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Approaching History through Literature: Generating Knowledge through Writing and Inquiry in a Cross Disciplinary First-year Learning Community
Frederick Dotolo and Theresa Nicolay
St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York
| AT ST. JOHN FISHER COLLEGE, a four-year liberal arts institution, learning communities comprise the first semester of a two-semester series on writing and thus are an integral part of the core curriculum, enabling faculty to assist entering students in meeting the goals of the general education program. In each learning community, two instructors, typically from different disciplines, collaborate in teaching linked courses organized around a central theme, incorporating various activities to reach general education outcomes. Specifically, by the end of the first-year writing program, we expect our students to be able to locate, summarize, and analyze secondary source material from a variety of perspectives. Students demonstrate this by synthesizing multiple perspectives into a unified and coherent argument of their own. |
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Years of experience in the assessment and placement of entering students, as well as experience in composition and history classes, have demonstrated that our students frequently do not come to us with the critical thinking skills necessary for creating and substantiating original arguments that take into account multiple perspectives on a topic. Although learning communities foster intellectual and pedagogical growth and deepen collegial bonds, they often present their own unique challenges for instructors of history, as classes are, more often than not, lecture oriented with assignments involving heavy reading and writing loads. Unfortunately, many first-year students in such learning communities do not have the opportunity to interact with the more experienced students and history majors. As a result, entering students have little or no experience with college-level history and often approach the subject with untested expectations as to work load, reading, and thinking, while lacking the necessary skill sets required in college. |
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To address the disparity in the skills of entering students and the goals of the first-year learning community (LC) program, we created a series of scaffolded, or tiered, writing assignments around the concept of kingship to move students from summary to analysis to synthesis. For each assignment, we incorporate informal write-to-learn and inquiry-based learning activities. In other words, we strive to meet core goals within an interdisciplinary framework of history and literature, thereby enabling our students to see history as more meaningful and to approach learning as more lasting while they simultaneously master increasingly complex cognitive skills. |
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Our learning community, "Kingship and Christianity," which includes History 255: Early Britain and English 170: The Oxford Christians, helps students discover the connections between kingship, Christianity as understood by members of the Oxford Movement, and the cross-disciplinary connections of early British history and the literature of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Teaching a writing-intensive learning community has its own challenges, regardless of discipline, because the focus of the class is on critical thinking, without which even the most coherent and correct prose is empty. For example, the history course is structured slightly differently from how it would normally be if it were a straight lecture course. While lecturing is an important component of the course, it is not the sole focus. This means the instructor has scaled down the time period covered in the course lectures from Roman Britain to the beginning of the Tudor dynasty. However, the breadth of material covered includes not just England, but, where relevant, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and France. In addition to the lectures, students are assigned a text and the two monographs, Belloc's William the Conqueror and Machiavelli's The Prince. Formal course assignments include a paper, midterm, and a non-comprehensive final. Furthermore, there are a number of in-class readings, mainly excerpts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and about the Hundred Years War. Other informal writing assignments supplement the formal ones. Finally, by ending with the Tudor dynasty, the course focuses on kings as opposed to the ruling of sovereign queens, since both Tolkien and Lewis primarily addressed kingship and not necessarily "monarchy." |
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Within this context, kingship provides a meeting place for literature and history. As historian Joel Rosenthal notes, kingship provides "the gateway to the deeper mysteries of regality, to the road from the secular to the sacred," but has been a common meeting place between history and literature throughout the modern period.1 Tolkien and Lewis, for example, attempt to understand kingship within a historical model of England inherited from the Victorian period.2 Indeed, the development of kingship throughout the period covered by our LC, from the end of Roman Britain to the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, reveals an interconnectedness of literature and historical understanding, from the forms of Anglo-Saxon poetry to the plays of Shakespeare. For our purposes, we focused on the evolution of kingship found in its earliest manifestations as a war leader to its more traditional understanding as a feudal dynasty; this evolution can be found in both history and literature.3 |
