Stan Garrod: I was first introduced to Kieran’s ideas when I began working with him in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We were both working on projects related to the development of Social Studies curriculum materials and were both exploring ideas of working with narrative/storytelling as a vehicle for engaging students in Social Studies investigations. My discussions with Kieran led me, along with my co-author Rosemary Neering, to create a series of books on Canadian history for elementary school children each built around a novella core. Using what we now refer to in the IERG as mythic and romantic elements in the story core to bring life to the historical period also enabled us to embed social studies concepts and vocabulary in a more familiar or comfortable genre of communication than that of the more traditional textbook format. I think that having some of these titles still in print a quarter century after they first come out is testimony to the effectiveness of this approach.

Have you experienced any problems associated with Kieran’s model? If so, what were they?

SG: I’ve encountered few problems implementing imaginative educational activities in my secondary classes in history, geography, western civilization, and classical civilization (OAC). I think there are two reasons for this. The first is the fact that there are no contradictions between the content of the official curricula for these subjects and the imaginative model of teaching and learning. Imaginative teaching practice is a very effective vehicle for conveying the content and the methods of these disciplines. The second reason may be particular to the context in which I work. I teach in a non-selective entry, secular, co-educational independent school in which I’m encouraged to be as creative as possible in my teaching and to find ways of stimulating and motivating my students to learn in a variety of ways.

As well, our Social Studies department is highly collegial and committed to increasing the use of stories and narratives by both students and teachers as means of enlivening our classrooms and our explorations of the human condition. We’ve worked together to create such programs and activities as a grade 8 medieval fair, mock trials, historical film study groups, cross-cultural food/cooking festivals, history and geography field schools, and other non-traditional educational experiences for our students. These activities often bring parents into contact with what we are trying to do and we find that this parental involvement usually strengthens support for our imaginative approach. In fact, one of the most often heard comments from parents is, “I wish that my teachers had done these sorts of things when I was taking Social Studies.”

Ironically, the greatest resistance to imaginative learning that I’ve encountered has come from the small number of students I teach who have been so thoroughly enculturated to an extrinsically motivated, marks-driven view of school and education that they find an approach to learning that places little emphasis on, and offers fewer rewards for, trivial reproduction of facts very difficult, if not impossible, to adjust to at the grade 11 or 12 level. What seems to be particularly frustrating for these students is the fact that the textbook, if there is one, is not the course, and that much of the evaluation in my classes involves students constructing narratives–expository, interpretive and creative-using original source materials. There are no marks for “fill in the blanks” or “sentence completion” right answers or other similar tasks using the textbook. There are no marks for anything that can be copied from an encyclopaedia or downloaded from the Internet.

How has the imaginative education model changed your ideas around teaching? Your daily practice?

SG: Each lesson I teach is a story, a narrative of history or geography. Within each lesson, personal stories, mine and others, form part of the classroom discourse. These stories both engage and illuminate. They provide metaphors to assist in understanding and making meaning and they establish points of connection between what is being learned in the classroom and the lifeworld beyond the schoolhouse walls.

The Vygotskian foundations of Kieran’s model have had a profound influence on my daily practice. I think of myself now as a language teacher whose task is to develop in my students the communicative and cognitive tools needed to make sense of and construct meaning from the disciplines I teach, both to prepare them for further educational experiences and to equip them for the larger world. Vocabulary development and an exploration of how language is constructed and has evolved over time and across cultures has become part of my daily classroom practice. I openly speak of metaphors and their role in communicating historical, geographic or cultural understandings. At the end of the last school year, one of the young women in my History 12 class brought her notebook to me to show me the section in which she had recorded all her favourite metaphors over then course of the year.

With my honours grade 10 Geography students, two years ago, I introduced the concept of binary opposites (e.g. metropolis-hinterland; bourgeoisie-proletariat; rich-poor) as cognitive tools used in constructing meaning and making sense out of our perceptions. We then built on the tensions between these pairings as we explored a variety of issues in human and social geography. Speaking with three of these students, now in grade 12, some time ago, they made the comment that they continued to use this approach to help organize their thoughts and to construct arguments in their writing, in a wide variety of subjects beyond geography.

With my Advanced Placement European History students, all four components of Kieran’s model–the Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic and Ironic-become part of our working vocabulary as we explore how histories are fabricated and historical narratives are constructed in different contexts and from different points of view. Here, too, tensions are explored in classroom dialogue as we examine original sources and see how the mythical and romantic elements are utilized by nationalists, propagandists, and patriotic official histories or embodied in the documents produced by working men and women engaged in acts of resistance (e.g. the Diggers in England, the French Revolution, or the operas of Verdi during the Risorgimento).

How has this model helped you in your teaching practice?

