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Schemata, Prototypes and Templates: Narrative Ethics, Part Two

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Gustav Doré, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (detail), 1866 (from the 1925 German edition)

Introduction

This is the second in a series of posts about ‘narrative ethics’ in history education. The first post in the series can be found here.

This post is concerned, largely, with laying the ground-work for a discussion of Kurt Vonnegut’s work on the shape of stories in the third blog in this series. This post aims to set-up some concepts from schema theory.

Like many of my colleagues in history education in England, I am an amateur and a magpie of schema theory rather than an expert exponent of it. All I do here is bring together some ideas that I’ve found interesting and that, it seems to me, might be useful to history educators.

These ideas seem to converge to a degree – specifically, aspects of the work of David Bordwell and James Wertsch – and also to take us beyond the somewhat undifferentiated ways in which schema have often been discussed in history education in England in the last ten years or so, often drawing on Chapter 2 of Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, 1987.

I am sure that there’s much more to say than I manage to say here: this is just a start.

Constructing Story: Assumption Prediction, Confirmation, Revision

The Pirates of the Caribbean Disenyland ride, Eric Riltchey, 2011.

Cognitive scientific explanations of narrative comprehension, David Bordwell has argued in various places (Bordwell, 1985 & 2009), can fruitfully make use of the notions of schemata and of prediction to make sense of how we interpret or construct stories.

We interpret incoming data (in a film, text, sound or other narrative context), the story goes, by forming hypotheses about the larger patterns that these data are part of, and these hypotheses are then confirmed or revised, as we continue to make sense of new data and as the narrative continues to unfold.

The hypotheses story-consumers make could include the hypothesis that we are experiencing a story (rather than just random unnconnected data). They could include the hypothesis that the story we are experiencing is a story of a particular type (e.g., a pirate story). They could include the hyptheses that X is the pro- (e.g., Little Red Riding Hood) and that Y is the antagonist (e.g., the Wolf) in the story. They could also include the hypothesis that the events we are viewing constitute a larger whole (e.g., a chase sequence), and the hypothesis that this chase is part of a larger story sequence (e.g., a quest narrative). And so on, and so on.

On this model, the consumer of stories co-constructs the narrative they are experiening by forming hypotheses about what is going on and by bringing together and organising the narrative data presented to them (in a book, film, conversation over coffee, etc.). They are co-constructing because, in most cases, someone else is also contributing (the film-maker, the novelist, and so on), and because author and consumer participate in shared conventions of meaning, and share many of the same schemata.

The consumer (or co-constructor) of stories brings together and organises this incoming story-data using their pre-existing cultural resources (i.e., knowledge of conventions about story operative in their culture and context). They use their knowledge to organise incoming data into patterns that enable them to construct an ongoing story that has a pattern they recognise. The story consumer/constructor then confirms or revises these hypthesis about what is going on in the light of incoming narrative data. This process of pattern and sense making is largely unconscious / unreflective – unless, of course, incoming data cannot easily be construed using available resources, and conscious thought and sense-making is then required.

The conventions and assumptions that readers draw upon are typically also shared by story-makers, which allows for largely shared meanings to be conveyed in particular narrative cultures. However, this commonality of assumptions begins to dissolve when consumers are presented with stories from a different cultural time or different cultural space, where story-co-constructors share different conventions. This point is well-illustrated in the ‘War of the Ghosts’ experiment, described in Frederic Bartlett’s Remembering (1932), perhaps the most influential book in the history of schema theory – a study in which Bartlett asked middle class English subjects to re-tell a Chinook narrative, a process in which the English re-tellers re-wrote and misconstrued the Chinook story to fit with their conventional expectations, without consciously setting out to do so.

Constructing Story: Templates and Protoypes

This ongoing process of assumption, prediction and confirmation / revison works by deploying culturally-learned and conventional schemata of various kinds. These schemata are cookie-cutter-like models of the shapes that things in story worlds usually conform to. Schemata model the kinds or genres of story that we can expect to find (e.g., horror stories, ‘Westerns,’ etc.). Schemata model what plots look like in different story-types; and they model the typical scences and locales we might expect to find in particular story-worlds. They also model things like the typical equipment, actions and interactions that might be found in story locales, and the kinds of actor or agents we might expect to find there. They also model roles agents might plany in story-worlds and the kinds of motivation they might have. And so on, and so on.

Bordwell (1985: pp.29-47) divides these schemata into ‘template’ schemata (for plots and developments in time) and ‘prototype’ schemata (for character types, for mise en scène, etc). The difference between the two types of schemata can be grasped, it seems to me, using the example of Cluedo (or Clue in the US), a board game patented in the UK in 1944 and first produced in 1949 and still in play today, albeit in updated forms.

Protoypes in classic Cluedo – people, equipment and locales

Cluedo is a ‘country house murder’ game and was itself based on ‘country house murder mystery weekends,’ which were in turn based on the typical conventions (templates and prototypes) developed in the ‘murder mystery novel,’ (works such as Agatha Christie’s The Body In The Library, 1942). We can see, then, how Cluedo is an abstraction from an abstraction of a genre in which reality itself has been modelled in a highly stylised way. Cluedo takes the templates and protoypes of a genre, then, and stereotypes a stereotype based on them.

Cluedo‘s narrative templates are simple – one of the upper class guests in the ‘country house’ setting is always murdered by one of the others; the identity of that murderer has been concealed; and game unfolds using the classic ‘murder mystery’ narrative template of investigatoin and interrogation of suspect individuals by detectives, culminating in a summons of all the country house’s inhabitants to ‘the Library’ where the truth is to be revealed (a template drawn upon time after time in Agatha Christie murder mystery stories).