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Sacred and moral notions of kingship provide the concept around which the readings, discussion, lectures, and assignments of both the courses in the learning community are organized. While kingship determines the theme, we do not simply point students to these connections, but rather guide them through critical inquiry and writing,to find for themselves the many points of intersection between our disciplines. In this manner, students improve fundamental analytical and communication skills, come to value literature, and make the transition from secondary to college-level history. |
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We established our pedagogical approach by using a mix of social constructivist learning, teacher-led discussion, and lecture. We soon added informal writing activities that would tie into the paper and lecture topics. These write-to-learn techniques, many of which are based on the work of Barbara Walvoord and Toby Fulwiler, encourage active learning in both the literature and history classes by letting students generate their own ideas and create meaning and connections through writing.4 We have designed the writing assignments such that as the students' knowledge increases, paper topics and standards would likewise demand more rigorous thinking and writing skills. This building-block approach, or scaffolding, culminates in a final research paper which calls upon the students to make deeper connections from among the various literary and historical readings. For the research paper, we require various smaller assignments: a library assignment in conjunction with the first-year library orientation, a topic submission, a bibliography, an annotated bibliography, and an article summary. Both instructors assess this material and provide feedback which the students then use to revise their papers. In this manner they develop both writing and critical thinking skills. |
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The first paper in the series of scaffolded assignments is written for the Early Britain course, and its project title is "Arthur: History becomes Fiction." The purpose of this paper is to help students to begin looking at fiction as a way to interpret and comment on history. In the history class, we discuss Eastern and Western notions of kingship, while at the same time, in the literature class, we examine the poetry of WWI, including the work of Yeats, Owen, and Pound. |
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Our approach requires more than a traditional pedagogy, so we also use methodologies from writing and critical thinking across the curriculum in order to help students engage with and retain the course material and, in the process, become better writers and thinkers. As Ken Bruffee argues, students can work as "knowledgeable peers," helping each other construct knowledge through conversation:
[I]f we accept the premise that knowledge is an artifact created by a community of knowledgeable peers and that learning is a social process not an individual one, then learning is not assimilating information and improving our mental eyesight. Learning is an activity in which people work collaboratively to create knowledge among themselves by socially justifying belief. We create knowledge or justify belief collaboratively by canceling each other's biases and presumptions; by negotiating collectively toward new paradigms of perception, thought, feeling, and expression; and by joining larger more experienced communities of knowledgeable peers through assenting to those communities' interests, values, language, and paradigms of perception of thought.5
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Therefore, we begin with a dialogic process in the literature class whereby students engage in small group discussion of Yeats's "The Second Coming," Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," and Pound's "These Fought in Any Case." In this way, students are introduced to examples of Modernist literature and sensibilities, generating and supporting assertions about the meanings of the poems. Next, in the history course, we use instructor-led discussion to examine the origins of Eastern and Western kingship and then examine the political and socioeconomic development of Roman Britain. During the next literature class meeting, the students arrange themselves in groups and address the question, "What is the nature and origin of kingship?" Each group generates substantive answers, recorded by one member of the group and reported by another. We find that the students generate many of the concepts of kingship that we hope to address throughout the course, so we type all the student-generated concepts and distribute them to the students during the following class, thereby providing a documented baseline of knowledge regarding kingship. |
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Also, as part of the first paper project, we read Lewis's The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, a work that was composed during the modern period, yet expresses a contrasting sensibility of deep religious faith. We broaden our discussion of the fictionalizing of history and its appropriation for ideological purposes by viewing the Director's cut of the 2004 film, King Arthur, which re-contextualizes the legends of Arthur in such a way as to portray a negative commentary on Catholicism, its values, and political structure. This re-contextualizing is done largely through the use of anachronism, specifically by introducing Pelagius, misplacing the Battle of Badon Hill (generally believed to be in southern England) to the north at Hadrian's Wall, and providing a detailed account of Arthur's background.6 To help students understand the complexity of how narrative history is written, we ask them to read and discuss in class several chapters from Leslie Alcock's Arthur's Britain concerning the type of historical evidence and the background of Roman Britain that Alcock uses in his history. While most historians discount the literary and medieval notion of King Arthur,7 they generally accept the reality that the Britons under an Arthur at Badon momentarily halted the rampaging Anglo-Saxons.8 The discrepancies between history and literature raise questions we hope the students will find compelling enough to answer in their papers, using the writing task as an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which history is framed and manipulated to serve the writer's, or screenwriter's, purpose. |
