‘No, no, the Cold War was not that dramatic’: A case study on the use of a drama task to promote Dutch secondary school students’ historical imagination

Constructing images of the past

Whether focused on the physical appearance of the historical context or on the thinking and actions of a historical actor, all imagination activities should be based on historical evidence (Lévesque, 2008). Collingwood (1935) argues that when confronted with knowledge gaps because of an absence of usable sources, one must try to fill these gaps ‘like a detective’ by using information from sources that are the most plausible. Thus, historical imagination is not the same as fantasizing about the past. However, when confronted with gaps in their knowledge, students have to imagine the things they do not know, using what seems reasonable from their own point of view (Barton and Levstik, 2004; Virta and Kouki, 2014). Therefore, scholars argue that these types of tasks can lead students towards misconceptions about the past, such as presentism, which is the transfer of values and information from the present to the past (Brooks, 2009; Wilschut, 2012). For the same reason, teachers can also be concerned about working with imagination tasks (Egan and Judson, 2008).

Despite these possible concerns, tasks in which students are asked to form an image of the past are used in everyday classroom practices (Cunningham, 2009). Historical imagination can be exercised and demonstrated in various ways (Fines, 2002). Especially when working with historical empathy, writing tasks are known to contribute to students’ historical understanding (Brooks, 2008; De Leur et al., 2017; Virta and Kouki, 2014). A writing task focusing on imagining a concrete person can support historical understanding. In a study by De Leur et al. (2017), students reported that a writing task about a child in a factory supported them to picture the era of industrialization. Although in history textbooks writing tasks are omnipresent (De Leur et al., 2015), there are other ways for students to present their image of the past (Fines, 2002; Levstik and Barton, 2015; Munslow, 2016). For example, drawing tasks can evoke forms of historical imagination (De Leur et al., 2019; Dilek, 2010). Another promising way to promote historical imagination is a drama task (Rainer and Lewis, 2012). Drama activities can combine historical empathy with imagining concrete details of the past. When acting, students are forced to pretend that they are an actor from the past (historical empathy), and when they create a (role) play, the historical context (concrete details about the setting) has to be shown as well.

Beneficial effects of drama activities

Several scholars list the possible beneficial effects of drama activities on history learning. By impersonating a historical actor, drama can be a tool to deal with questions about human motivations, feelings and actions in history (Rainer and Lewis, 2012). A drama task can also help students to grasp the role of historical characters and to understand their actions (Egan and Judson, 2008; Stevens, 2015). Furthermore, drama could lead to an in-depth understanding of history through taking a detailed look at a particular time (Fennessey, 2000; Rainer and Lewis, 2012), especially when students themselves do the necessary research (Rantala et al., 2016). Moreover, drama tasks might enhance students’ motivation, or their commitment to the lesson or topic they are studying. In an exploratory study on a scripted role play about the partition of India, Stevens (2015) conducted a questionnaire which shows that most students considered the role play engaging. Particularly, the emotional element appealed to students. Endacott and Pelekanos (2015) show that debating in the role of a historical character helps students to engage with the past. Wilhelm and Edminston (1998) argue that motivation can derive from the fact that, in a drama task, the students can take agency of the task and, therefore, the task becomes meaningful for them. Luff (2000) also reports that drama tasks can encourage student engagement because students themselves regulate the task, giving them a sense of ownership.

Designing and assessing drama activities

As shown, drama tasks might contribute to students’ engagement with, and understanding of, historical events. In best-practice descriptions of drama activities, several scholars propose design principles for drama activities in the (history) classroom. McDaniel (2000) argues that to make a coherent story, a variety of sources should be provided, showing students that there is more to a topic than only the textbook. McDaniel (2000) and Harris and Foreman-Peck (2004) suggest that a task based on non-fictional individuals enhances students’ active involvement in the task. Fennessey (2000) adds that details about humans in particular can encourage students to relate to the topic they study.