The prototypes in play in the game include prototypes for locale / mise en scène (country house, with dining room, ball room, library, etc.), artefacts (the lead piping, the rope, and other murder weapons), and pro/ant-agonists (Miss Scarlett, Professor Plumb, Colonel Mustard, etc).

Students as Active Meaning-makers

The constructivist account of story-comprehension as story-co-construction is one in which the story-consumer (viewer, listener, etc) is highly active. They make and revise hypotheses as they consume, drawing on available cultural resources (schemata) to make sense of data they are presented with on TV or cinema screen, through what they hear, through what they read, through the images they are presented with (and so on). These resources are learned, culture-specific and they change over time.

My hypothesis, in what follows, is that what is true of making sense of ‘fictional’ stories (Bordwell’s focus) is as true of making sense of ‘factual’ stories also, such as the stories we focus on in history lessons.

If we accept that premis then in follows that teachers need to attend to the cultural resources that students bring to the task of making sense of the stories we present them with in history. They will, as the How People Learn project showed more generally, bring their own assumptions to the task of story-construction and these will draw upon their own prior experience of the world and their experience of how stories about the world work.

Three fundamental open access books in learning theory – NAP, 2000, 2005 and 2018.

As all historians know, context is everything in history, and the worlds of the past differ from the worlds of the present in fundamental ways – which is one reason why, of course, the concept ‘anachronism’ is of such interest to history educators. Helping children make sense of stories about the past involves developing and expanding the prior resources they bring to the task of constructing meaning. It means building new prototypes (e.g., for the kinds of actors, beliefs and motivations that one might find in medieval contexts; e.g., for those one might find amongst the Victorian Middle Classes; e.g., those we might find amongst Aztec nobility and amongst Spanish Conquistadores). It means building new templates of how events can unfold (What happens in a revolution, and uprising, and so on?), including understandings of what narrative lines of development might look like in history, as opposed to other genres of story-making.

It is also likely to involve ‘clearing the ground’ and trying to help deconstruct misconceptions that students may have, such, for example, as the misconceptions of what 18th Century Paris looked like and of how terror operated that seem to be in play in the mind of the student who drew the following representation of the French Revolutionary Terror.

A school students’ drawing of the Terror, Chris Husbands (1996) What is History Teaching, p.75.

Narrative comprehension and text comprehension

We have become much more used than we ever were, in educational practice in the last 15 years or so, to cognitive science and cognitive scientific paradigms and research. I would no longer be told now, as I was about 15 years ago, to avoid using the word ‘cognitive’ in an article for a teacher magazine because it would put teachers off reading it. There are limitations. nevertheless, it seems to me, in how cogntive science has been appropriated, in England, and, also, in the use made of schema theory in history education literature.

Talk about schema and schemata has increased significantly in history education discourse in England since the early 2010s, however, it seems to me to be quite limited to understandings of specific substantive concepts and to draw on work on text-comprehension at the level of the sentence or paragraph. It also often draws quite heavily on a limited range of references (as I have noted above, Chapter 2 of Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy is often a key reference – we need more).

Understanding a story involves more than understanding a sentence or a paragraph and we need a wider repertoire of schema-types than is typically found in text comprehension work. Hence, it seems to me, the suggestiveness of Bordwell’s typology (prototype and template schemata), although differentiating a concept into to two subtypes is only a beginning and not an end.

Schema have also been discussed in the work of James Wertsch (see, for example, Wertsch 1998, 2002 and 2021), and in the work of researchers drawing on his example (for example, see Wertsch’s introduction and the related empirical papers in this open acces journal special edition on nations and narrations). Wertsch’s work couldn’t be more different from text-comprehension appropriation of schema-theory – it works at the very zoomed-out and large scale of the tools cultures use to make sense of themselves, and not at the micro-level of understanding X, Y or Z text.

Wertsch distinguishes between specific narratives and schematic narrative templates – the former are particular stories about specific events (e.g., the story of the evacuation of troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in late May and early June 1940) and the latter are large-scale interpretive stories that different cultures use (Wertcsh hypothesises) to construct large scale narratives about themselves and that they also use to help make sense of particular events that arise.

Much of Wertsch’s work on narrative templates works through data sets about narratives in the former Soviet Union and its former Eastern Bloc satelites. One of the conclusions that Wertsch draws is that Russian narrative identity, at a national level, is bound-up with, and expressed through, a ‘trimuph over alien forces’ narrative template, in which Mother Russia is invaded (without provocation and without good reason) by an external aggressor, and then almost defeated at great cost in life and treasure at the hands of this nefarious foe, before, finally and through great sacrifice, expelling the invader and restoring her former position. The point about such templates, Wertsh argues, is that they are identity-stabilising large-scale stories that members of national cultures can reach for, effortlessly and without much thought, at moments of crisis, and use and re-use over time. Whether or not using any particular template would be a positive thing, overall, in terms of the actions and reactions a template might sanction, is, of course, another matter.

David Low, ‘Very Well, Alone,’ (1940) Pictorial Press/Alamy

An equivalent in Britain is captured in David Low’s famous cartoon (above) which, one might say, both encodes and deploys a story the British are fond of telling themselves about their resilience and their ability to muddle through and resist overwhelming odds through sheer grit – a schematic narrative template that is periodically refunctioned, for example, in the dramatic re-emergence of the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster.

This poster, now treated almost as a pure embodiment and expression of the ‘Blitz Spirit,’ was created in 1939 but shelved before use in 1940, and re-emerged around 2000, before becaming almost ubiquitous during the austerity years after 2010. A poster rejected in 1939/40, then, became a cultural archetype of the spirit of 1940, and a way of reasserting another questionable narrative – Britain was not alone in 1940, she had ‘her’ Empire with her. A questionable narrative that might, at times, do as much harm as good.

