Using a Narrative Tool to Help Quebec English-Speaking Students Produce Personal Histories of Belonging

Abstract

This article introduces Jörn Rüsen’s concept of narrative competence as a useful pedagogical framework for operationalizing a remedial narrative tool designed to help make room for Quebec’s English-speaking minority in the teaching of school history. Developed through empirical research and representing a schema-like narrative structure, the Narrative Template Tool’s aim is to assist students to produce and validate personal (his)stories of belonging through conducting original historical research. To counter the dangers of indoctrination, the tool moreover employs a feature of the orientation component of narrative competence—use-of-history—as a means of helping students account for their emerging perspectives.

Operationalizing Historical Consciousness: A Review and Synthesis of the Literature on Meaning Making in Historical Learning

“…Although the view of narrative as a psychological capability is useful in history education because it provides a framework for historical understanding, the view of narrative as a cultural tool that students and teachers use to make sense of the past and history can engage students in a process of negotiation between different narratives and thereby help them come to grapple with the ways in which historical interpretation can oversimplify, constrain and even distort their historical understanding. For instance, drawing on both psychological and sociocultural dimensions of historical narrative, Zanazanian and Popa (2018) adapted Jörn Rüsen's concept of narrative competence and James V. Wertsch's notion of schematic narrative template to operationalize a pedagogical tool, the narrative tool template (designed by Zanazanian, 2017), for educators to effectively teach historical interpretation through a narrative lens, and also encouraging and validating minority group stories in the teaching of national historical narratives.…”

Cultivating historical consciousness in the history classroom: Uncovering the subtleties of student meaning making with the help of found poetry

“…A habit of mind guides students' focus and assists their perceptions, comprehensions and evaluations of historical material. For such meaning making, history students can primarily use investigations (Boix Mansilla, 2005;Lee and Shemilt, 2004;Saye, 2017), narrations (Kölbl and Straub, 2011;Levisohn, 2010;Rüsen, 2004;Wertsch, 2004;Zanazanian and Popa, 2018) and perspectives (De Leur et al, 2015;Lee and Shemilt, 2011;Retz, 2015). Each of these habits is grounded in the norms, discourses and practices of both the academic discipline and the surrounding culture.…”