Creswell, Jeff. (1997) Creating Worlds, Constructing Meaning: The Scottish Storyline Method. Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis

Creswell, Jeff. (1997) Creating Worlds, Constructing Meaning: The Scottish Storyline Method. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. ISBN #0-435-07244-7 124pp $20.00 (Paper) Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis Marshall University March 16, 1998 Despite the largely unqualified claims made for the effectiveness of the storyline method, Creating Worlds, Constructing Meaning is, in some ways, a modest book. One of Heinemann's "Teacher to Teacher" series of books, it offers a brief account of an instructional approach that teacher Jeff Creswell thinks would interest other teachers. The slim, paperback book, illustrated with photographs of some of Creswell's students and their projects, introduces the reader to the Scottish storyline method by giving a brief history and rationale for the method, a description of the method, and five examples of how it has worked in Creswell's classrooms of students from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds. In the prologue to the book, the reader learns from Sallie Harkness, one of the originators of the storyline method, that it was developed at Jordanhill College of Education in Glasgow, Scotland, by inservice educators in collaboration with classroom teachers. Developed partly in response to a set of guidelines published by the Scottish Office Education Department in 1965, the storyline method resulted from an effort to apply the concept of teaching the whole child to the accomplishment of curriculum goals in academic subjects. Harkness quotes the Education Department guidelines as saying,: "It cannot be too strongly stressed that education is concerned as much with the personal development of the child as with the teaching of subjects" (xiii - xiv). These guidelines recommended that education in the primary years "have regard for the nature of the child and for the way he [sic] grows and develops" (xiii ) and recommended that education be based on the child's interest and needs as well as on the nature of the child's environment. In addition, the guidelines recommended that children participate actively in their learning and that the curriculum be taught as a combination of interrelated subjects rather than as a number of discrete subjects. The Scottish storyline method was designed, then, to provide a child-centered approach to instruction, discovery learning, and integration of the curriculum. It was also intended to promote development of language skills and, through its emphasis on group work, skills of social interaction. Harkness says that a successful storyline encourages a creative partnership between teachers and learners and inspires a sense of ownership and an unusual degree of imaginative involvement. Children say, according to Harkness, that they enjoy the storyline method "better than work." Because of its effectiveness and its popularity with students and teachers, she reports, this method is well established as a basic element of teachers' instructional repertoires in the west of Scotland. The storyline method espouses a constructivist philosophy. Key questions, developed and presented by the teacher, combined with teacher- and student-initiated episodes elicit students' ideas about a particular topic. The first key question usually helps establish the setting for the storyline. After this, characters are developed, and episodes are dramatized through the children's made-up stories, presentations, simulations, and pictures. Each storyline concludes with a celebration in the form of a performance by the children, a field trip, or a visit from a local expert, who may offer them the opportunity to contrast their version of the story with reality. Sometimes, Creswell notes, the children's written products associated with a storyline are bound into topic books which the children and their parents can look through after the storyline is completed. Although the storyline approach is described as highly flexible and able to accommodate most curriculum goals, Creswell does not propose it as a means of teaching everything. Each morning, the author teaches math, reading, and writing. In the afternoon, his class works on a storyline. He says that his classes have been able to complete about three storyline topics a year. Each storyline has one major focus and two minor areas, for example in a radio-station storyline, Creswell had language arts goals as major curriculum goals and science and career- education goals as minor ones. The first of the five examples of the storyline method provided in the book is "The Hotel," a storyline that was developed in St. George's County Junior School, a school in a working class neighborhood with subsidized housing for low-income families, in Colchester, England. Creswell taught the fifth grade and had 32 students, who worked about two hours every afternoon on this storyline for three months. The second storyline described in the book, Space Adventure: Operation DSCV, was developed by his fifth-grade class in Irvington School, a racially and socioeconomically diverse school in Portland, Oregon. This storyline, Creswell says, helped him to solve the problem of getting kids from different backgrounds to work toward a common goal. A radio-station storyline was done by a third- and fourth-grade mixed-age classroom in Irvington School. A fish- farm