Using YA To Teach History

Hi all. Once again we have a contribution from Georgia McBride's network. Georgia works tirelessly for the benefit of the reading lives of children and adolescents She is the operator of Georgia McBride Media Group (GMMG). This is the home of Month9Books, Tantrum Books, Swoon Romance, and Tantrum Jr.  This post is written by Chris Ledbetter, one of authors in the Month9Books. Take it away Chris.

As a former teacher, I can say with certainty that the quickest way to get a student to eye roll one eye while the other one glosses over into a haze… the quickest way for them to fall into a dribble-on-their-desks, sleep-through-the-bell, and be-late-to-next-class slumber… is to tell them the lesson is about history. That’s not completely true. But close enough.
 
I can hear the groans now. And the teeth sucking. And the sighs. Wait… is that my own PTSD? But I digress.
 
Everyone knows that if you don’t learn history you are doomed to repeat it. Usually, that only applies to the bad things. Or at least, that’s the selling point. Repeating good things is not necessarily doom, last I checked. I wish I could be doomed to good, positive things. Sign me up!

​History has many lessons to teach our youth. (And frankly, our older generations, as well.) But it’s all about the delivery system and, dare I say, the presentation. The best restaurants use healthy amount of pizzaz in their plating of food, and for good reason. To some youth, reading about history is like sitting down to a plate piled high with nice, perfectly healthy vegetables. Your parents can sing the praises of the veggies until their cheeks turn a nice shade of azure, and those sad little veggies still won’t taste better and they will have zero cool factor and even less street cred.
 
Seriously, who wants to be that kid who pulls out a baggie of celery stalks and baby carrots when everyone around them is mowing down pizza and fries? But as I said, it’s all in the delivery and presentation. Now, there are actually sneaky ways to get your kids to eat veggies. They’re hidden in juice box blends, apple sauce, and even pasta.

​Lesson: You have to Make Veggies Fun Again.
 
And that is how we can get youth, reluctant or not, to consume history… we hide it in plain sight behind an expertly eye-catchy and well-designed cover, and within a tightly plotted, unputdownable story with unforgettable characters. Who doesn’t love a good story? It’s like when you eagerly anticipate talking to your favorite uncle at Thanksgiving because you love the tall tales. And he’s got a million of ‘em. The very best history teachers are the ones who can teach it in such a way that the people throughout history become characters, each being the protagonist hero or heroine in their own plotline. That’s what makes them truly come alive.
 
Similarly, the YA author’s job in historical fiction, as well as any other story, is to transport the reader, dropping them in to a lush, fully realized, three-dimensional landscape with characters and stories so compelling that the reader completely forgets that they’re reading about history. They’re learning without even knowing it, similar to how Karate Kid learned his martial art craft by waxing the car and painting the fence.
 
Sometimes a YA story will dive into the head of a historical figure to offer a close view of what it might have been like to be that person in that period. Other times, authors will create a character that bears witness to real historical events. The end result is that the reader arrives at the end of the story with a deeper understanding of time, place, context, and significance. In that way, it’s similar to sliding on a virtual reality viewer and taking a walk through a particular moment in history… all the while having fun. It’s just like when you serve your child their favorite spaghetti and meatball dish made with veggie-infused pasta and of course, a primo red sauce chockablock with veggies they never even saw coming. 

Thanks Chris. Chris tries to practice what he advises in his new novel, The Sky Throne. It has been released this April, 2017. It is described as a YA Zeus origin story. You can read about it and by it here.

I really think Chris is on to a good idea. We have several other guest contributors who have addressed making the history and YA connection in early posts. My colleague and occasional coauthor, Dr. Paul Binford has written twice for the blog. His first post was Revisiting Emmett Till’s place in Mississippi State History and his second was Before the Dust Settles. Another post that builds on historical fiction is by Mary Warner. Her post helps us see how our students can help make voices from the past come alive: Discovering (Rediscovering) Karen Hesse’s Witness and Its Multi-genre Potential.

To finish up this week's post I am providing a slide show of several non fiction or works of historical fiction that I think are fantastic. Enjoy.