Every once in a while, I’ll find myself in a group of teachers discussing techniques for keeping students focused in the classroom.Almost inevitably, the talk turns to criticizing the practice of lecturing and dismissing it as outmoded and ineffective.
I’m usually quiet during such exchanges because I used to think of what I do in the classroom as lecturing.But I’ve realized that what its detractors have typically called lecturing is often something else entirely.Rather than defending it, I want to ask critics if it’s lecturing when they tell their children a story at bedtime.Of course it’s not.Telling a story is about as far from the stereotypical lecture as can be imagined.It’s also one of the oldest art forms practiced by humans.
A few years ago, a writer for the New York Times said that storytelling would not disappear, “as long as there are people who can fire imagination with words modulated by voices that reflect nuances the printed page cannot.”That’s what connects storytelling to other forms of art.Like painting, music, and live theater, it fires the imagination of those who encounter it, transforming the audience into a vested participants instead of detached spectators.
One person who’s had his interaction with American history transformed though an encounter with art is the actor Daveed Diggs, who won a Tony award for his portrayal of both the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the smash musical Hamilton.In 2016 I read an interview with him in which he said that American history never seemed to be his until he joined this musical.A feeling of not possessing the story, of not understanding how it could relate to you, are feelings that I know lots of people have when they first come to the study of history.
He said that seeing and hearing the talented actor Chris Jackson sing the part of George Washington was, in his words, a game changer. It “totally changed everything I thought about American history.”It didn’t do that for him because Jackson brought any new information to the role.It did it because he was suddenly engaging the raw material of history through an artistic medium that changed how he perceived it.Diggs said that now for the first time he feels like this is his story.
What do we learn from this?In Diggs’ case, when art became the medium through which he encountered history, his receptiveness to it was transformed.I know that any subject, even one as dramatic as history, can be neutered by being conveyed through a “lecture.”But instead, when art is the medium, mere facts transform into something every bit as alive as we are.