Vital narratives - Narrative Intelligence - page 102

down and dirty, up and out. These provide “hooks” of personal relevance for
the reluctant science student.
At the John Woolman School, a Quaker institution, students do a service
project related to science each year. These projects range from beach clean-ups
to counting tortoises in the Mojave desert and working on ways to prevent
dirt bikes from killing tortoises and disturbing their habitats. Science melds
with action and activism in such projects and can prove quite rewarding and
enlightening to students. The aspects of wonder, joy, and service can be incor-
porated into a “field curriculum” for science. The tools of handheld technology
may greatly enhance the ability of students to do scientific work in the field.
Historical narratives
On May 10, 2002, The New York Times reported that “[at] a time when an-
cient cultures and conflicts are increasing American involvement around the
world, American students show a poor command of history” (Schemo 2002).
In my experience as a researcher and parent, it seems that history is taught
primarily as “chronicle” - that is, as an exercise in remembering dates and
names. It seems that causality, ethics, politics, personal stories and oral history
are not adequately explored in many classrooms. The antithesis to the typical
classroom experience is something like the Holocaust Museum, which con-
tains many different kinds of narratives and artifacts to help visitors to see the
whole picture.
One of the reasons that history often takes the form of chronicle is the de-
sire to avoid highly colored points of view. History attempts to be “objective.”
Yet the actual events and experiences that history tries to represent are most of-
ten enormous conflicts in values, political or nationalist narratives, and points
of view. Erasing these “subjective” differences removes the heart of history. Of
course, personal stories, journals, and oral history are primary materials that
can give emotional and political views into the complexities of history.
In the Guides project at Apple in 1990, Tim Oren, Abbe Don and I worked
on a system for presenting different points of view on history in a comput-
erized database (Laurel et al. 1990). We worked with the concept of “Guides”
- characters who represented different points of view - as ways of navigating
the information. In addition to encyclopedic content, the database was pep-
pered with personal stories, and the “Guides” had stories of their own to tell.
Our subject was Westward Movement, and the “Guides” consisted of a Native
American, a pioneer woman, and a trader/trapper, each performed by real peo-