As a student of history, I have engaged with historical films for both classwork and enjoyment, and I would certainly want to utilize them in my own educational work. I was inspired to fully watch and review David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia because my thesis advisor showed certain scenes in a Middle Eastern history class, and used those depictions as a basis for classroom discussions on both the content and the film’s portrayal of it. I think I would take a very similar approach: introduce the content and the context of the film, and guide students through several different facets of the film, including narrative and cinematography. For example, students could discuss whether it matched their expectations from earlier lessons, whether they found its portrayal of the content convincing, or what they would change instead. An important element of this activity would be analyzing the film as a medium – students would need to inquire how the film was made, why it might have made certain decisions, and what specific information or sources it was based on. This would hopefully utilize several different aspects of historical thinking to teach students how to better approach films as a medium to convey information and perspectives, with its advantages and disadvantages. For this review, I was initially considering more traditional ‘war’ movies, but for future activities I think I would lean more into historical biopics similar to Lean’s Lawrence due to the breadth of material they provide for discussion.

Of course, film is just one example of digital (or otherwise electronic) storytelling and the educational opportunities it offers. Digital tools provide new ways of finding, organizing, interpreting, and communicating information of all academic kinds, but they also assist in finding a bigger audience for such information. For the past century, cinematography has been an enormously influential medium to convey history to an ever-growing public – for good and for ill, with reliable research or not. As digital tools evolve, so too will the possibilities of digital storytelling, and new mediums will provide alternate ways of engaging with history. Writing a decade ago, Robert Whitaker’s proclamation that “video games will prove to be one of the most popular mediums of the 21st century” was extremely prescient, and so too was his prediction that the gaming public is an immensely important audience for the humanities to connect with (“Backward Compatible”). As the industry has continued to exponentially grow since then, more and more video games utilize historical content and settings, and even more than that, numerous genres have emerged where in-game histories are multilayered enough to merit interpretive discussion. In my experience, many of the skills integral to historical thinking are utilized in these discussions, which is often the intent by developers. Thus, Whitaker is correct that the gaming public is an audience that public historians cannot ignore going forward – video games are themselves prime examples of digital storytelling, and it will be interesting to see them referred to more in classrooms.

Regarding more educational applications of digital storytelling, I think I would take a similar approach to those seen in the modules where most research questions are left up to students. Similar to my own current project, I envision students finding their own niche within the broader scope of the lesson for them to individually pursue and fulfill. From the reading, Sample and Schrum explain that digital storytelling has value because “it is accessible, relatively easy to teach basic technical skills, and a useful practical skill,” and similar to their own examples of scaffolding techniques, I think that a larger degree of freedom would be best suited to help students succeed in such a project (“What’s Right with Digital Storytelling”). In doing so, I think students would obviously improve at research, source analysis, and writing as well as other staples of historical thinking, but it would also teach them much about the relationship between interpreting historical sources and using them to convey a narrative. Like with film, the power of these mediums is not that they can relate a multitude of historical ‘facts’ (which itself would be suspect) but that they can convey them through powerful narratives for different kinds of people, which requires responsibility and the utmost care. Practice with digital storytelling would help students in both creating narratives and approaching those of others.

References:

Zemon Davis, Natalie. “Film as Historical Narrative.” In Slaves on Screen: film and historical vision. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Robert Whitaker. Backward Compatible: Gamers as a Public History Audience Perspectives on History

Schrum, K. (2012). A tale of two goldfish bowls . . . Or what’s right with digital storytelling. In D. Cohen & T. Scheinfeldt (Eds.) Hacking the academy: A book crowdsourced in one week. Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press.