A useful project, it seems to me, might be to take Bordwell’s typology (prototypes and templates) and to seek to differentiate it further, thus generating a model of the range of schemata and resources that we might aim to try and develop in our students to help them make sense of the stories about the past that we want them to be able to master, understand, and use.

It seems to me, also, that Wertsch’s work might be useful in this endeavour. I find the notion of culture-wide shared narratives a little dizzying (‘How might we know what they are and that they exist (if they do)?’ is one question, and there are others). It seems sensible to explore what Philpott called ‘meso-level’ uses of Wertsch’s ideas (1), however, and to explore the possibility that culturally constructed conventionalised narrative schemata exist and work at varying levels of complexity, forming a spectrum between micro-stories (such as the Dunkirk story about little boats) and Wertch’s macro-level templates.

From Prototypes to Stereotypes: Affordances and Constraints

Cluedo is a highly limited representation of the world – and one that, one imagines, no one takes seriously. Arguably, however, we should take world-building representations, in all their forms, very seriously, as they all contribute to the overall task of making our life-worlds and delineating their possibilities and exclusions, to one degree or another. All stories matter, on this understanding, in the sense that they all contribute, even if only in a very small way in an individual case, to consituting world-pictures, social norms and paradigms, and, thus, to shaping and delimiting future possibilities – an awareness that has underwritten much contestation in cultural politics in the last fifty years.

The history of the worlds represented in Cluedo over time demonstrates this. The world represented in the original Cluedo, was prototypically White and prototypically patriarchal: all the characters in the game play were White and whereas all the male characters were identified by their roles in society (Colonel Mustard, Professor Plumb, Reverend Green) two of the three female characters were identified solely by their marital status (Mrs Peacock, Miss Scarlet). The 2023 edition of Clue, by contrast, features an African-American Miss Scarlett and an an African-American Professor Plumb, and although Miss Scarlett is sexualised in appearance (the ‘scarlet woman’ stereotype persists, perhaps one might say) the game notes tell us she’s in fact a ‘sharply intelligent investigative journalist’ masquerading as a ‘socialite.’ Furthermore, the remaining two female characters are now identified by their role (Mrs Peacock becoming Solicitor Peacock, and Mrs White, always visually a chef, being renamed to become Chef White). Despite these changes the game continues to have a social bias. It is still largely about the rich and powerful and, although from the perspective of Brecht’s Worker it improves upon high political history by including a cook – a fact that acknowledges pointing the existence of a workers enabling all this ‘luxury’ – there is no possibility in the game play for the largely invisible working classes to organise and contest the inequalities that the game’s mise en scène simply takes for granted.

Lubaina Himid’s Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service – detail (2007)

World representations like Cluedo matter, perhaps, in a number of other ways, also, not least by pointing to historical processes that have contributed to the shaping of ideas of taste, wealth and status in the United Kingdom, and more broadly, to cultivating a romanticised Downton Abbey paradigm of Englishness.

In addition to being a culturally available prototype, the ‘country house’ is also a historical symbol or synecdoche of a much larger and much more brutal history. As critics of the ‘Jane Austen’ world of Regency ‘elegance’ have frequently pointed out, and as projects like Corinne Fowler’s Colonial Countryside Project have shown, the wealth that built these expressions of power and conspicuous consumption, and that enabled this ‘elegance,’ had its roots in enslavement, empire and other forms of imperial extraction and exploitation. A fact that is very dramatically apparent, for example, in cases like Powys Castle and Harewood House.

Do the world-representations provided in history classes present a limited picture of past worlds and help to perpetuate notions of status and power created in deeply unequal class-, gender- and race-divided societies? Do we, alternatively, develop rounded pictures of past realities that explore the dynamics of how those social, cultural, economic and political formations worked, for example, to create, control and selectively distribute wealth, status, power and life-chances? Are the prototypical images of actors in the past that we present ones that say that only upper class men had agency and could shape their worlds, or do the stories we tell and co-construct in class show, alternatively, the ways in which the actions and counter-actions of all members of past societies came, in interaction with each other, to shape and reshape past worlds, and to help to create our worlds?

Do do the protypes of past actors, states of affairs and processes that history education helps to build sanitise the past – like the sheen on well-polished Gillow furniture that osbcures any connections with enslaved mahogany loggers and processors? Or, like Lubaina Himid’s Lancaster Dinner Serivce, commissioned for the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, do our history lessons give voice to and make present both past systems of power and exploitation and the agency of those who challenged the inequalities underpinning them?

Narrative Ethics and Historical Relevance

School work of John Hite, 1964-5, History in Education Project Archive, IHR.

The importance of these questions, and the differences that narratively inclusive history teaching can make, are pointed to by some largely-undiscussed findings of one of the most significant history education research studies conducted in the twentieth century – Denis Shemilt’s evaluation study of the Schools Council History13-16, itself one of the most important curriculum development projects that we have seen in history education to date.

Shemilt’s study compared outcomes for children taught conventional political history (the ‘control pupils’) and for children taught history in the innovative manner developed by the SCHP (now the SHP), a project with innovative pedagogy that also aimed to change the content-focus of school history so that it foregrounded ‘ordinary people,’ and social and economic history.

Although Shemilt was too careful a researcher to overclaim and only present positive findings about the differences between ‘control’ and ‘Project pupils,’ he nevertheless reported some highly suggestive differences in attitudes towards history and in the sense of personal agency expressed by pupils in the two groups.

On the one, hand, ‘most History 13-16 candidates’ found ‘the subject personally relevant… because they see it as dealing with people like themselves (Shemilt, 1980: p.23). On the other hand:

Shemilt, D. (1980) History 13-16 Evaluation Study, Edinburgh: Holmes McDougall, pp.21-22.

