“Composing Visual History: Using Powerpoint Slideshows to ... - ed

International Journal of Social Education - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2007 -- Theme: Historical Thinking

"Composing Visual History: Using Powerpoint Slideshows to Explore Historical Narrative"

Bruce Fehn

Note: Selected PowerPoint slideshows referenced below are available at:

In thoughtful articles in the Journal of American History, historians Michael Coventry, Peter Felton, David Jaffe, and others described how the "pictorial turn" in cultural studies and the "digital turn" in the history profession were changing their teaching. They argued historians' increased use of visual material (the pictorial turn) necessitated teaching students how images influenced past developments and how historians increasingly employed images to shape versions of the past. The accessibility of online images and new technological capacities for organizing and presenting visual material (the digital turn) motivated the authors "to [help] their students become sophisticated readers ? and perhaps even authors ? of image-based historical narratives." "While an emerging body of scholarship addresses the development of historicalthinking skills using textual sources," the historians observed, "little has been published on how the pictorial turn might simultaneously complicate the study of history and offer new opportunities for faculty to teach students to think historically." Moreover, new multimedia enables students and teachers to explore alternative ways of composing, presenting, and contesting historical knowledge.1

With evidence from a small study involving pre-service history teachers, this essay explores PowerPoint slideshow's capacities for introducing history teachers and students to the pictorial and digital turns for representing and narrating the past. Based upon this research I argue image-dominated PowerPoint slideshow provides teachers and students with a unique and powerful tool for composing and interrogating historical evidence and narrative. By putting slides together in new ways slideshow history composers have surprises, insights, and even

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International Journal of Social Education - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2007 -- Theme: Historical Thinking

new worries ? all part of the emotions and cognitive activity required of historians. As history educator Walter Werner observed, moreover, image-based presentations "open" opportunities for teachers and students to generate many possible meanings that rich "visual texts" contain. Encounters with visual material, enables viewers to detect a "storyline" and offer "plausible" "alternative storylines."2 In a manner unique to PowerPoint, students and teachers "uncover" the elements and structures of historical narration for analysis, interrogation, and improvement. With slideshows containing ten, fifteen, twenty or more images composers and viewers participate in what historians Alan Munslow and Robert A. Rosenstone would identify as an "experiment in history"; a narration of the past "where being playful, inventive and imaginative is. . . part of the knowing."3

Historians, history educators, and teachers agree that development of historical thinking requires students to compose narratives. Through collection, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of historical materials into compositional forms students refine their understanding of history as construction. The National Standards for History claims synthesis of historical material into a narrative represents a central component of historical thinking. The Standards assert "K through 4 students should create historical narratives of their own." and older students (grades 5 through 12) can only attain "[r]eal historical understanding" by creating historical narratives and arguments. "Such narratives and arguments," the Standards observe, "may take many forms ? essays, debates, and editorials, for instance."4 PowerPoint slideshow has emerged as a new medium for narrative production and exploration.

This investigation into PowerPoint's potential for history teaching and learning draws upon evidence from twenty-seven slideshow compositions produced by twenty pre-service history teachers. In the absence of instruction on PowerPoint slideshow and narrative history, the study found, subjects quite predictably composed slideshow histories mimicking narrative structures featured in PowerPoint lectures frequently observed in classrooms and lecture halls. The first productions were akin to what Richard Paxton identified as "school writing"; a veritable

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International Journal of Social Education - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2007 -- Theme: Historical Thinking

duplication of the "knowledge structure" of history textbooks. They also contained features such as heavy reliance on bulleted sentences a sentence fragments. Rather than exerting agency upon, and transforming, written and visual sources into their own interpretation and voice, subjects' first PowerPoint compositions tended to serve as vehicles for "knowledge telling" presentations.5 After instruction on PowerPoint and history, however, some subjects designed compositions demonstrating the medium's capacities to compose a different kind of historical narratives. These slideshows were dominated by images and much more open than subjects' first efforts to conversations about possible meanings a historical slideshow narrative may contain.