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Simultaneously, students are given opportunities to write what John Bean calls "microthemes" about literature and film in comparison to history. For example, we ask students to write informally about Aslan's kingship in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, including whether they thought he was an Eastern- or Western-style king. We use a similar exercise to have students think about the kingship of Lewis's fictional high king, Peter Pevensie. As with the other informal microthemes, we provide formative feedback to facilitate the students' writing process for paper one. |
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In addition to using write-to-learn activities to generate paper ideas and deepen thought on class topics, we use freewrites to teach assertions and evidence. Specifically, we read each of the informal writing assignments and provide individualized feedback by underlining assertions and bracketing evidence. In this way, students are better able to understand the relationship between assertions and evidence as well as the common pitfall of following assertions with repeated or additional assertions rather than substantiating them. Also, we begin to bring students into our discourse community, sharing with them a language that helps us talk about effective writing and coherent, substantive thinking. We do not grade these informal assignments. |
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The second paper project is entitled "Kingship in Lewis: Legitimacy and Usurpation." The purpose of this paper is to help students combine their knowledge of history and literature so they can better understand both content areas. C. S. Lewis was a devout Christian, and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe works largely as an allegory of the Fall and redemption of humanity. The story centers on Aslan, a Christ-figure, and the coming of the Pevensie children to Narnia in order to rescue that world from the tyranny of a usurper queen. For our purposes, Peter Pevensie represents a third aspect of kingship, as he blends both Eastern and Western styles of kingship. Through the story, Lewis reveals a truth about the nature of various kinds of kingship, so we encourage the students to compare these characters to historical or Biblical personages and thus generate a thesis about kingship. |
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The second paper assignment gives us the opportunity to discuss several of the topics covered in the first-year writing course: rhetorical context and form, the importance of textual evidence, the nature of primary and secondary sources—in our case as those terms apply to history and literature, the use and integration of quotes from the texts on which they rely, and proper Chicago Manual of Style citation format. As with all papers, students share their drafts with three peers of their choice, write reader assessments, and are able to apply reader feedback in revising their papers before submitting final drafts. |
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The third paper of the sequence is entitled "Kingship in Tolkien: Good Kings, Bad Kings, and Dark Lords." The purpose of this paper is for students to examine kingship in greater depth by presenting a comparative argument about kingship in The Lord of the Rings. One constructivist activity that we find particularly effective begins in the history course, continues in the literature class, and links discussion, writing, and critical thinking skills. Specifically, students read about and attend a lecture on Henry II, and then watch the 1966 movie, The Lion in Winter. Working in groups of two, students generate three examples, from any of the sources, in which they believe Henry behaves as a tyrant and three examples in which he shows royal or kingly qualities. Students write their lists on the board, and as a class we review them. We ask students to pick one of the characteristics from each group (allowing for redundancy) and eliminate the other two in each of the categories. Next, we discuss the remaining examples of kingship and tyranny and invite students to write an assertion about the nature of both. Finally, in the literature course, the students make cluster diagrams or lists, according to their learning styles and preferences, for three main characters in The Lord of the Rings and then generate an assertion about the difference between kingship and tyranny. |
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This two-part activity requires students to think inductively, from the particulars of historical and fictional kings to a general assertion about kingship itself. It also reveals their own perspectives on kingship, as the lists are primarily based on their own ideas. This exercise allows us to discuss the differences between historical, modern, and contemporary viewpoints. The process of finding examples and winnowing them through class discussion teaches students to reason their way to a tenable assertion. Obviously, we could simply put forward an assertion ourselves with much less time and effort; however, as Mike Rose maintains in his book, Lives on the Boundary, "Students will float to the mark you set."9 Therefore, we set that level high. The "think-pair-share" model allows students to approach a question through inquiry, writing, and discussion. When they successfully complete the activity, we explain that they have just used inductive reasoning, a way of thinking that will help them write coherent and persuasive arguments. |