A narrative-ethical question that arises from these considerations, I think, is the following: ‘Does our history curriculum develop prototypes of past actors that help students feel empowered and see their everday lives – and the lives of ordinary people in the past – as ‘the fabric upon which the remarkable and spectacular’ can be ‘woven?’ Altneratively, does it create a vision of the world (past and future) in which only powerful minorities have agency and in which only powerful minorities have a world to make and shape?’

Shemilt’s findings suggest that attending to these matters can have significant impacts on learners and on the prototypes and world-models their history lessons can help them build.

Conclusion

This post has tried to show that the notion of prototype schemata might have some value in helping history educators think critically about inclusivity and the implications of their curriculum choices, and of the narratives that they tell, for children’s sense of agency and self.

It has also, I hope, prepated the ground for reflection of the possible value for history educators of Kurt Vonnegut’s work on story templates, or what he calls the ‘shape of stories.’

*****

Endnotes

(1) I would like to dedicate my work on narrative ethics to the memory of Professor Carey Philpott who died suddently and much too young in January 2017. We had started to do some work together on narrative in educational policy in the run up to the BERA conference that September in Leeds and it is a matter of great regret to me that we could not continue that work together for many more years.

Getting the Story Right and Telling the Right Kinds of Story: Narrative Ethics, Part One

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Gustave Doré, Illustration 4 for Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 1863

What is narrative ethics?

History education should pay more attention than it currently does to what I am going to call ‘narrative ethics.’

Narrative ethics relates to practical and empirical questions about the positive and negative effects that stories can have on their audiences, and opens-up ethical questions about the kinds of story that we should and should not tell, and that we should and should not credit, promote, share, and so on.

Stories are both enabling and dangerous things – tilting at windmills is, no doubt, an enjoyable pass time, even if it is a futile one. Both Madam Bovary and Don Quixote‘s (fictional) lives suffer as a result of the kinds of stories they lived and told themselves. We should care about the kinds of story that circulate around us, then, about the kinds of story that inform our actions, and the kind of tales we tell ourselves about who we (and others) are and can be.

The pedagogic aim of narrative ethics should be first, to practice responsible story-telling in history classes as teachers – and, by transfer, in other contexts; and, second, to nurture students’ narrative responsibility, their disposition to tell responsible stories and their aversion towards irresponsible stories and irresponsible story-tellers.

Narratve ethics is a topic that I have written about before – without explicitly calling it that – for example here in Public History Weekly, reflecting on the work of Tzvetan Todorov, and, in a sense, it lies at the heart of all history education, since history concerns itself with the question ‘What can we reasonably claim, say and believe about the past?’ I have written about narrative ethics here, also – again with calling it that – reflecting on irresponsible stories told about history education.

My thinking on this topic has been influenced – as have so many other aspects of my thinking about history – by the work of Peter Lee, in particular, by his emphasis on the importance of developing ‘dispositions’ in history and not just knowledge and understanding (see Lee’s chapters here and here, for example). Learning a discipline is learning a practice and a way of going about things, and narrative responsibility should be one of the historical virtues.

Getting the story right – more than the sum of its parts

Traditionally, history education might have regarded narrative responsibility as an epistemic question, concerned with the truth of claims. That’s a reasonable way of approaching questions of credibility, clearly – minimally, a credible story is a story made up of credible claims. However, there is more to narratives that the sum or their parts – stories have form as well as content and thinking responsibily about stories means thinking about both these dimensions of narrative. This is one of the key insights of the so called ‘narrative turn’ in historical theory – a point made, for example, in Frank Ankersmit’s Narrative Logic, or in the various works of Hayden White, not least Metahistory and The Content of the Form. I have developed that point in various places – for example, in my contribution (pp.121-143) to the open access book Teaching History to Face the World Today (2023, Peter Lang), in relation to the Brecht poem ‘Alles Wandelt Sich’ and the Hitler narrative discussed below.

Cicely Herbert’s translation of Bertold Brecht’s Alles Wandelt Sich (1948).

Brecht’s poem consists of four statements (such as ‘We plant trees for those born later’) that are presented twice in different orders, linked by varying connectives (‘but’ and ‘and’). What is highly instructive about this is that these changes of sequence and connection have profound semantic consequences. The meaning of the first stanza is entirely altered in the second, simply by changing the form of narration, and without altering the content of any of the component lines.

This meaning-transforming power of narrative – operating independently of the truth of a narrative’s internal contents, or propositions – is apparent also in the summary narrative about Hitler that Lee produced in the open access book How Students Learn: History in the Classroom (at page 59), in which the overall narrative is created that is a transparent distortion of history, even though, in some sense at least, every single one of the propositions that make up the narrative might be considered ‘true.’

Telling the right kinds of story

Every page a victory. 
Who cooked the feast for the victors ? 

Every 10 years a great man. 
Who paid the bill ? 

So many reports.  

So many questions.

Bertold Brecht, Questions from a worker who reads, 1935 (extract)

The power of form to shape meaning is apparent, in different way, in another of Brencht’s poems – ‘Questions from A Worker Who Reads.’

Brecht’s ‘Worker’ reads convential history – the kind of ‘history from above’ that much historical writing has practiced since the disicipline was formalised in the nineteenth century under the flag of the nationalist state. And he reads that genre of history with an informed and sceptical gaze. The Worker knows that the kind of world-model he is being offered in these history-from-above great-man histories is at best partial and certainly implausible. It is a world structured by the actions of leaders who seem to be able to do everything by themselves – since only their agency is foregrounded in this genre of history-making. They ‘did’ it – without cooks, without armies, without stone masons, and, in short, without the working class. This is the kind of story that a worker is highly likely to want to question, particularly if supported by the traditions of critique and world-understanding nurtured by the labour movement.