SG: This model has helped me by engaging the interests of my students, by gaining the active support of their parents, and by making my classes less boring for me. Its effectiveness was summed up for me in June of last year when, having some 15 minutes left in the last class of the year, I asked one of my History 12 sections what they wanted to do for the rest of the time. “Tell us a story”, said several students. So I did.
I told them the story of a great Persian king who wanted to be able to say something on any occasion that would always be true. He sent for all the wise men and all the wise women and all the wise eunuchs of the kingdom and gathered them together in one of the vast banquet halls of his royal palace. There they argued and discussed and debated for a year and a day. Finally, they all agreed, there was one statement the king could make on any occasion that would always be true. The best scribe amongst them carefully copied down the product of their collective wisdom in her finest hand. The scroll was carefully wrapped up and tied with a red silk ribbon (the original red tape) and handed to the king’s herald to take to the monarch who, by this time had understandably become rather impatient. When the herald arrived, the king snatched the scroll from his hands, ripped off the red silk ribbon, and opened the scroll. His eyes widened in perplexity. On the scroll was written only these words: “And these things, too, shall pass away.”

When the story ended, the entire class was silent and I noticed that several students were crying, including Emma, one of the girls who had asked that I tell them a story. As I caught her eye, Emma–not the strongest student in a relatively non-academic class-said, “When I asked you to tell us a story, I thought you would tell us a funny one. But you didn’t. You told us a story about history that summed up the whole course.” By her statement, Emma had just demonstrated to me that she was capable of philosophic reasoning.

Can you provide us with a specific example of how you teach?

SG: This is just a brief example of one of the exercises that I use in teaching about ideologies in a variety of courses at the grade 9 through 12 levels. It involves the mythic element and its embeddedness in language.

Students often ask about the terms “left wing” and “right wing” as used in political analysis. After a joke about the game of politics, I explain the origins of the terms in the seating arrangement of the National Assembly during the French Revolution and in the relative approaches to revolutionary change adopted by the Jacobins and the Girondins, seated to the left and right, respectively, of the speaker of the assembly. However, this history, linked to such powerful events as the Reign of Terror, is inadequate to help students understand the emotional power these terms continue to have in everyday discourse. This leads to a discussion of these terms as binary opposites and the powerful persistence of such binaries in construction of group and individual identities. We then explore other binaries such as “good-bad”, “collective-individual” with these terms and the emotional amplification that goes with such combinations. Finally, we examine the “coded” information contained within the terms “left” and “right” that lead to these being not only conflated with “bad” and “good” but to their being virtually synonymous with them in such forms as “left-handed compliment” and sinister on the one hand, and in “right-hand man,” “human rights,” and the “right answer” on the other. These distinctions can be further explored, depending on context, students interests, etc, in such areas as the role of bird omens in ancient Greece–birds flying from the left were omens of ill-fortune, birds flying from the right of good luck-the role of hands in body functions, etc.

Another example comes from my teaching of The Odyssey as the central element of my Classical Civilization OAC course. We read the story aloud, both to get a better appreciation for the language and the rhythms used by the ancient bards who fabricated this story and to remind them that storytelling is–at its roots-an oral tradition. To begin, I dress as Homer, wearing a bed-sheet chiton, and recite the preamble to The Odyssey to the students. Again, throughout this exercise, vocabulary development is central to an imaginative approach. Telling the students that what I am wearing is a chiton, not a toga, leads to discussions of the use of the term “chiton” as an exoskeleton in biology. Learning that odyssey is etymologically linked to the English words “odious” and “odometer” helps them to appreciate more imaginatively the implications of a painful journey conveyed by the name Odysseus. Similarly, knowing that Telemachos means to make a journey (particularly one of transformation, such as a rite of passage) assists students in understanding the parallel journeys of father and son.

Throughout the exploration of The Odyssey, I explicitly use the terms mythic, romantic, philosophic and ironic. While the first two are obvious aspects of The Odyssey, the philosophic is also a dominant strand as the narrative is a guide to goodness, truth and beauty in the Greek world of three thousand years ago. In our discussions of this story, we explore similarities and differences between contemporary and past values, attitudes, beliefs and codes of behaviour. Irony, too, is everywhere in the story–nowhere more so that in Odysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus in the story of Cyclops’ cave. The fact that this irony rests on a pun–when Odysseus calls himself Nemo, “No one”, in response to Polyphemus asking his name-allows us to explore the importance of humour and word play in literary expressions and storytelling. Finally, the fact that many of the ironies regarding the “god-like” Odysseus and his behaviour are ironic only in our context and not those of Ancient Greece allows us to explore the contingent nature of irony and contrast it to the enduring nature of the mythical and romantic ways of knowing and constructing meaning.

Links to related interviews:

Crossing Boundaries and Learning to Embrace Ambiguity, a discussion with Lindsay Cohen, Collingwood School 2003 Graduate

Imagination on the Brink: Colouring Outside the Box, a discussion with Alexander Rafael, Collingwood School 2003 Graduate