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TEXT TRANSCRIPT
Narrator:
Historical fiction has always been a popular genre of literature. The embellishing of history for literary purposes has been used to portray many events over the years. One era that spawns such historical fiction novels as The Dirty Dozen and The Winds of War was that of World War II. However, the concept of historical fiction is difficult enough to teach to elementary school students using traditional resources.
How can teachers use technology in such a lesson? Chris Collins a sixth-grade teacher at Hillside Elementary School in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, has found a way of integrating technology into the study of World War II to help her students understand that historical fiction is based on fact.
Collins:
Technology in my classroom is used as a tool. I don't really teach technology. I teach how would you use technology to do what you already have to do and make it better. So, for instance, we use the Internet in my classroom. But, it's not, "Let's go do the Internet now." It's, "We're doing these projects on World War II-how can the Internet assist us in accomplishing these projects?" One of the things about technology that I teach is that if the information is in a book, use a book. But if you need up-to-date information or current information or access to experts, then the Internet is a great place to go.
The World War II project kind of evolved out of my having to teach historical fiction in my classroom. That's one of the genres that sixth graders have to learn. It's always been a really difficult genre because the students never quite came to the understanding that historical fiction is based on fact. So what we did is, we pulled these three novels down about World War II that the students read: one was in America, one was based in Denmark, and one was based in Poland or Warsaw. And what happened is the students read the three books, and they kept journals on the characters and what happened in their lives and things like that-so that they could pull out information that would have been what they would have considered factual or not. We took out maps. We read nonfiction and fiction books about the World War II and historical things that had happened during that time.
But that piece was still missing where the students didn't quite make the connection to this is people's lives, this is what happened when someone created a story around those events in different people's lives. So what we did was we joined a listserv called Memories. And on that listserv there were several people who had experienced World War II. There was a survivor of Auschwitz, there was a Croatian soldier, there was a land girl who spent time working on the farm because the men had gone off to war. There was a London schoolboy. There was a girl that had been a schoolgirl in Vienna that was part Jewish, so she had dealt with some of the problems there. And there was a nurse and an American bomber.
And what is really neat is, the students could ask a simple questions to the list like, "Why did World War II start?" The American soldier said, "Well, Pearl Harbor was bombed and so the war began because we had to go defend ourselves." People in London were saying the war had started because Hitler had gone too far, that he had pushed and taken over so many areas that it was time that he had to be stopped. And then the Croatian soldier was real philosophical, and he said the war started not because of the common people but because of the politicians, the people who where in charge. You need to talk to your politicians and find out what things happen in conflict resolution that would make them go to war, why aren't they getting along, things like that.
And so we got into talking about conflict resolution, and the students set up little committees where they discussed a situation and how you would take care of it without going to war. But they also had the opportunity to apply the memories of these people to their historical fiction novels. And then they created their own historical fiction and put it on the World Wide Web.
Student 1:
My story is about, like, this guy. And so he is, like, 17 so he just, like, just got out of secondary school. And so then, like, the Nazis came and so, like, took him away. And so then he was forced to fight for the Nazis. And so at the end, he gets away.
Collins:
Okay. What part of your story is true and what part of it did you kind of embellish or make, make up?
Student 1:
Well, so it was like, he was like, like, taken away. So he was forced to, like, fight for the Nazis. And so I'm not really sure how he got away. So I just, like, made it up.
Collins:
Okay. So you made up the part where he got away, but you took his memories of…
Student 1:
Yeah.
Collins:
…of when he was taken away as a boy after he had gotten out of school? Okay.
Student 1:
Yeah.
Collins:
[Addressing another student] Your historical fiction? Do you remember that?
Student 2:
During World War II, he was just a young boy. He was a schoolboy. He wasn't Jewish or anything, he was just, in the information I got, just told about how his life was as a young child growing up and hearing all the stuff around him. He was, like, in Germany.
Student 3:
And the story was mainly about how they had to ration off the food and the items that they bought, stuff like that. It was the little kid's birthday, it was the little kid's birthday, and it told, like, that they could only, they couldn't make him a big birthday cake. They could only make him, like, a little cupcake. And instead of getting, like, a big birthday present, he got a pair of snakeskin shoes.
Collins:
What an incredible way to assess a group of students. If they can create historical fiction based on fact, you know that they understand what historical fiction is. And the really neat outcome from that is, some people from the Memories listserv saw the students' work and went to the parliament and had certificates of achievement created for those students who had done really outstanding jobs on their projects.
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