The worlds of history – and the kinds of worlds that histories offer us – have broadened immensly since the 1930s. History from below, of the kind practised, for example, by E.P.Thompson, has served to ‘rescue’ many of the dramatis personae of the past hidden from history by the elite-focused gaze of high-political and ‘great man’ history that Brecht’s Worker reacts against. And so, of course, have other historiographic developments – the rise, for example, of social history, of women’s history, of Queer history, of post-colonial history, of Indigenous histories, and so on. These ‘varieties of history’ should, naturally enough, be central to history education, since history education is about understanding the multiple ways in wich sense can be made with and about the past.

This consideration adds awareness of, and the ability to distinguish between and compare, different types of history in various ways, including in terms of their relative strengths and limitations, to the goals that narratively informed history education might set itself. There is much more to narrative difference that simple sequence. And these differences have ethical consequences, since generic differences in types of history have consequences for who history sees and who history misses, and for who gets ‘hidden from history‘ and for whose pasts are ‘silenced.’

Toxic Narrative

Honoré Daumier, Mélodrame 1855-60 (detail)

Questions of narrative ethics have increasing urgency, it seems to me, in our contemporary present – a world increasingly structured, it would seem, by polemical and simplistic melodramatic stories whose form is problematic and whose effects can be highly dangerous, as we saw on the 6th January 2021 in Washington and as we are seeing, again, in England and Northern Ireland at the time of writing, in late July and early August 2024.

Conspiracy theories – better called fantasies than theories – typically have very simplistic plots. They feature malign and hidden agents whose covert intentional actions are held to be responsible for negative features of the world, and, in particular, for damage to the lives of ‘good’ people, with whom the narrators of such stories identify. Their melodramatic character emerges as soon as we describe them. They pitch unequivocally ‘good’ and unequivolcally ‘bad’ characters against each other (as if the world were normally that simple, binary and two-dimensional), operating an ‘us’ and ‘them’ ontology. Such stories are manichean and implausible and toxic to democracy by that fact alone, as Todorov has argued, since they categorise and selectively other groups of our fellow-citizens.

Conspiracy fantasies are also ignorant of one of the most basic insights that one learns from the human sciences (including, of course, history) – namely that most developments in human affairs are the unintended consequences of the interaction of numerous actors operating independently, few, if any, of whom may have intended the actucal consequences that obtain at any particular time. The world of conspiracy fantasy is a much simpler and more satisfying one. A world in which things happen because some identifialbe and blameable group or person wanted them that way. It is a world that has the shape of a simple personal story – a shape that the real interpersonal and social world rarely actually has. It is an illusory – if satisfying – world in which someone (and never, of course, ‘us’) is to blame.

Simple stories work for many reasons and, not least, because they key into quite basic aspects of human psychology – as researchers like Matthew Williams have argued. ‘Us’ / ‘them’ dynamics are central to human sociality – ‘we’ have typically lived in groups throughout human evolution, and defending our in-group against threats works with the grain of that history. This is one reason why simplistic binarizing stories are so dangerous: when we are living a simple binary story, we can easily be triggered into violent actions, through narrative twists that turn the ‘them’ we identify against into a threat to the ‘we’ that we identify with. If ‘we’ become convinced that there is a ‘they’ out there who are hostile to us and responsible for our real or perceived misfortunes, and if we start to believe that ‘they’ really are coming for us and our families, then all kinds of aggressive action can come to seem both reasonable and necessary.

Narrative ethics involves, in at least part, attending to our narrative vulnerabilities – and becoming aware of ways in which they can be triggered and exploited. Reality is always multifaceted and never structured into clear ‘sides’ and neat binaries. We all contain multitudes and have hybrid identities, a fact that makes the notion of a simple group that we might identify with, and another we might identify against, a fairly absurd proposition.

There are, no doubt, historians who promote conspiracy theories – historians are human beings and binary thinking and threat reactions are part of our natural-historical inheritance. Nevertheless, I’m persuaded – and given some hope – by the argument that Raphael Samuel developed in The Enemy Within, his book on the 1984/5 Miners Strike, that historians are likely to be more ‘resistant’ to ‘conspiracy theories’ than non-historians (1984, p.13), a claim that points to the potential power and benefit of history education.

The notion that this strike was the work of ‘the enemy within’ that the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher propagated, was, as Samuel noted, both implausible and a conspiracist trope. It was part of a melodramatic self-serving story that pitched nefarious ‘union barons’ against a virtuous ‘Iron Lady.’ We might also add that it was a profoundly undemocratic story – a metaphor that turned an organised group of citizens in dispute with the government, into an ‘enemy’ of the state that could legitimately be violently ‘attacked’ – as, of course, miners were at Orgreave and elsewhere.

It seems to me that Samuel’s response embodies the kinds of democracy-enhancing wisdom that one hopes a history education might aim to develop more widely.

“Historians… will know that leaders… are not so much causes as effects… They will know that decision-making is not an event but a process in which a thousand different circumstances conspire. And they may remember – if they are readers of Tolstoy, or students of the First World War – that in a battle nobody is less in command than the generals… A strike is not a controllable process but a huge wave of happenings… Even when a strike appears to be directed from above, its energies come from below….”

Raphael samuel, the enemy within, Pit Villages and the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5, 117-119

Conclusion

What the observations above point to, I think, is the conclusion that we must attend to how stories are told and structured, as much to the truth of the ‘facts’ contained in them, if we want to make an overall call on story-credibility. However important facts are – and they clearly are important – they are emphatically not ‘the whole story,’ as it were.