Moreover, a safe learning environment is essential for drama activities (Biddulph and Bright, 2003), although safety can also be a result of a drama activity (Stevens, 2015). Furthermore, a teacher must be comfortable with drama or role play (Luff, 2000). Some teachers prefer to discuss texts rather than working with drama tasks, because they think focusing on texts is more important (Stevens, 2015). In addition, some teachers lack confidence in their ability to create or manage a creative process (Newton and Newton, 2014; Pauw et al., 2018). Finally, there can also be a reluctance to use drama because it might hinder historical understanding. Too close (emotional) identification with the role a student is playing can result in less focus on the historical context (Endacott, 2014; Shemilt, 1984).

Because most drama tasks are open-ended, assessing such tasks is challenging (Rainer and Lewis, 2012). Kearney (2011) recommends the use of rubrics in order to include the full range of skills, processes and content goals in an assessment. Selwyn (1993) recommends using learner reports or self-evaluations. Nevertheless, both Selwyn and Kearney acknowledge that the difficulty of assessment can prevent teachers from using drama tasks in classrooms. De Leur et al. (2017) proposed to evaluate the processing of information from historical sources and prior knowledge, the use of concrete details, historical correctness, and the display of human thoughts and feelings when evaluating students’ images of the past. Ashby and Lee (1987) propose a model with different stages of historical empathy, which was used in, for example, a study by Rantala et al. (2016), focusing on a simulation about the Civil War in Finland. However, Endacott and Brooks (2018) argue against the measurement of historical empathy. They stress that tasks related to historical empathy should be seen as a process towards historical understanding. Because of the personal factors contributing to historical empathy (that is, the personal context of the student), the learning process by means of historical empathy is highly individual. Furthermore, the follow-up after a drama activity is considered important (Luff, 2000; McDaniel, 2000). When discussing student products afterwards, there is an opportunity for elaborating on the content based on the activities of the students (Havekes et al., 2017).

Research question

There has been some research on drama activities in history education. However, empirical studies on the possible contributions of drama tasks to students’ engagement in historical imagination, or what the produced images look like, are scarce. This case study aims to contribute to gaining more specific insights into the use of a filmed drama task by exploring the following research question: What are the learning opportunities in a drama task aiming at historical imagination in terms of students’ engagement and the construction of an image of the past?

Participants

This study was conducted in a suburban, average-sized secondary school in the western part of the Netherlands. The history curriculum of this school is chronologically ordered, and mainly aimed at the acquisition of overview knowledge, as is the custom in the Netherlands (Van Straaten et al., 2018). All 29 students of one ninth grade group and their teacher participated. The students, aged 14–15, took their history classes at the Dutch intermediate stream preparing for higher education at a university of applied sciences (15 male and 14 female students). The students had some experience with the production of films, since they had completed a film task for a citizenship course one year prior to our study. The teacher of the class was a 26-year-old history teacher with a bachelor’s degree in teaching history. She already had three years’ experience of drama tasks in her lessons, both preparing small role plays and supervising a filmed drama task.

Drama task

For this study, we choose a drama task resulting in a filmed product (see Esslin, 1987). The topic that the students were studying was the Cold War. Therefore, the drama task focused on daily life in the Netherlands during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The task was designed in close cooperation by the teacher and the first author. The teacher set the goals for the task. She wanted to evaluate that students understood how the Cold War affected the daily life of a normal family, and she wanted to give students the opportunity to work with historical information in a creative manner. The teacher designed the rubric for the assessment. The first author assisted by collecting suitable sources and was present during the lessons, but did not intervene in the lessons or the assessment of the products.

The teacher divided the students into five groups of five or six students each, following the recommendations of Cooter and Chilcoat (1990) and Fischer and Frey (2012) that, in (dramatic) group work, six is the maximum number of students feasible for manageable discussions. The groups were mixed by gender, and each group consisted of both weak and strong performers in history class, according to their history grades. The students were asked to imagine an afternoon of a Dutch secondary school student aged 14 or 15 during the Cuban missile crisis, and to present their image in the form of a short film clip (2–4 minutes). The exact phrasing of the task was: ‘Present a clip in which you make clear if and, if so, how, the Cold War affects your daily life.’ To help the students, different sources were provided, such as a description of the events during the Cuban missile crisis; pictures of families and children playing, listening to the radio and doing household chores; and some suggestions for further reading on life in the Netherlands during the Cold War.

