What Can Forrest Gump Tell Us About Students’ Historical Understanding?

Abstract

HISTORICAL NARRATIVES envelop us everywhere--at home, at church, at the movies; in the buildings we inhabit, the parks we visit, the stamps we lick; in the days we take off from work, the newspapers we read, and the six-o'clock news we receive from Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather. By the time young people reach their eighteenth birthday in our culture, they possess a rich narrative of origins--how the United States came into being, the roots of the race issue that divides American society, something about Pilgrims, colonists, and settlers. In terms of impact and influence, no algebra or French teacher can compete with such famous history teachers as Steven Spielberg or Oliver Stone, whose devoted students number in multiples of millions. Each of us grows up in a home with a distinct history and a distinct perspective on the meaning of larger historical events. Our parents' stories shape our historical consciousness, as do the stories of the ethnic, racial, and religious groups that number us as members. We attend churches, dubs, and neighborhood associations that further mold our collective and individual historical selves. We visit museums. We travel to national landmarks in the summer. We camp out in front of the TV and absorb, often unknowingly, an unending barrage of historical images. By the time children have celebrated a decade of Thanksgivings and Martin Luther King Days, they are already seasoned students of American culture and history. But the notion that all these sources form a coherent whole mocks the complexity of social life. Historical consciousness does not emanate like neat concentric circles from the individual to the family to the nation and to the world. Lessons learned at home contravene those learned at school. What we hear at school conflicts with what we hear at church or synagogue--if not in the pews then certainly in the bathrooms. If we pay attention to the lyrics of rap music or tune our dials to Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern, we confront more disjunctures. To make historical sense, we must navigate the shoals of the competing narratives that vie for our allegiance. Our Research We followed youngsters from three different schools and communities across a year of eleventh grade history instruction and into the twelfth grade.(1) But the school curriculum was just one of the venues in which we located our study. We believed that the home was also a prime venue for teaching us to become historical, for influencing the shape of the narratives we tell about ourselves and our nation. We conceptualized the development of historical understanding not as a series of courses in school but as a complex interplay between home, school, community, and the historicizing forces of popular culture. We were suspicious of the simplistic accounts of both young people's disengagement from the past, on one hand, and their abject ignorance of it on the other. We believed that historical knowledge, to use Michael Schudson's apt phrase, seeps into the cultural pores even if such knowledge is not readily retrievable by seventeen-year-olds answering a quiz.(2) The three schools we identified were in the Pacific Northwest: an inner-city high school, a college preparatory academy, and a Christian high school. From each school we selected five parent/child dyads. When we began, all students were about to enter eleventh grade and were enrolled in the state-mandated U.S. history course. In the first year of data collection, we engaged each parent and each child in extensive oral history interviews, querying them about the history of their own lives, their families and their communities, as well eliciting from them personal narratives about the key events and turning points in American history. During the academic year that followed, we engaged in over a hundred hours of classroom observations across the three schools, and enlisted students in six more formal interviews, ranging from an interview on Vietnam to interviews that asked students to interpret the comments their teachers made on their history papers and tests. …