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The capstone paper for the learning community, a research project entitled "Kingship and Christianity: Bringing together Historical, Literary, and Religious Perspectives," asks students to examine kingship in depth by presenting a comparative argument about kingship in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Lord of the Rings; and the history of early Britain. In addition, students must consider the views of Hilaire Belloc and Niccolò Machiavelli from the history course as offering an ethical treatment of kingship. In other words, we asked students to synthesize many viewpoints into one coherent argument about kingship and Christianity. |
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Additional opportunities to develop students' conceptual and critical thinking abilities and to demonstrate how different perspectives inform historical understanding were also presented in both courses. The first involves how two Catholic writers saw the effects of the Norman Conquest of 1066. In the literature course, students read a series of letters in which Tolkien expressed his admiration for Germanic culture and Anglo-Saxon England. As a counterpoint, in the history course, students read and discuss Hilaire Belloc's, William the Conqueror. Although Belloc and Tolkien were Catholics, whose views were very much influenced by the Victorian and Edwardian periods, they disagreed about the significance of the Norman Conquest for England. Belloc seemed to argued that the Normans saved England by centralizing political authority under a strong feudal monarchy, ending the corruption and paganism of the Danish tradition with the ruling Anglo-Saxons king.10 However, according to Tom Shippey, Tolkien regretted the infusion of French into the Anglo-Saxon language.11 Tolkien's perspective reflects a nationalist position, prevalent in late nineteenth-century historiography, which celebrated traditional English liberty and sensibility as having developed under the Wessex dynasty and survived the Normans. Students therefore read Belloc and prepare a short written response that outlines the main points of his narrative, which typically includes William's claim to the throne, personal bravery in battle, and willingness to submit to the judgment of God. Then during class, students use the Tolkien letters, readings from the text, and lecture materials to generate freewrites which evaluate Belloc's position in light of Tolkien's. |
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Another opportunity to present an opposing perspective and to incorporate it within a writing assignment derives from Machiavelli's The Prince. The idea is to expose students to a secular understanding of the state, and then ask them to synthesize those ideas within the study of British kingship and the broader development of European political theory. As in the previous example, students prepare written responses to Machiavelli. However, on the final exam, they incorporate Machiavelli's ideas and apply them to a historical counter-factual question: how would they, as counselor to a young Queen Elizabeth, advise her to respond to a Catholic rebellion in northern England without undermining the social fabric of the state? |
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Another write-to-learn exercise in the history course requires students to analyze a translated historical account and make a tenable, substantive assertion, similar to the work that a historian might do. The students form small groups and read an excerpt about the Battle of Crecy (1346) from The Chronicle of Jean Froissart. Each group has to come up with a thesis statement about the differences between the English and French militaries, cite three pieces of evidence that support their assertions, and then discuss a conclusion on how their assertions might be more broadly significant to the history of the Hundred Years War. After ten minutes, each group writes an outline of their analysis on the board, and the class chooses the best two based on all three elements—assertions, evidence, and significance. The class is then asked, based on their group work and without knowing the particulars of the Hundred Years War (because it had not yet been covered in lecture or the readings) to give their best estimate about how the war actually unfolded. Surprisingly, for first-year students with little or no exposure to college history, the class typically correctly argues that the English would outfight the French. |
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Two examinations supplement the conceptual work the students do in their literature papers. Two weeks prior to the history midterm, which tests from the end of the Roman period in Britain through the start of the Angevin Empire under Henry II, the instructor asks the students to aid in the compiling of an exam review sheet. Students form groups of four and review the course material—texts, notes, and readings—in order to find a person, event, and concept for the identification part of the examination. Next, the students are asked to generate two essay questions on the theme of kingship in early Britain. The questions can center on a particular king or series of political events, and may include elements from the identifications. Each group writes its identifications and essay questions on the board and, as a class, we discuss suggestions for content, scope, and available evidence from the course materials that might provide a satisfactory answer. As a collective, the students choose two identifications from each category and an essay question for inclusion on the midterm review sheet. The groups then revise the essay questions to make them clear, concise, and accurate. After the class, the instructor adds more identification items and other essay questions and then posts the completed review sheet on the learning community Blackboard site. |