In the first 45-minute lesson of a series of five, the teacher delivered an interactive lecture about the Cold War. She talked about the end of the Second World War and the tension between the Soviet Union and the United States. She also discussed a picture of two children playing in a bomb shelter, and she displayed an original radio from the 1960s and a package of NATO emergency biscuits. With these concrete objects, she introduced the task. At the end of this first lesson, and during the following three lessons, the groups were allowed to work on the task. The teacher opened each lesson with a reminder of what the task was about and some admonitions about the group work, and she closed by urging the groups to fill out the group journals. During the last lesson, the clips that the students had produced were watched, and the task was briefly evaluated.

All the groups were free to decide among themselves who would do what and when, as long as they monitored the process in a journal. The teacher was available for all questions, whether on the subject of the Cold War or about the task itself.

Data collection

Because we wanted a detailed picture of the implementation of the drama task, we used various data. Furthermore, to increase the validity of the results, we used methodological triangulation (Miles and Huberman, 1994). Table 1 shows which data we used for which part of the analysis. We used the following data:

1. Audio recordings of the group work. During the group work, each of the groups had a voice recorder on their desk. By recording the group discussions, we tried to monitor the construction of a historical image as reflected in the clip.

2. Classroom observations. During all the lessons, the first author was present in the classroom taking field notes on the students’ task behaviour.

3. Group journals. We provided each group with a journal to be completed at the end of lessons 1, 2 and 3. In this way, we wanted to monitor the group process and the subject-related problems the groups encountered. The questions raised in the journals were: What did we do today? What do we want to do in the next lesson? What do we want to do at home? What did we want to know today, and how did we get to an answer?

4. Situational interest questionnaire. This questionnaire (Linnenbrink-Garcia et al., 2010) measures the students’ interest provoked by a particular learning activity or lesson. It is a validated questionnaire consisting of 12 items scored by the students on a 1–6 Likert scale. Examples of the items are ‘The task we just completed was fascinating’ and ‘I think that what I learned working on this task is useful’. We used this measurement to explore how students valued the task. The students completed the questionnaire at the beginning of lesson 5.

5. Learner report. With this learner report, we wanted to explore, on an individual level, what students took with them from the task (Van Kesteren, 1993). This report consisted of four sentences to be completed by the students: ‘The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the task is…’; ‘I have learned the following about the Cuban missile crisis…’; ‘What I see before me when I think of daily life in 1962 is…’; ‘What I will certainly remember from this task is…’. The students completed the learner report at the beginning of lesson 5.

6. Interview with the teacher. After lesson 5, we conducted a semi-structured interview with the teacher, focusing on her evaluation of the lessons, the group processes and the products the students handed in.

7. Interviews with students. After lesson 5, we interviewed triads of students from three groups in semi-structured interviews. We asked them about their perspectives on forming images in history education and let them evaluate their own clips. Due to time issues, it was not possible to interview Group 1 and Group 2.

8. Group product. The teacher assessed the products using a rubric she designed herself and that was known to the students. The rubric comprised a score for required elements (journal, recordings, finished product, turned in on time), task approach, use of the information provided, illustrative elements to demonstrate historical empathy/imagination, the historical correctness of the product, and a possibility for a bonus because of extraordinary creativity.

Data analysis

We mainly chose the group as the unit of analysis, only mentioning individual students when they stood out significantly. To analyse the data, we used ‘pattern watching’, a constant comparison method (Yin, 2009), visiting all the data several times to ensure internal consistency in the findings. First, we looked at students’ engagement. To explore students’ task behaviour, we focused on the degree of on- and off-task interaction and joint attention (Fischer and Frey, 2012). To better understand students’ task behaviour and the situational interest they reported immediately after finishing the task, we explored the students’ perceptions of the task. We focused on the students’ positive and negative remarks in interviews and learner reports on what they valued in the task and what they thought was challenging. To explore the process, content and quality of students’ historical imagination, we focused on elements relevant for historical imagination: the processing and use of the sources that were provided with the task, and the addition of both concrete details and human thoughts and feelings. To explore the quality of the images, we used the assessment the teacher did herself, and her opinions about the quality of the drama products.

