Histories/Hi-Stories: Greeting History through Theatre and Literature
is an innovative curricular program, paired with drama integration professional development for educators, that I have developed during my time at HGSE and continue to build through being awarded an HGSE Education Entrepreneurship Fellowship.
Story is where theatre, history, and literature intersect. I hope that history teachers will not take offense when I say that history was the subject I found myself least engaged in throughout middle and high school, as I struggled to find logic in or connections to the information we had to commit to memory; nobody ever framed history for me as a story, despite the word being right there in the name. Histories/Hi-Stories hopes to help by maximizing the learning that can take place at this crossroads of story, juxtaposing stories from history and literature and mining into their multifaceted interpretations through the playful, vitalizing, and emotionally-engaging force of creative drama in the classroom.
Histories/Hi-Stories is founded on the belief that a character-driven approach to history and an active approach to literature through drama will engage students’ perspective-taking and empathy, critical thinking, and creativity. Each easily adopted and flexibly adaptable curricular unit focuses on a specific historical period, revolving around three carefully-selected, character-driven works of literature that communicate history through the eyes of its actual figures – their perspectives, motivations, and dilemmas. The three texts must include a fiction, a drama, and a non-fiction, a unique multi-genre approach that engages students in multiple authorial viewpoints and storytelling styles. The experience is made active through theatre, incorporating engrossing and thought-provoking play in each lesson. The program operates on students’ agency, giving them ownership to experience and experiment with history from inside it, and students’ motivation, bringing creative and kinesthetic activities into history and literature. In turn, alongside historical and literary knowledge, the program strives for three key outcomes: 1) Perspective-taking and empathy, as students adopt the mindsets, decisions, and actions of historical figures, 2) Critical thinking, challenging students to assess each text’s contributions across three genres, and 3) Creativity and storytelling skills, asking students to represent and perform characters and stories visually and symbolically through drama.
This philosophy is expressed in our theory of change graphic below:
Histories/Hi-Stories is unique among curricula in its use of drama as a pedagogical core: participants are challenged to unite historical knowledge, character-driven narratives, and personal interpretation to create, produce, and perform new artistic representations of the meanings they have made of the stories of history.
Please reach out if you are interested in learning more about Histories/Hi-Stories or in using the pilot Salem witch trials curriculum with your middle or high school class!
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