, a student burst out in a frustrated excitement and said, “Pari! We have no way of knowing that all the people involved in this are trustworthy or not, or that these processes of interpreting even work, what if they made a mistake?’ In a way this student challenged the scientific nature of a historical research, and to our surprise another student came up with the defence and said, “But if we do not study what they are talking about, then we might not be able to catch their mistakes, correct them, and in this process learn more about the past as well as the historian.”
There it was, our first reason for why we study history. Singer argues that “History gives us both the information and the means for understanding our world. History is the past, and it is the human effort to study, understand, and utilize the past to help us make choices about, and to shape, the future.” (Singer 2003, 19). As a teacher, through that discussion, I learnt that the reason we must teach history is not so that our students just know about the past, but that they also learn how to read, engage, examine, analyze, question, challenge and theorize about both, the past as well as theories about the past. Another thing that happened, because of practicing such a pedagogy that celebrated these kind of thought experiments and challenges the students brought to the class and the subject matter at hand, was that it gave a fairly organic shape to the curriculum, as it became driven according to the kind of inquiries that the students aspire to pursue in history classes. After all, ‘history’ did come from a Greek origin – historia, meaning ‘knowledge through inquiry’.
To give an example, while studying about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in the module on the ‘Age of Exploration and Colonialism’, we studied a lot about how the horrors of slavery expanded and intensified with the European exploration and the expansion of their colonies in the Americas, ‘The New world’ . We studied how in the name of trade, innocent people, mostly of African origin were bought and sold, butchered, lynched, and starved. Moreover, this whole enterprise was seen to be a cost-effective and efficient method to grow cash-crops that were then sold for profit in the countries of the colonists.
I remember one girl in my class commenting, “How the profit of Europeans trumped the humanity and dignity of so many people.” From the very beginning, students were hooked to this class, probably because most of them couldn’t believe how people were treated as cargo and written about in the ‘white man’s’ journals as if they were not people but rice, grains, gunpowder, sugar, etc. When we learnt how in the middle passage of the slave trade route, each slave had only about a space of six feet in length and sixteen inches in width, and because they were chained to the floor, they could not even turn over. We had a long discussion on personal space and the freedom to move our bodies according to our own will. The students also measured the space of the table they sat on to understand the conditions of the slaves on the slave boats. Many students spoke about the discomfort they felt learning about these realities.
I remember how the heads of my students turned to each other with horror when we discussed that around 15 per cent of the ‘enslaved people’ died in the four-month boat journey due to disease, malnutrition and heat. I remember one boy in the class saying, “That means 5.1 people out of 34;” 34 was the strength of our class. The sudden realization of how privileged one is to not be in such a situation seemed to have struck the learners, and while that realization sinked in, another thing that brewed with it was the curiosity to learn more about the people who went through these horrible conditions.
While all of these discussions were taking place, our classroom policy of celebrating not just what we are studying but also to engage critically with how we are studying the same, surprised us. As one girl asked me, “Pari! See, all we are learning right now is how these enslaved people were treated brutally by the colonists, but we know all of it because maybe we have some ship captain’s journal that talks about how many slaves were bought, sold, or died, or how each slave should get only a bowl of rice a day or water twice a day… and all of it is helpful for us now as today we get to know about it all, but all of our learning is still happening because the white man wrote about it. We still don’t know how the enslaved Africans saw these moments.” Another boy agreed, “Yes, they were not allowed to read or write, so how do we know what they would have written in their journals if they were allowed to keep one?” ‘Profit’ was important to the Europeans, so they wrote about that, what was important to the enslaved? What would have been important to them to the point that they would make a note in their journal?’
“If you don’t get to write or read, what would you do to convey whatever you would want to?” I asked my class. They all said simultaneously, “We would speak it.” There and then was born the possibility of a slave folktale to enter our history classroom, because our learners wanted to know what the enslaved people spoke about with each other. Virginia Hamilton’s People could fly (1985), was the folktale we studied, and to our surprise, something that could practically be fiction, did hold an ample amount of truth that existed in our textbook as well. The folktale talked about the beauty and glory of Africa, the home of the enslaved, it talked about the middle passage, it talked about the inhuman treatment of the slaves in cotton plantations, and it talked about the dream of freedom that these enslaved Africans had in their hearts. None of the students took this folktale as historical evidence, but they did learn from it about the realities that our history textbooks could not provide them with. The realities that they were curious about. It did however make us discuss why as young historians we were able to see truth in them, but how it was still difficult for it to stand alone as physical-historical evidence.
Before writing this article, I asked my students if I should share details of the overlaps of our learnings about slavery from the textbook and the folktale. My students asked me not to. One of them said, “Pari, leave it like a mystery. Let the people who read your essay become curious about this folktale.” Another student said, “And let their curiosity lead them to the discovery that we claim we were led to… they could help us see if we were right or not.” Hence, accepting the suggestion of my students, I leave the reader with just the name of the folktale and urge them to go discover the meaning we claim to have discovered in the same.
However before ending this reflection, I do want to share with my respected reader a proposition. Probably some people will frown upon the usage of a folktale in a history classroom, but I must propose the following to all. Not as historians, but as teachers of history, who are interested in working with the student to develop a historical thinking that would allow them to construct meaning that serves their curiosity about the world. I propose that as teachers we must be prepared to participate in not just learning about the subject matter, but also to maintain a reflective and critical dialogue with all the students, about how they engage with the said process. This will not only help the teacher by providing them with constant feedback from the students, but it shall also help the students become aware of their own locations in the whole movement of the learning.
Bibliography
Singer, A. J. (2003). Social Studies for Secondary Schools: Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach (1st ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum.
The author has taught history, literature and theatre at The Valley School, KFI, Bengaluru. He can be reached at parikshitsharma21@gmail.com.
