Stories, it seems, are in vogue in the History classroom.
And for good
reason. Telling a gripping tale, as Christine Counsell has recently advocated,
can grip students’ imagination, revealing through memorable examples key parts
of the bigger picture in a way which can inspire and enthuse.
Yet, as
Claire Holliss and Jim Carroll (2025) have also noted, the use and purpose of
story telling does require some careful thought, and can – despite our best
intentions – lead to some surprising and frustrating outcomes.
I hadn’t
been aware of Claire and Jim’s work on story telling at KS5 until this past
summer, when Claire presented it at a brilliant session of the Schools History
Project (SHP) conference. But by that point, I and colleagues had also been
starting to think about how and why to tell stories at KS5 to students.
Principles for Storytelling at A-Level
Our project
was considerably less ambitious than the one Claire presented, focusing in particular
on telling one strategically chosen narrative at the beginning of each of our
ten enquiry questions for the AQA 1H (Tsarist and Communist Russia) course.
These ten narratives can all be found here.
The purpose for doing so was threefold.
Firstly, I
reasoned that stories – which we already used quite extensively at KS3 – were indeed
good for engaging students’ interest and might bring to life our KS5 teaching
in a few different ways.
Secondly, I
wanted to tell stories at the beginning of each enquiry as a way of unpicking
the enquiry question itself, by revealing small but significant snapshots of
the content to come which in some way exemplified the main issues to be
discussed in future lessons.
Thirdly, I felt
that the stories might direct students’ attention to particular aspects of our
teaching during each enquiry which might otherwise go overlooked, despite being
highly significant in their own right.
In constructing them, I chose to follow established and reputable scholarship to ensure their accurate factual basis, but also to write these into (what I hoped would be) an engaging and lively narrative. (Whether or not I succeeded is something you can of course decide for yourselves!) Following several principles inspired in large part from those of the SHP, I sought also to root the narratives in:
- historical enquiries
- diversity of society and culture
- the historic environment
This post
will give one such story, the second delivered to Year 12 this year, concerning
Anton Chekhov and the Russian cholera outbreak of 1892, before
reflecting briefly on how and with what success it has sought to engage
students in a wider enquiry so far. Its source base is primarily taken from Femi Oyebode’s 2021 article in the Journal of Global Medicine.
The Narrative: “A Writer in a Time of Cholera”
The simple
wooden cart bobbles along an unpaved country lane. The man sways with the
motion of travel. There are black bags under his eyes and brown bags by his
side.
The day is
fine. The sun is bright. The parched green-grey of the grass along the lane
contrasts with the deep blue-green of the forests in the distance.
A light
breeze gently sways the grass and ruffles the leaves on the trees. It carries
the scent of death from the nearby village.
Anton
Chekhov drives the
cart wearily onwards. He has been working nonstop all year. Having moved onto a
new estate at Melikhova in 1892, he has been pitched into immediate crisis.
The previous
year, famine broke out. The Tsar’s minister of finance, Ivan Vyshnegradsky,
has followed a policy of grain exports for years in order to boost Russia’s
capital and raise money for industry. He is reputed to have declared “We
ourselves shall not eat, but we shall export.” In good times, this might have
seemed like sound policy. Now, it seems like lunacy.
A bad
harvest in 1891 left little food in the main grain growing regions. Following
terrible weather, and with grain exports leaving little grain in reserve,
peasants began to starve. This year, 1892, cholera has reached Russia.
It’s a global pandemic, one of five to have swept the world in this century.
But here, with a population weakened by starvation, it is having devastating
results.
By the end
of the year, somewhere between 375,000 and 400,000 people will have died.
But Anton
Chekhov won’t let it take the local villagers without a fight.
For months
now, Chekhov, village doctor and famous writer, has travelled the area, working
for the local zemstvo. With the Tsarist government making little effort to halt
the spread of disease or feed the local population, local members of the
liberal intelligentsia have taken the lead. They hold the government in
contempt. They are out to prove they can do the job it cannot.
As a zemstvo
doctor, Chekhov works almost for free. He has had to raise funds for his
essential work by begging money from local notables. He has set up cholera
clinics and barracks for patients. His life has been dominated by diarrhoea and
death. He respects and hates his work in equal measure. It is vital; utterly, utterly
vital. It is also exhausting and distracts him from his main passion: writing.
