Why & How I Teach with Historical Fiction

Borrowed shamelessly from Scholastic.

By Tarry Lindquist

Here's the story on historical fiction in my classroom: It illuminates time periods, helps me integrate the curriculum, and enriches social studies. Just take Amy's word for it. At the end of our westward-expansion unit, while modeling her journal entry after a fictional account we'd read, this fifth grader wrote: "Dear Diary, July 30, 1852: This journey has been heart-wrenching, thirst-quenching, and most of all, an adventure I will never forget." Blending stories into a study of history turns the past into a dynamic place.

Of course, historical fiction doesn't stand alone in my instructional program; even the best literature cannot address skills and processes unique to social studies that kids must learn. I have students balance fiction with fact, validate historical hypotheses with research. Historical fiction is the spice.

To help you build good fiction into your social studies program, below you'll find:

• Seven Reasons I Teach with Historical Fiction
• Fifteen Fabulous New Historical Fiction Books
• Is Pocahontas Real? Discovering Where History Stops and the Story Starts
• Seven Reasons I Teach With Historical Fiction: It piques kids' curiosity.

Read more.

I can certainly attest to the efficacy of historical fiction in engaging a child's imagination about history, people, geography, sociology, and more. In about 1957 I started watching the British television series, The Adventures of Robin Hood, sstarring Richard Greene and Alan Wheatly. Something in it either spoke to an inner reality for me or implanted that reality so permanently that I have never been the same. I knew those people, that time, these cultural metaphors. Or perhaps they took me over and drew me out of my own time and place to live in theirs.

I am coming full circle now that I am crowding sixty. With my relatively recent re-immersion in writing historical fiction that comfortable old world is becoming a reality to me again. This time around it is the more accurate Middle Ages that draws me. That's not really new, since my thirst for the world of characters like Robin Hood developed in my teens when my friend Laura and I started writing about the characters who people my novel, An Involuntary King. It was my desire to place that story in a time not already taken with historical facts that would refute my fiction that led me to set it before Charlemagne when I thought no one knew anything about what was going on in the world. Now I am thirsting for further facts, to engage my imagination in real history about an era, Anglo Saxon England, that I stumbled into decades ago.

Perhaps this is why I am not fond of unicorns, dragons, and wizards and not even of the goddess religion remake of the Middle Ages. I did not fall in love with a fantasy way back in 1957 but rather a real if fictionalized world that seemed so right to me. I am smart enough now to know the truth is grittier, but I am also adult enough and sensible enough not to be repulsed. Maybe Robin didn't really take showers in a waterfall, but so what? The time doesn't so much appeal to me as it is familiar to me. Warts and all.

I know a woman who though otherwise intelligent decries historical fiction as lying to unsuspecting readers about the past and its people. I could not disagree more. The fact is we don't really know every detail about their lives and their thoughts. By speculating, each historical novelist offers one possibility to consider. And that's where stirring children's imagination about the past through fiction comes in. When they wonder how Pocahontas may have lived, may have felt about the events and people in her life, they begin to empathize. If you can empathize with someone from another time, you can empathize with your contemporaries in different lands. And the Great Spirit knows how much we need more empathy.