Storytelling, Imagination, and Fanciful Elaboration in Children's Historical Reconstructions

Abstract

Interviews with fourth graders who had not yet received systematic instruction in United States history revealed that these students were interested in the past, concerned about human motives and cause-effect relationships, and able to construct coherent narrative (storytelling) accounts of historical events as they understood them. However, they lacked an experience-based framework for grounding and connecting their historical thinking, so that their accounts often mixed accurate information with naive conceptions and imaginative elaborations. This article provides examples of these historical accounts given by children at this beginning stage of learning about history and discusses them with reference to the work of Dickinson and Lee (1984) and Egan (1989). Also considered are issues involved in teaching history to elementary students and assessing their historical understandings. The discussion identifies both beneficial and problematic aspects of children’s reliance on imagination in constructing historical narratives.

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