The first author conducted the initial analysis, which was then discussed with the second author. We performed a member check on the teacher, and she agreed with our findings. Additionally, inspired by the guidelines for an audit procedure (Akkerman et al., 2008), a third history education researcher (the third author), who was not involved in the design of the study, did a check on the analysis of Group 3. This researcher was provided with all the data related to this group (recordings, student product and evaluation by the teacher, questionnaires, interviews). There was agreement about the interpretations. Our findings for all the groups are summarized in Table 2. The table is followed by a general description of the findings. Subsequently, to illustrate the whole production/learning process, we give a thick description of Group 3, which was selected because of the complete and rich data set.

Students’ engagement

The teacher reported in the interview that she had seen many on-task interactions in all the groups, but also that some students worked more seriously than others. This was confirmed by the field notes of the observer and the audio recordings. The students discussed the content of the sources, historical clothing and names, and the threat of a nuclear war. In all the groups, we saw students correcting each other and offering their own views on the sources or the content of the clip; for example, ‘the problem was that neither Khrushchev nor America could win a war because in the war they could use nuclear bombs, and nuclear bombs kill everyone’ (Group 1). In Group 5, one of the members sighed when the others suggested that back then no one dared to go out on the street: ‘No, no the Cold War was not that dramatic.’ The audio recordings and observations showed that the groups used different approaches in handling the task. Groups 1 and 5 focused on the form of the product (such as camera, props and acting); Group 3 initially focused on the content (sources, prior knowledge); Group 4 mainly focused on social interactions that were not really related to the task.

In most of the groups, the situational interest questionnaire scores were average (see Table 2), with a mean of 3.8 on a 6-point scale. However, there was quite some variation reported by individual students (SD = 0.87). In the learner reports, as well as in the interviews, most students confirmed that they enjoyed working on the task: ‘We could talk and move, and we had freedom and responsibility.’ The boy playing the lead part in the Group 5 clip reported: ‘When I saw the clothes, I thought I didn’t like it, but when I had everything on, I enjoyed it; I thought it was fun.’ The students’ motivation was also noticed by the teacher. She thought that the students appreciated the amount of freedom they had during the task since, she explained, normally they do not get much freedom during history class.

The learner reports showed that most students agreed that they had learned from the task – primarily that it had helped them to relate to the emotions of people in the past: ‘Now I had to play or something. Then you have to truly mimic the feelings’ (Group 5). In the interview, students from Group 5 elaborated on the difference between the task they had just completed and a ‘regular’ textbook task (reading a text and producing written answers): ‘This is more difficult than writing because when you act out history, you have to make an image. When you complete a writing task from the textbook, you can copy the answers, but when you have to act, you learn things better.’

Construction of an image of the past

In all products, information from the sources was visible. The clips contained traditional role patterns (a mother who is cooking and cleaning), the threat of a nuclear bomb is elaborated on, and Americans and Soviets are mentioned. Some groups tried to use old-fashioned names for their characters. Additionally, some students were dressed in a way that they thought was the custom sixty years ago, thus adding concrete details that did not derive from the sources. In all clips, human emotions were shown, mainly fear and insecurity.

In the learner reports and the interviews, students provided us with insight into the understanding gained from the task. Group 4 told in the interview: ‘Making the clip, we now know more about those people. Because we had to play their emotions, which sounds weird, but imagining that period you could imagine their feelings a little.’ The students elaborated: ‘For example, people lived in fear. However, they still went on with their lives. They prepared slightly with shelters. They hardly had any electronics, and their clothes were different.’ The teacher noted that ‘This class knows a lot about daily life and human details, but has hardly any knowledge of politics; another class that did a traditional pencil-and-paper task learned more about politics, but has no idea about daily life.’