As his cart slowly
winds its way to the next scene of human misery and devastation, Chekhov
reflects on his accomplishments – and his failures.
Modern
medicine, tentatively established in villages like these by the zemstvos set up
under the last Tsar, keeps some people alive when they would almost certainly
die. The local peasants have a great deal to be grateful for. Underfunded,
overworked, exhausted, Chekhov has nevertheless worked small miracles.
Not that the
peasants always see it this way. As Chekhov has recently written in a letter,
they are “rude, dirty in their habits, and ungrateful”. It’s been typical for
decades for well-educated intelligentsia to be condescending towards the common
people, the narod. The peasants remain largely illiterate, under-educated, and
– in the eyes of people like Chekhov – superstitious, vulgar, and destructive.
In a word, the peasants are “backward”.
The cholera
outbreak has heightened this conviction. Chekhov’s condescension for the
peasants has started to sour into contempt. In some parts of the Empire, there
have even been “cholera riots”, as local people – horrified and mystified by
the terrible death rate – have turned on doctors, accusing them of spreading
the disease.
Chekhov’s
disgust at this kind of primitive behaviour may even now be crystallising into
a plan for a short story, The Peasants. It will eventually be published
five years from now. Its tone will be vehement, its condemnation of peasant
culture absolute. It will become an instant classic.
As he
reaches the outskirts of the blighted village, Chekhov knows the cholera will
pass. But when it does, there will be an enormous amount of work still to do.
Initial Conclusions and Future Directions
Having told
this story in lesson to our Year 12s, I was struck by a few thoughts.
Firstly, as I suggested in an earlier post, part of the value of stories might actually
be enjoyment not just for students (they did, certainly, engage positively and
enthusiastically in the narrative), but also for teachers. I enjoyed researching,
writing, and telling the story, and (I hope) it made me a better teacher in
that lesson.
Secondly, as
Claire Holliss and Jim Carroll noted in their recent Teaching History
article (2025), “[t]he benefits of stories appeared to be unlocked more fully
when explicitly directed by the teacher – either by the tasks […] set or
through […] questioning.”
In the
context of our enquiry question for this unit (“Could forces of change overcome
forces of reaction, 1855-1894?”), simply posing the enquiry question and
reading the story would likely not have been enough.
I deliberately
and repeatedly directed students back to the issue of “forces of change” and “forces
of reaction” struggling against each other. In this case, and with some further
questioning and prompting, students were able to latch on to the key themes I
was trying to bring out: the liberal intelligentsia (exemplified by Chekhov) as
a force for change; the ambiguous role of Russia’s state-led industrialisation,
with its implications of both economic development and social hardship; the intelligentsia
view of peasants as “backward” and a potential block to change, and of the
Tsarist government as a pernicious and incompetent force blocking progress.
Finally,
this narrative did seem to open up further opportunities to engage students in
a highly story they might otherwise have underappreciated later in the enquiry –
that of the sociopolitical impact of the Russian famine and cholera outbreak of
1891-92.
While we
have always taught this, it’s usually been from the perspective of Russia’s economic
development (the famine was exacerbated by a policy of grain exports led by
minister of finance, Ivan Vyshnegradsky). The story of the peasants who suffered
from it, and the liberal intelligentsia who led local government efforts to
alleviate that suffering, had gone largely untold. This narrative may have gone
at least a little way to alleviating this issue (although not all the way,
certainly).
It has also
offered an opportunity to engage students in the cultural life of Russia at the
time, through Chekhov’s own writing. This was hinted at in the narrative, with
a brief mention of his short story, The Peasants. I’ve now set this as
some half-term reading/listening for students (good online text and audiobook resources are available), with a focus on the intelligentsia’s attitudes
towards Russia’s peasants. What the students make of that, of course, is yet to be seen…
Further Reading
Claire
Holliss and James Edward Carroll, “Story time? Investigating using storis about
the French Revolution with Year 12”, Teaching History 200 (September 2025),
pp. 18-29
Femi
Oyebode, “Anton Chekhov and the cholera epidemic of 1892”, Journal of Global
Medicine (2021): https://globalmedicine.co.uk/index.php/jogm/article/view/21/23#content/contributor_reference_1
Christine
Counsell, “Stories, voices and text in secondary history”, June 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDE84cxOJsY
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