Some kinds of story are incredible simply because of the way they are told and simply because of the kind of story that they are. Other kinds of history are profoundly limiting and limited in the kinds of human experience they include and exclude and in the groups whose experiences they attend to and/or exclude.

As Samuel’s observations about conspiracy fantasies, above, indicate, there’s much more to assessing the credibility of history-stories than simply attending to sequencing and order. Form includes a range of considerations – including plot types, agent types, forms of causality, and much else. Form also includes attention to the types of history being told – histories that focus on ‘leaders’ only, for example, presume as much as they explain and exclude as much as they account for – just as masculinist stories, Eurocentric stories, and other limiting types of narrative do.

Learning what kinds of story one might find credible, or at least be disposed towards and in favour of simply because of their form is, it seems to me, part of what learning history means. ‘Facts’ matter but checking story-credibility involves so much more than ‘the facts’ and ‘checking’ the facts. Noticing and evaluating the form, the telling, and the form of the telling of a story matter just as much as thinking about claims and truths, where evaluating story-credibility is concerned.

And, of course, one can only care about questions like this if one has come to the narrative-ethical insight that stories and story-telling matter – that stories can legitimate and enable injustice and, also, of course, that stories can help to challenge injustice and change the world, and that there are kinds of story we should not tell, attend to, or help to share and spread.

Coda

This is the first of a series of posts. There will be at least three – ‘if the accident will’ (to borrow a line from Slaughterhouse 5). The two that follow will pursue the questions of narrative ethics in dialogue with the work of Kurt Vonnegut, a great story-teller and reflector on the good and the bad that stories can do. I will focus, in particular, on Vonnegut’s writing about the bobming of Dresden – work that points, I think, to both the power of focusing on narrative when evaluating stories about the past, and also, despite Vonnegut’s best efforts, to the limitations of a solely narrative approach.

Last edited: 25 January 2025

On the Grammars of School History: Who Whom?

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First published in Public History Weekly on the 31st of March 2016; https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/4-2016-11/on-the-grammars-of-school-history-who-whom/

Abstract

Grammar has a reputation for tedium, and a well-deserved one, perhaps, given the way in which was traditionally taught and the facility with which concern with grammar can become pedantry.[1] Grammar can, however, be a valuable tool for appraising historical thinking and for reflecting on how school history is made and understood.

A teacher with three discipuli, around 180-185 AD, Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier.

Grammar has a reputation for tedium, and a well-deserved one, perhaps, given the way in which was traditionally taught and the facility with which concern with grammar can become pedantry.[1] Grammar can, however, be a valuable tool for appraising historical thinking and for reflecting on how school history is made and understood.

Agency

Consider ‘agency’, or, in grammatical terms, the question ‘Who does what to whom?’[2] Grammatical analysis can reveal a great deal about our relationships with the past. ‘Critical historical consciousness’, for example – the historical equivalent of Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy with a hammer’ – subjects the past to the stringent scrutiny of the present, judging it iconoclastically (as with #RhodesMustFall). For ‘traditional historical consciousness’, by contrast, the past leads and ‘we’ must follow, since to live well is to reiterate ‘the best’, which exists already in the practices of ‘our’ ancestors.[3]

What is true of historical culture more generally is also true of history education: the question ‘Who whom?’ can reveal features of our learning aims for history and aspects of our students’ historical thinking that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

Case 1: The National Curriculum for History

Consider these approximately parallel passages from two iterations of the English National Curriculum for History. We need to read both documents in full, of course, to understand them but comparing these two paragraphs alone can illustrate the power of grammatical analysis.

“History fires pupils’ curiosity and imagination, moving and inspiring them with the dilemmas, choices and beliefs of people in the past. It helps pupils develop their own identities through an understanding of history at personal, local, national and international levels. It helps them to ask and answer questions of the present by engaging with the past.” (2007)[4]

“A high-quality history education will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. History helps pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time.” (2013)[5]

In one sense these texts are structurally identical – in both ‘history’ does things to pupils. Despite this, the contrasts are striking. In the second, history is more clearly cognitive than in the first. Pupils ‘question’, ‘think’, ‘develop… judgment’ and, in total, they control six verbs related to intellectual processes in one sentence of this passage, whereas in the first paragraph they simply ‘ask and answer questions’. In the first passage, history is presented in a more affective manner than in the second – whereas the second mentions ‘curiosity to know’, the first links curiosity to being ‘moved’ and ‘inspired’ and the agency attributed to people in the past is identified as the source of these responses.

In the first text, past people made ‘choices’, faced ‘dilemmas’ and had ‘beliefs’ but in the second the ‘lives’ of past people simply have ‘complexity’. Pupils’ identities shift in ways that may, perhaps, be pedagogically consequential between the two paragraphs. In the first, pupils actively ‘develop their own identities’ through historical study but in the second ‘their own identity’ is something that they come to ‘understand’: what was plural and pupil-generated becomes singular and, perhaps, a given.

Case 2: Students’ thinking Grammar can also reveal a lot about students’ thinking.

Consider, for example, the contrasts between these two responses by the same student to questions about historical interpretation.

“Different sources have interpretations of events and this can affect what the historian using them concludes… the social background [of the historian]… can affect interpretations… a historian with a working class background would be more inclined to favour the Chartists. The political background of the historian can affect their conclusion. A communist historian would have a very different conclusion of the Russian Revolution to a socialist.”[6]

In this text, written at start of an intervention designed to develop understandings of what historians do, the student does grant historians agency – they use sources and have conclusions; however, historians’ claims are ‘affected’ by their backgrounds or political beliefs – on this account, historians do not so much write their own texts as ventriloquize the claims of factors acting on them.

The grammar of agency is very different in this later response by the same student.

