The Vanishing Past by Trilby Kent

Author:Trilby Kent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sutherland House Books
Published: 2022-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

III

WHAT CAN BE DONE

Success stories

DANUTA KEAN WAS IN her forties when she decided to leave a successful career in journalism to retrain as a high school history teacher. I’d written reviews for her when she worked as a magazine books editor, and when I heard about her decision to change professions, I was eager to know more. Given the challenges and stresses of school teaching, and the various raging controversies around history teaching in Britain today, I was curious to find out why it seemed like an attractive move.

Danuta told me that she’d grown increasingly frustrated with journalism, a not uncommon complaint, and felt, after a good run that included producing five reports on diversity, as well as writing and editing the Guardian’s books website, that she wanted to move to help support a younger generation facing an increasingly unpredictable world. Furthermore, as she saw it, the move to teaching history was actually an outgrowth of something she’d been nurturing all along: a love for story.

The first in her family to do A-levels, let alone go to university, Danuta loved history and writing from the start. “I was obsessed with non-fiction accounts of history at a very young age,” she told me. “I remember being fascinated by pictures of Charles I on the scaffold with his head cut off. This sounds gory, but I wanted to understand where that brutality came from and how we respond to it.” (I suspect most writers and historians could draw on a similar moment: I can certainly vividly recall being fascinated, at age seven, by a colourized engraving of a gendarme holding up the bloody head of Louis XVI).

History was also something Danuta related to on a personal level. “My mother’s family was Irish Catholic, and storytelling about ancestors is fundamental to their culture. I believe one of the failures of the history curriculum has been to not engage with children from broader cultural backgrounds and to capitalize on the oral storytelling tradition many of us grew up in.”

All humans share an instinct for storytelling, as well as a need for joined-up narratives that help us make sense of the world. Cognitive scientist Jerome Bruner described two ways of knowing—paradigmatic and narrative—the second of which draws on emotion to strengthen the power of memory. Stories engage our feelings, which makes us interested in a subject; but they also give shape to information, which helps us develop understanding.

The most effective stories aren’t just about feelings, however. As an award-winning journalist and journalism instructor, Danuta says, “I’ve noticed a real difference in those who have an Eng Lit degree and those with History degrees. The former tend to care more about the writing and aren’t [necessarily as] good at the research and challenging underlying assumptions.”

It’s this passion for telling stories well—and for interrogating the stories we’re told on a daily basis—that informs the most innovative and engaging approaches to teaching history today.

In 2008, Bill Gates happened upon a collection of talks by Australian professor Dr. David Christian, released as part of the Teaching Company’s Big Courses DVD series.

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