This review has been accessed  times since March 16, 1998
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.
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