“Some historians choose to interpret sources in a more subjective light, being more critical of any inferences that can be drawn… Some historians may choose to accept the attributes of the sources… it is the interpretation of the sources that determines the conclusions which are to be drawn.”[7]

Here the historians are in charge of the verbs. They are agents of their own arguments, they make choices and it is this interpretive decision-making that ‘determines the conclusions that are to be drawn’.

We Still Believe in Grammar

Agency is only one part of the story. Grammar structures and enables historical thinking in a wide range of ways, the most obvious being time. What history could there be, after all, without the past tenses? Another example is historical explanation. Here grammar can index barriers to progression and increasing sophistication in historical thinking. Sophisticated historical explanation necessarily involves counter-factual reasoning, as Megill (2007) has argued.[8] Counter-factualism requires mastery of the conditional ( ‘if… then’ and ‘if not…. then not’) and ‘possibility thinking’, enabled by the conditional, is key to progression in historical explanation [9]

We still believe in God because we still believe in grammar, Nietzsche once quipped.[10] Whatever its negative value to the iconoclast, grammar is of positive heuristic value in history didactics. Improving historical thinking and parsing the texts that embody and express it are likely to go hand in hand. ‘Who whom?’ we might ask, when tasked with implementing or writing a curriculum proposal. ‘Who whom?’ we might ask also when thinking about what our students write and say and about how we might help them to develop more powerful historical thinking.

Further Reading

Coffin, Caroline: Historical Discourse. The language of time, cause and evaluation, London and New York 2006.

Coffin, Caroline: Learning the language of school history: the role of linguistics in mapping the writing demands of the secondary school curriculum. In: Journal of Curriculum Studies, 38 (2006) 4, pp. 413–429, http://oro.open.ac.uk/5529/ (last accessed 23.3.16).

Harris, Roy:  The Linguistics of History, Edinburgh 2004.

Endnotes

[1]  Butterfield, J. (2016). ‘Think you’s good at grammar? Try my seven golden rules’. The Guardian, 4th March, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/04/national-grammar-day-rules (last accessed 23.3.16).
[2] I intend ‘agency’ in both a sociological sense (denoting the power to act and make effective decisions) and a grammatical sense (where to be an agent is to be the ‘subject’ of verbs). The former is explored in Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press and the latter in Halliday, M.A.K. and Matthiessen, C.M.I.M (2014) Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar, Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
[3] Rüsen, J. (2005). History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
[4] Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (2007) History: Programme of study for key stage 3 and attainment target, London: QCA, http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100202100434/http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/key-stages-3-and-4/subjects/key-stage-3/history/programme-of-study/index.aspx?tab=1  (last accessed 23.3.16).
[5] Department for Education (2013). History programmes of study: key stage 3 National curriculum in England, London: The Stationary Office, p. 1, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study (last accessed 23.3.16).
[6] The full text of this passage is at Chapman, A. (2012). Developing an Understanding of Historical Thinking Through Online Interaction with Academic Historians: three case studies. 2012 Yearbook of the International Society for History Didactics, 33, pp. 35-36 (last accessed 23.3.16).
[7] The full text of this passage is at ibid, p.36.
[8] Megill, A. (2007). Historical Knowledge / Historical Error: A contemporary guide to practice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.7.
[9] Lee, P. J., & Shemilt, D. (2009). Is any explanation better than none? Over-determined narratives, senseless agencies and one-way streets in students’ learning about cause and consequence in history. Teaching History, 137, pp. 42-49.
[10] Nietzsche, F. (1889) Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, translated by Daniel Fidel Ferrer (2013), , https://archive.org/details/TwilightOfTheIdolsOrHowToPhilosophizeWithAHammer (last accessed 23.3.16).

Note: This post is reproduced (with a new image) from Public History Weekly. I would like to thank Publlic History Weekly for publishing it and Dr Eleni Apostoloudou for replying to my post. You can find that reply at the bottom of this page: https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/4-2016-11/on-the-grammars-of-school-history-who-whom/

Thinking in Fours – Part One

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A large frame quadrant at the Beijing Ancient Observatory, published public domain and copyright free.

Quadrant Diagrams

I’ve a soft spot for quadrant diagrams and have put them to use in various places over the years – for example, here, in Public History Weekly to think about the ‘institution’ and ‘destitution’ of pasts, and here to reflect on the ethics of historical identification.

Quadrant diagrams can be problematic, of course, if the terms they are made up of are polarized in a strictly binary manner. Furthermore, they are two-dimensional, giving positive and negative values on two axes, where the world is three-dimensional in space. Quadrant diagrams tend to the static also, since they denote logical contrasts, and they typically lack a fourth-dimensional element and a time that ticks.

It seems to me that they can have great value, however, as ways of working out the implications of a position or proposition, and in helping to scheme out alternatives. I’ve found that at leat four times in recent weeks, whilst reading, and I have found myself pencilling quadrants in the margins of books to help me think with (and against) their authors.

This post fleshes out the first of those scribbles in the context of an argument about history, responsibility and reparations for slavery. Parts 2-4 will look at arguments about aims in history education, arguments in Indian historiography, and, finally, the contrast between knowing (and not knowing) and believing (and not believing) histories.

It’s probable that quadrant diagrams are more valuable as things to break than as things to make and that their value is less to articualte binary concepts than to help test their limits and the limits of the conceptualisations we can build by combining binaries.

Legacy and Responsibility

I’ve been reading Thomas Harding’s White Debt: The Demerara uprising and Britain’s legacy of slavery (2022) on my early morning commute recently and finished it last week. Finished in the sense that I got to the end of the book, but not to the end of the issues it raises – linked to the topics it discusses and to the type of writing it embodies (what Megill calls ‘para-history’ (1)). I need to read it again and soon, to start exploring those issues with the care they deserve.

