Learning History Through Historical Fiction

The 8th graders at my Dyad placement just wrapped up their study on the events leading up to the American Revolution.  As they move into their study of the Revolutionary War, they will be reading a historical fiction novel.  In fact, my Dyad partner and I are planning an interactive read aloud to help introduce this book.  I'm so excited to be doing this because I think that using historical fiction as the means for grabbing the attention of students can be a very effective strategy, especially for those who have a hard time making connections to historical events.

When I was in junior high, I received my very first "F" on my report card.  It was in history.  I thought that history was so boring.  It just seemed like a bunch of dates and names that I couldn't possibly memorize and everything was written in the rich white male perspective, all of which I was not.  It wasn't until I started studying the history of race in college that I became truly interested in history.  A large part of that was due to reading about events from other people's perspective, especially minorities.  It also helped that we were learning about themes and big ideas in history rather than merely names, dates and events. 

In most of my history classes in college, we read stories from first person perspectives.  It helped put us in their historical shoes and witness events as they were happening.  Even then, I was more interested in learning about people I could relate to.  This meant that I was not interested in learning European history.  That changed, however, after I read a historical fiction about Queen Elizabeth.  The story as so strange and fascinating that suddenly I was looking up historical facts about the era to find out what was true.

Since I've started student teaching, I have met many childre who actually enjoy learning about history and love reading non-fiction books and almanacs.  However, there are just as many students who prefer reading for fun to reading for educational purposes.  Thats where historical fictions come in.  They are fun to read and most of them do a good job of developing the fictional main characters.  And once those students put themselves in the place of those main characters, they can't help but become engrossed in a rich historical story.  Used in conjunction with meaningful studies of history, stories can be a powerful tool.