storyline was done by this same class the next year as fourth- and fifth-graders. The fifth storyline, developed by this same class, was based on Barbara Smucker's book, Underground to Canada, about the underground railroad. Creswell's description of the storyline method is clear and well-organized. After reading it through, I felt prepared to try this approach to instruction. The approach doesn't seem difficult because it employs familiar principles and methods of education. (Creswell credits writers Nancie Atwell and Peter Elbow among his major sources of ideas, and, though his name is not mentioned in the book, Jerome Bruner's emphasis on discovery learning is apparent in the background of this approach.) But, despite the sample plans and schedules, despite the explanation and examples, the author cautions at the end of the first chapter that this is not a "how-to book" and that readers who are interested in applying the method should consider taking a storyline class. This modest disclaimer may be a straightforward attempt to prevent the reader's expecting more from the book than the author is sure he can provide. But I'm not sure because, in some ways, Creating Worlds, Constructing Meaning is an immodest book. Throughout much of the text, the author employs a blithe tone, bringing up few of the many problems that accompany any approach to classroom teaching. Although Creswell presents enough detail to allow teachers to adapt its basic ideas to their classrooms, they will have to discover the limitations of the method pretty much on their own. He doesn't present enough information about problems to allow readers to judge beforehand the limitations of the method. The only limitations he acknowledges are minor or dismissed as minor. He says that the method is not a total approach to curriculum—but this isn't much of a limitation, few methods are. The occasional unexpected delay in schedules and the occasionally recalcitrant child are brought up as nuisances, to be taken in stride as all part of a day's work. When I noticed in the acknowledgments section, Creswell's thanks to the office manager of Storyline Design for being so efficient that he had time to teach full-time and write his book, the author's modesty came into question for me. Is he an employee of Storyline Design as his remarks suggest? Does he offer classes in the storyline method? If so, his book must be read in that light, and his saying that enrolling in storyline classes, not just reading his book, takes on a different dimension. Although I know there is no such thing as disinterested scholarship, I think this degree of interest, if it is as close as it appears to be, is so close that the author should go out of his way to explore problems and limitations of the method especially carefully. I was struck with the lack of space given to identifying the limitations and disadvantages of the storyline method; and recognizing that there may be many reasons for these omissions, I have to consider that the author may, consciously or unconsciously, have material reasons for being so uncritical in his description. Creswell supplies enough information so that I could apply the method, but not enough to be sure that I would want to. The book does not question the assumptions endorsed by the Scottish guidelines of 1965: education of the whole child, education based on developmental norms, inductive learning, and student- centered education. Although these concepts are still generally endorsed, they have been called into question enough since the 1960's so that they cannot be taken for granted. All are accepted as givens in Creswell's account of this method of instruction without even an acknowledgment that they may not be valid guidelines for instruction. Among the many unanswered questions deriving from this method's adherence to the concepts identified above are whether what is learned is worth the time spent on it. Two hours a day for most of the school year is a considerable amount of time. The examples provided: the study of hotels, a radio station, a fish farm, a spaceship, and the underground railroad could lend themselves to teaching intellectually powerful concepts and skills, but there's little evidence in the book that they did so. Much of the children's time seems to be spent in drawing friezes to serve as settings and drawing the characters to populate the stories. Creswell talks proudly about a learning-disabled boy's spending an hour and a half constructing an elaborate overhang of branches for a tree and about a girl's working a long time to match the checkerboard pattern in two windows. One activity has the groups designing competing logos for their radio station. These activities may have been worthwhile for the children, but so much of the book is given over to description of drawing, painting, and building that the question of how much time of the children's time is devoted to thinking about and discussing history, science, and literature comes to mind. Creswell seems to feel no need to justify his implied response to the question every instructional developer must ask: "what is the knowledge of most worth?" Process education often implies that the content of the curriculum is unimportant. But researchers and theorists have questioned this position, too. Substantial, intellectual content may be needed to teach academic skills well. If this book was intended to be other than a "how to" book, Creswell needed to attend to these important