Writing Fiction to Awaken Historical Memory

• In Event: 32.051 - Novel Approaches to Arts-Based Educational Research

Abstract

In this discussion, I explain why I chose to use arts-based research to construct a novel for use in multicultural education courses with teachers. My novel turns my extensive research on my German-American ancestors into historical fiction. The novel is set mainly in the present, but about one-third is set in the past as its protagonist Jessica gradually uncovers her own family history. Jean Harripersaud (2014) refers to this kind of fiction as “historically accurate fiction” — history with a little “romance and suspense thrown in.”

One purpose for writing the novel was to bring to life German-American bilingual, bicultural families who lived in the Midwest during the 1800s and early 1900s. While German is the largest ethnic ancestry of U.S. Americans, surprisingly little has been written about its history. How did this history become suppressed, and what are implications of its suppression on contemporary Americans of German descent? My extensive data sources included vital statistics, property records, and old documents, but the most useful data source turned out to be digitized newspaper articles, mainly from Decatur Illinois, where my ancestors lived. Doing the research, I became intrigued by questions such as: What was a typical day like? How did people relate to each other? What did it mean to be a German immigrant, or of German descent, living in the U.S. Midwest? How did German-English bilingualism play out in everyday life? How did perspectives change as World War I approached?

As I read newspaper articles published in the early 1900s, ranging from anti-German sentiments to perspectives by German-Americans, I was struck by strong parallels of contrasting perspectives today. These parallels led me to the second purpose for writing the novel: to engage readers vicariously in identification with bilingual-bicultural protagonists historically, and with Jessica’s struggle to understand her Mexican-American bilingual-bicultural colleagues who were working to advance an ethnic studies curriculum today. How might monolingual, White readers and teachers make sense of bilingual and multicultural approaches to teaching, if they knew the histories of their own ancestors? For Jessica, these juxtaposed ways of being collide in a manner that fundamentally changes her. Brooker-Gross (1991) argued that novels serve as a highly motivating tool for engaging university students with complexities of race and racism. I wrote my novel for this purpose, specifically to prompt the thinking of teachers working in racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse contexts.

References
Brooker-Gross, S. R. (1991). Teaching about race, gender, class and geography through fiction. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 15(1): 35-47.
Harripersaud, J. (2014). The value of historical fiction. New York Public Library. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/04/11/value-historical-fiction
Sleeter, C. (2015). White Bread. SensePublishers.

Author

• Christine E. Sleeter, California State University - Monterey Bay