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The review sheet includes six items under each of the categories, person, event, and concept, and four essay questions. On the actual exam, students are asked to respond to four out of five items under each category in a paragraph-long short answer, and two out of three essay questions. Preparation for the final examination is completed in the same manner: students aid in the generation of their final review sheet. However, while the final resembles the midterm structurally, it requires students to respond to one additional item in each of the short answer categories and to complete the mandatory essay on Machiavelli's The Prince. |
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The informal and formal writing exercises in the learning community help our students make informed analyses and develop critical thinking skills. Write-to-learn and inquiry-based learning provide fruitful insights for our students and prepare them for the assessment of the learning community, further work in the college core, and the adjustment to forthcoming college work. Subsequent to the learning community, students might not remember the specific reign of Henry II, the troubled and tragic rule of Edward II, or the bravery of Aragorn in the Paths of the Dead, but they will remember the idea that kingship transcends the individual ruler and that legitimate authority must be answerable to the governed. Students show an appreciation and an understanding of a perspective that is truly foreign to them: early or medieval Britain and the ideals of Tolkien and Lewis, which are at odds with the hyper-individualism often found in our increasingly technologically-dependent world. Finally, for the instructors, writing to learn and inquiry-based learning have brought the incredible satisfaction of seeing our students think about, engage in, and become passionate about ideas and concepts about kingship offered by two different disciplines. |
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Notes
1. See Joel Rosenthal, "A Historiographical Survey: Anglo-Saxon Kings and Kingship since World War II," The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 24, no. 1, (January 1985): 72–93 for a discussion of recent work on the scholarship of kingship. For an analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary and historical examinations, see Billie Melman, "Claiming the Nation's Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 26, no. 3/4 (September 1991): 575–595.
2. Melman, 577. Melman characterized nineteenth-century British conservative writers as anti-modern, paternalist, ruralist, and nationalist. Melman, 577. Certainly, Tolkien seemingly shared these sensibilities, although most contemporary historians tend to view English history more broadly.
3. Alcock explained that contemporary sources were never intended to be treated as a communiqués because they conveyed their truth through literature. See Lesile Alcock, Arthur's Britain (New York: Classic Penguin, 2001), 68.
4. See Barbara Walvoord, Helping Students Write Well, 2nd ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1986) and Toby Fulwiler and Art Young, eds., Programs that Work: Models and Methods of Writing Across the Curriculum (Portsmith: Boyton/Cook, 1990).
5. Kenneth Bruffee, "Peer Tutoring and the 'Conversation of Mankind'" in Writing Centers: Theory and Administration, Gary A. Olson, ed. (Urbana: NCTE, 1984), 11–12.
6. Pelagius was born in mid fourth-century CE Britain where he lived as an ascetic. He later traveled to Rome and Hippo, teaching his lifestyle. However, his teachings on Original Sin were controversial, as he maintained that human beings were capable of perfection without divine grace. Subsequently, the Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine, persuaded the Synod of Carthage in 418 and the Council of Ephesus in 431 to declare Pelagius a heretic. Pelagius died sometime between 420 and 440.
7. Hugh Kearney argued that the story of Arthur was more important than its historical accuracy because it shows the need of defeated Britons to look for a champion who would defeat the invading Anglo-Saxons in the future. See Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 50.
8. Leslie Alcock uses passages from Gildas, De excidio et conquestu Britanniae, annuals from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, other documentary fragments, and findings from archeology to argue for the existence of evidence for Arthur as a war leader of several Briton kingdoms which united under his leadership to face the rampaging Saxons, not as a high king. See Alcock, Arthur's Britain: History and Archaeology, AD 367–634, rev. ed. (New York: Classic Penguin, 2001), 359.
9. Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary (New York: Penguin, 1990), 26.
10. For a brief overview of the range of historical opinion on the role of the Normans in feudalizing England see Richard Huscroft, Ruling England, 1042–1217 (Longman: New York, 2005), 104. For an excellent narrative account of the background and effect of the Conquest, see Hilaire Belloc, William the Conqueror (Rockford: Tan Books, 1992), 11.
11. Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien Author of the Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 9–10.
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