questions in his philosophy section. Chapter two, entitled "The Philosophy," isn't, or just barely is. With the exception of brief statements of six principles of the storyline method, this chapter simply explains the process of applying the storyline method. It says the storyline method is different from other thematic approaches in that the children create their own conceptual model before instruction begins. At the end of the storyline topic, the children compare what they created to its real-world counterpart. The author seems to employ a simplistic perspective of constructivist epistemology when he says that at the end of the storyline—for example when a hotel manager comes to speak to the class after their hotel storyline—the children have a chance to compare their perceptions with reality. Constructivism, as I understand it, postulates an ongoing dialogue between personal knowledge and different communities of knowledge and has little to say about reality. But Creswell's makes short-shrift of philosophy and by page 13 of the book the reader is introduced to scheduling, planning, teaming, and grouping for storylines. Another undiscussed problem with this method, is in the teacher's role as facilitator, providing little direct instruction, but helping children find information and materials, and work out problems. My long experience with the facilitative approach in gifted education indicates that this role is more difficult than it seems. Even at the elementary school level, a teacher needs to be knowledgeable about the topics studied if children are expected to go beyond a superficial level. Not only can a novice in a field often not find good answers or good sources of information, he or she can't even ask good questions. My impression of the storyline projects was that they lacked much depth. The author's uncritical approach to his storyline method is matched by his apparently uncritical approach to the topics studied. For example, in studying hotels, it seems important to at least broach questions of who stays in hotels and who is more likely to work in them. Naming a fish farm "Huk- Toocht," Chinook for "good luck," seems ironic, if not sardonic, when there is apparently no discussion of the history of Native Americans and the effect on their livelihood of white people's economic and geographic expansion). In this salmon-farm storyline, the author reports that the students finale included Native American poetry and song, but no place in the description of the unit does he mention study or discussion of conflict between the interests of various groups. All of the examples seem to imply acceptance of commercial enterprise as a worthwhile course of study. Recognizing that a teacher cannot raise every important social issue relevant to particular curriculum content, Creswell's omissions seem to be of a piece, and the topics as described seem to accept what is as good. Creswell says storyline experiences provide the context for the children's future learning, and no doubt they do—most everything a child experiences does. He implies that they present a superior context to that of more traditional instruction as well as other thematic approaches, and I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure that they provide an adequate context for academically challenging content, and I'm even less sure that they provide an equally adequate context for all children in the classroom. Creswell acknowledges that small group instruction can at times result in conflicts between children, and he recommends changing groups often. He stresses the importance of balancing the group in terms of gender and ethnicity. When he discusses individual children who are noncompliant or noncooperative, however, he seems to assume the individual child is the problem. But analysis of children's problems usually includes analysis of the setting in which the problems occur. Does the storyline method contribute to some children's misbehavior or underachievement by assigning some children relatively menial tasks more often than other children? Do some of the children tend to be assigned nonverbal tasks more often than tasks which exercise the verbal skills so important for academic success? Again, Creswell didn't need to address this issue in detail, but at least some acknowledgment of the potential for such developments in thematic methods such as the storyline method seems important to provide to the reader. Particularly, the author's apparent insensitivity to social inequities implicit in the content of the examples of the storyline method and his lack of attention to the potential inequities of the method undermine the credibility of this method as a means of improving education for any children, particularly for children who belong to minority groups. The foreword, written by Bobbi Fisher, refers to the Scottish storyline methods as an "authentic curriculum framework." Though I've read the book, I'm not sure what she means. She may mean the storyline method is true to the child's nature, true to the world's nature, or a genuine structure on which to hang any curriculum, or all three. Whichever she meant, none of these is a claim the book fully supports. A more suitably modest claim might be that the storyline method may, if used with a critical regard for its potential problems, serve as one among many alternative models--each with its own strengths and weaknesses-- that teachers may draw on to provide thematic instruction.