Historical Narrative, PowerPoint, and Pedagogy Prevailing historical narratives, such as texts, monographs, articles, lectures, and bookson-tape, present readers or listeners with fully developed, seamless products. They render invisible (at least to the novice reader or hearer) writers' struggles to produce complete and coherent historical narratives. When history teachers or lecturers employ newer modes of composition such as PowerPoint slideshow they also tend to project a seamlessness disguising the struggles to render a coherent past from fragmented evidence. They typically project slides with words to help students or audiences follow the developing historical narration or argument. Students write down lecturers' observations and arguments for restatement on examinations. Successful learning consists of following a line of reasoning rather than acting upon or challenging the logic and evidence presented. The lecturers' slides may indeed offer recipients examples of primary sources employed to develop the argument. However, images or other documents serve as illustrations of the professors or teachers' narrative rather than sources for students to interpret. While having the capacity to assist composition and presentation of a conventional closed narrative structure, PowerPoint slideshow should instead open with students a

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International Journal of Social Education - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2007 -- Theme: Historical Thinking

pedagogical space to analyze and critique historical narratives. In the process of composing and presenting, teachers should position students to interpret an individual slide, clusters of slides, or challenge slide inclusion or arrangement. Unlike with slow and clunky predecessor technologies (slide and opaque projectors) teachers and students using PowerPoint may project many images in rapid succession and return quickly and easily to previous images for further analysis and interpretation. Together presenter and viewers can assume agency over the words, images and narrative structure. Students and teacher may reorder individual slides into new juxtapositions, clusters, or sequences to refine or re-fashion a narrative's meaning(s). Such revisions represent a critique of the narrative or rhetoric contained in the original slideshow. Ultimately PowerPoint historians, like their "conventional" counterparts, alight upon a configuration or succession of visual and verbal material enabling viewers to construct a story of a past event or development.

Among historians, David Staley has argued most vigorously for image-dominated slideshows as "a serious form of historical narrative" whose composers follow the same "design principles" as those employing words to construct written narratives. "Whatever our individual historical specialties," Staley observed, "all historians . . . ask questions, seek relevant primary sources, discern patterns in the evidence, and then arrange the evidence into a meaningful narrative strung together by words, sentences and paragraphs." In an article titled "Sequential Art and Historical Narrative: A Visual History of Germany," Staley maintains that historians who create visual narratives employ the same processes. To illustrate, he provided a "visual essay" containing a sequence of exclusively visual primary sources (e.g., photos, advertisements and diagrams) from post-World War II Germany. Staley claimed his sequential ordering of images "make them a history, instead of merely a haphazard collection of pictures or "`gallery of images.'" Creation and comprehension of visual narratives emerges from the juxtaposition of images side by side and in longer sequences. "The sequence of images," Staley wrote, "creates a context which affects the meaning of each image. Change the arrangement of the images,

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International Journal of Social Education - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2007 -- Theme: Historical Thinking

alter the selection of the images so juxtaposed and the meaning of the individual images is changed."7

Although Staley discussed neither PowerPoint nor history teaching, he made stimulating suggestions about the interaction of teachers and students with sequences of slides, many featuring visual primary sources. Viewers create historical meaning by reading, in Staley's words, "the conceptual space between two images." Drawing upon studies of sequential art, such as comic strips, Staley believes historians using visual sequences require viewers to "fill in" the spaces between images to create meaning. By implication, authors of visual narratives give readers wider latitude for interpreting or even changing an essay's meaning than historians who produce written narratives. If we think of teachers and students composing, reading, or evaluating/critiquing a visual historical narrative, Staley continues, the essay's meaning emerges as they make "the conceptual and associative connections between [the] images."8 Further, by connecting a slideshow's images readers may construct, or complicate and challenge, the author's intended historical narrative. It is within this pedagogical and collective process of identifying and debating possible meanings and narratives contained in slideshows that students deepen their understanding of history as a provisional human construction open to disruption and contestation.

To borrow a phrase from literacy scholar Ilana Snyder, a well-constructed PowerPoint history slideshow, especially those intended for pedagogical purposes, contains a "rich field of narrative possibility."9 Narrative possibility evolves from varying combinations and permutations of a slideshow's constituent compositional elements: word, phrase, sentence, image, sequence/order, speed, flexibility, number of slides. These elements are combined with presenter's voice, style, and intentions as well as the authors' interaction with the audience. In a history slideshow with robust narrative and pedagogical potential, classroom conversation opens many possibilities for exploring narrative story line. Such compositions contain slides with both intra- and inter-slide interpretive richness. Many individual slides enable the reader to

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