Teaching Teens How to Separate Fact From Fiction
When students study their region’s scariest urban legends, they learn about oral history—and how to look for kernels of truth from the past.
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Go to My Saved Content.In a place-based course called Erie Experience, Fairview High School students in Fairview, Pennsylvania, learn about all things local, from ecology to economy. In the Urban Legends unit, they learn the value—and the pitfalls—of oral history, as they dig into some of their region’s most salacious supernatural tales.
History teacher and librarian Benjamin Barbour often starts this unit with a game of telephone, to demonstrate how stories change from one teller to the next. Students then get the opportunity to examine primary and secondary source documents behind the urban legends, and they think about how and why the legends have changed over time, which sharpens their critical thinking skills.
“I’m very interested in the stories in our area,” says Barbour. “These are often fantastic stories, supernatural stories, but I look at them as very, very important historical elements, whether they’re true or not. They tell us, the listener, something about the community. So they’re, to me, very profound psychological and sociological tools to learn about people in a specific region.”
After learning about these stories in the classroom, students head out on a field trip to the actual sites of these legends. Visiting these historical places in their own backyard makes the stories all the more real and cements students’ learning about how to find the grains of truth in sensational tales from the past.
What else do students get out of this unit (besides having fun)? ”These stories tell us something about the community. What that community values. What that community fears. It tells us about the prejudices at the time. The biases. It’s a gateway to understanding history,” Barbour says. Ultimately, he hopes that learning a little more about local history—and the context around these colorful urban legends—will translate into students’ feeling a stronger connection to their community.
For more information about this lesson, see Barbour’s article for Edutopia, “What Students Can Learn From Studying Urban Legends.”