Chapter 5: A Tale of The Teacher Educator and The Storyteller: Returning Stories to the Social Studies Classroom

This is a tale of the teacher educator and the storyteller. It begins with the consternation of the teacher educator who knew that the pre-service teachers in her secondary social studies methods classes fell back on lecturing as a pedagogical method. She knew there were moments when teachers—in any subject area—must convey content. She also knew, from the research she had read about the instructional strategies that dominate social studies education, that pre-service teachers had been taught by social studies educators who relied on whole-class teacher presentation as a primary pedagogy (Leming, Ellington, & Schug, 2006). Furthermore, she realized that her students had all completed their secondary education under No Child Left Behind constraints. But what caused the consternation to bubble up in the teacher educator was that students really liked stories, particularly when they go to the gritty materiality of the past that was so absent from textbooks. Students talked of teachers who shared history’s stories as complicated, presenting multiple experiences or perspectives of events. Students also loved stories about people, especially when they felt a connection to the person. A love of those stories had led many of them to teaching. Yet as the pre-service teachers began to practice pedagogies, they turned to lecturing, or talking at students about particular historical events or processes. How can this be, thought the teacher educator? If they love the stories, then why are they lecturing from a dominant perspective (Van Sledright, 2011) rather than attempting to engage the classroom in another place and time or in a diversity of experiences?