The assessment of the quality of the images constructed by the students proved challenging. The teacher thought that the actual products were disappointing, because she expected the clips to be richer in information. However, the recordings of the group talks and the interviews afterwards showed that the students’ conversations included much more historical content than they made visible in the product. In the interview, Group 3 explained: ‘Our clip is now about school and a bomb drill, so the teacher cannot know what we learned about other stuff. But we did.’

Group 3

To examine the learning processes and experiences of the students in more detail, we will present a thick description of Group 3. We will follow Group 3 during the consecutive lessons, and then describe their perceptions of the task, as shown afterwards in the interview.

Group 3 consisted of two boys and three girls, one of whom was absent during the final lesson. In the ten minutes the students were given for consultation during the first lesson, they started right away by discussing the task and the clothes they could use in their product. During the second lesson, Group 3 divided the information provided, looked at some of the internet links provided (one of which, an information clip about the Cuban missile crisis made by Dutch public school television, appeared in the actual product), and started studying them. The journals showed that the students summarized each source and wrote down which elements from the sources they could possibly use for their product, such as, ‘Source 1 mentions people being scared and talking to each other, so we could use people gossiping in our clip.’ The students constantly communicated about their associations, such as when discussing the source about television: ‘Oh no, they watched television with a whole group? Yes, on a small screen. Kind of like a microwave.’ This was later followed by an opinion: ‘How funny, there were only children’s programmes on Sunday.’ Additionally, the group discussed the Cold War in general: ‘It was about the threat of Russia and America. And the missiles on Cuba.’

The conversation of the third lesson was almost entirely dedicated to deciding on a plot: ‘We will do children who are walking home while discussing that war, and then, they watch the news or something … Did they have TV? No. Or did they have radios? Yes, radios.’ The students talked about setting, clothing and hair, and they made a list of props they might need (‘torch, radio, canned foods’). They also discussed how to make the clip look authentic: ‘Look, if we just make the clip in black and white, then you do not notice the modern stuff that much.’ During the fourth lesson, the students did the actual filming. At times, the students discussed some issue that was related to creating a historically correct image: ‘Look, T. was smart, she removed her watch.’ However, most of the talking was about practical problems: ‘No way am I going to lie down on the grass!’

In the learner reports, students stated that they would remember that this task was ‘a nice way to learn history’, and they stressed the fear and nervousness people must have felt during the Cuban missile crisis.

In the group interview, the students explained that, because they had to make a clip, they were forced to construct an image. To do that, they had to think about the information provided. In some cases, this enhanced their reflection on the differences between the past and present situations: ‘We studied a lot of information, and then you have an idea, but, well … now, we are free naturally, but then, every time there was fear that something could happen. But you have to be able to imagine that.’ Additionally, when shooting the clip, they had to think of issues related to a historical image: ‘You see, the cars that are out there today, they were not there then.’ According to the students, the task has primarily helped them to relate better to the emotions of the people from the past compared to a regular pencil-and-paper task: ‘When you read the textbook, you think “that country does this or that”, and then, I think “whatever”. But, when you study information to use in our own clip, then I can imagine how people experienced their life.’ They explained: ‘When reading a textbook, sometimes you feel sad, but when you have to make a clip yourself, you feel more, because you have to think how people must have felt.’ Although the students from Group 3 said that they were quite satisfied with their own product, they agreed that the actual clip did not reflect everything that they had learned during the preparation of the clip. They said, ‘You see, we brought a first aid kit, but we did not use it’, and, ‘We talked about how to prepare for a nuclear crisis with extra food at home, but we haven’t put that in the clip. But still, we learned about that.’

The students discussed many historical issues during the lessons in preparing to film the clip, but most of what was discussed was not included in the final product. For example, the radio, the workload of the mothers, or even the fear that the students attributed to people in 1962 are not present in the clip. On the other hand, the main historical element that the students did include in the clip (a bomb drill, see Table 2) is not shown correctly, because the students first drop on the ground, and then go inside and hide under a desk. Apparently, the students blended the information from the source about what to do when you are outside and what to do when you are inside.