Narrative fiction in a content area

My “content area” is history, specifically, Canadian History.  And since I can remember, I have always loved Canadian Historical fiction.  One of my favourite books of all time was (and is) Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens, which I re-read this year and found to be as wonderful as I remembered it.

This week in my writing class, I am to select an example of poetry or prose in my subject area.  I immediately turned to Farley Mowat, this time The Curse of the Viking Grave, the equally enthralling sequel to Lost in the Barrens:

(Chapter 1, page 2) Angus Macnair hardly looked the part of a school-teacher. He was a massive and craggy-faced trapper who had lived in the Canadian northlands since leaving Orkney Islands at the age of thirteen.  The schoolroom was the Macnair cabin, a cluttered and low-ceilinged log structure redolent with the gamey smell from scores of pelts that hung drying from the rafters.  Here Angus taught school for three days each week.  During the remainder of the week teacher and students were absent from Macnair Lake, tending their traplines which ran for as much as fifty miles to the north, east, west and south.

For me, this passage, succinctly and in the classic wordsmithing of Farley Mowat,  paints the scene, develops the characters, and sets mood, and does so through the well-chosen adjectives of a gifted writer.

The message that is conveyed to me in this paragraph is one that is more about the writer’s craft than the story, and I imagine that other readers, those not currently enrolled in a course about how to teach writing, might receive a different message from its reading.  Perhaps they would understand more about the way children in the far north during this period were educated, perhaps they would focus on their understandings of survival and priorities in this community, or the diverse roles of community members or the contribution of children to their communities.  How would they gather this meaning from the paragraph? Through the writer’s use of detail and descriptive adjectives, taking us back to the meaning I take from this paragraph: its function in writing to learn (using historical fiction) through learning to write.

In our textbook for this course (Writing Across the Curriculum, Peterson (2008)), Shelley Peterson suggests using a text such as this for a mini-lesson on The Challenge of Details. She suggests using a mentor paragraph but removing the details in the writing before sharing it with students. Students would then be challenged to form an image or picture of the scene or characters without the adjectives.  After finishing that exercise in frustration, I would then share the original paragraph with the students and talk about the use of detail in good narrative writing and have the students form a picture of the scene or characters using the paragraph in its full form.  To take the lesson further, I would challenge students to edit a paragraph from another historical narrative that has so much detail that it gets in the way of the narrative itself, having the students hopefully reach the analysis stage of their learning, and all through the use of narrative in a content area.