In his ‘Postscript’ Harding argues in support of the British paying reparatoins for slavery and says: ‘This is not about feeling guilty for what our ancestors did before we were born, it is about addressing the legacy of slavery that still impacts people today’ (Harding, 2022: 265). This sentence embeds a number of binaries, some of which explicitly contain both of the terms polarized and others in which only one term is explicitly present. An example of the former is the contrast between the ‘us’ whose ancestors’ actions are at stake, and those ancestors (‘them’); and, for example, between ‘feeling’ and ‘acting’ (my gloss on ‘addressing’). Examples of the latter include: the contrasts implied but not stated between the time of these ancestors (‘before we were born’) and our time; and between ‘us’ who will be doing the ‘addressing’ (through reparation) and those who will benefit from reparation, and who are still feeing the impacts of historic slavery now (a second ‘them’).

The diagram below tidies up what I scribbled in the margins on page 265 of my copy of Harding’s book, and focuses on the ‘us’ and the first ‘them’ in Harding’s text (‘our ancestors’), and on the contrast between ‘now’ and ‘then’. Perhaps it helps make explicit some possibilites that might be thought to be latent in Harding’s grammar.

Figure 1: History and responsibility, Schema 1

Quadrant 2 embodies the kind of responsibility that Harding doesn’t advocate, and, indeed, there may be good reasons for not setting this kind of responsibility out. The kind of claim that might be embodied in that quadrant seems absurd – in the sense of being inconsistent with conventional ideas about time and responsibility. ‘We’ didn’t ‘do’ these things – they took place before ‘we’ existed and ‘our’ intentions (and therefore scope for culpability) had no bearing on the outcome. What was done was done by ‘them’ and done ‘then.’

The kind of responsibility posited in Quadrant 2 remains absurd as long as we think individually (about the individuals who make up the ‘we’) or as long as we think in temporally-restricted ways (locating that ‘we’ solely in ‘our’ now in the twenty-first century). If the ‘we’ is a transcendant entity, bigger than and shaping individuals, such as a ‘family’, a nation, or a culture, however, then the apparent absurdity of holding agents in one time responsible for the actions of agents in another melts away. If ‘we’ is institutionalised (the ‘we’ of the British state, the Church of England, a family, and so on) then transcendance is factored in: that is a ‘we’ that is temporally extended across time, a corporate person that integrates individual people into itself and whose responsibilities, predicates and assets can transcend the limits of ‘our’ individual lives and stretch over centuries (2).

Quadrant 3 seems to isolate responsibility in the past also, insulating slavery and the perpetrators of slavery in the past – ‘what’ they did before we were born belongs ‘then’ and is effectively insulated from now (‘our’ present – the time in which ‘we’ can ‘act’ and be held responsible for acting).

Harding’s argument lives on the left hand side of the diagram – in Quadrants 4 and 1 and is interestingly unclear about exactly where it might sit. ‘People today’ are impacted by past action but even though Harding argues for ‘our’ responsibility ‘now,’ his form of words avoids explicitly identifying an agent responsible for these impacts. ‘Slavery’ is made responsible (through the use of the genitive ‘of’) for its ‘legacy,’ even though it is hard to see how we can thinkig of this ‘it’ as having intentions and as acting, and, therefore, as having responsibility.

A reformulation of the quadrant diagram can, perhaps, help, in turning apparent semantic possibilities and impossibilities into historical relationships and responsibilities.

Figure 2: History and responsibility, Schema 2

This forumulation introduces the arrow of time (the ‘now’/’then’ axis) and it introduces two arrows of causation, operating across time, leading from ‘them,’ here denoting slave-ownders, to ‘us.’ The arrow of causation is differentiated into two: one relating to an ‘us’ impacted negatively by the consequences of enslavement and exploitation (first and foremost captured Africans and their descendants) and the other relating to an ‘us’ impacted positively by those consequences (first and foremost families and institutions whose wealth now has roots in capital and other resources accumulated in the time of slavery) (2).

The question now becomes about relationships of responsibility and entitlement arising in the present between those who are the inheritors of positive and those who are the inheritors of negative distributions of material wealth and of poverty and of their cumulative impacts over time; between those who are the inheritors of positive and those who are the inheritors of negative positioning in cultures and ideologies originating in enslavemenet, and so on.

Talk of inheritance, of course, points to strutures: to interlocking matrices of institutions that enable and perpetuate distributions of resource (law courts, archives, and so on); and to ideologies, those interpersonal networks of discourses and frameworks of meaning and implication that evolve in time and that carry past conceptualisations into presents and futures.

Conclusion

Harding’s book is a very powerful and a very moving read and the project of researching and writing that it arises from was motivated, as Harding explains, by a sense of family responsibilty. The book succeeds in articulating history, responsibility and reparation graphically and very compellingly.

The marginalia on marginalia that I’ve elaborated here contribute very little by comparison. Nevertheless, scribbling, interrogating and tarrying with a quadrant diagram can, perhaps, help clarify some of the ways in which arrows of time and causalilty can help break down neat logical separations that can serve to help isolate and insulate both agency and responsibility and past and present.

References

(1) Allan Megill discusses para-history in the following 2002 review article – Megill, A. 2002. ‘Two para-historical approaches to atrocity’, History and Theory 41 (4): 104–23. For Megill, ‘para- historical’ enquiry mixes historical and moral questions (so that, for example, ‘who made it happen, who allowed it to happen?’ is no longer just an empirical question)

(2) The Trevelyan family, who recently made some reparation for what members of the family had done during the period of slavery explicitly framed things in collective terms – family responsibility (for example, here). One of the signal achievements of UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery project is to show how deeply slave holding was embedded in British society – contributing to the accumulation of wealth in families across the social spectrum.