Here is a list of activities and resources we are using for a unit on Ancient African Kingdoms that I am co-teaching for a group of homeschoolers, ages eight through ten. The class is a sixteen-week unit that explores the history and culture of eleven kingdoms.
We are using the BBC’s Lost Kingdoms of Africa and the PBS series Wonders of the African World as the primary guides for exploration of Ancient Africa, but we are reading broadly as well. The class is a field trip heavy, and during the field trips we will learn about and experience the dance, food, and art of various African cultures, both old and new. And a few of us will cap off the semester with a trip to Ghana. This may be our best unit yet!
Throughout the course, we will focus on cultivating the following habits of mind:
- Exploring African history from an Afro-centric rather than Euro-centric perspective, and thinking about how perspective effects interpretation.
- Understanding and valuing the role of oral history.
- Privileging artifacts and primary resources over interpretation.
- Exploring art as a unique expression of the culture (by looking at epic poetry, dance, sculpture, and architecture).
Week 1: Introduction
Before class, students were instructed to complete or begin:
- Read three folktales from Nelson Mandela’s Favorite African Folktales: “The Great Thirst;” “Mmadipetsane;” and “The Mother Who Turned to Dust.”
- Watch four episodes of Tinga Tinga Tales, from the BBC: “Why Baboon Has a Bare Bottom;” “Why Lion Roars;” and “Why Giraffe Has A Long Neck.” They can be seen on YouTube.
- Read Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid (due on Week 3).
Activity 1: Map (20 minutes)
Before class, blow up and laminate a large map of Africa, a map that shows the physical features of Africa without country borders. Have it displayed where students can see it.
As students walked in, they should find a spot around the table and began to work on a map of Africa. African Physical Map from World Reference Maps and Forms, page 64. Give them a direction list like the one on page 36. As students are working, they can look at the laminated map and compare maps with one another. Wander around to make sure they are doing it accurately.
After they finish, ask them what they notice about the maps. The key thing you want them to come away with is that the Earth did not come with country lines drawn in. That humans did that for lots of reasons, which is what we’re going to be studying this semester.
Activity 2: Get-To-Know-You Memory Game (20 minutes)
Do you remember the Memory Card Game, where you flip cards that are face down in an attempt to find matching pairs? In this game, the students will create cards that describe themselves to the group. To begin, give each student eight index cards, cut in half. They should write their name on all eight cards, and then write the following on each of four pairs: favorite food, favorite book, future job, and a fear (like spiders or lightening). Collect all the cards, shuffle them, and place them face down on the table. Take turns trying to find matches until all the cards have been turned over.
Activity 3: KWL Chart (15 minutes)
On a sheet of newsprint, draw a KWL chart. (It’s three columns, with the words Know, Want to Know, and Learned on top of the columns.) Tell students that you are going to fill in the first two columns today, and that you’ll fill in the last column during the last class. Begin by asking students what they know about ancient Africa. Don’t worry if they say things that aren’t true. When you review the chart at the end of the semester, you can come back to the list to see if they should cross things off. If several students disagree about something on the list, you can add the dispute to the Want to Know list.
Activity 4: Timeline (15 minutes)
Before class, make a 4.56 meter timeline that you can post along a wall of the room. Begin on the right of your timeline and mark “Today.” Mark each centimeter to the left of today, where each centimeter is 10 million years. The far right mark of your timeline will be 4.56 billion years ago, when scientists believe the Earth was formed.
Show the students the timeline and make sure that they understand the scale. Next, To lay out on the table sheets of paper with the following terms on them: Earth formed (4.56 billion years ago), First evidence of life on Earth (3.8 billion years ago), First dinosaurs roam the Earth (250 million years ago), Last of the dinosaurs die out (65 million years ago), Primates originate in Africa (40 million years ago), First hominids, like Neanderthal man, originate (7.5 million years ago), Early homo sapiens (like Cro-Magnons, orginate (250,000 years ago), Modern homo sapiens develop, marked by things like their use of language (50,000 years ago), Farming begins in places like China and along the Nile (10,000 years ago), Pyramids built (2,600 bc), American Revolution begins (1776), We land on the moon (1969), Nina was born (2009). Go through each one, asking students to place it correctly on the timeline.
“What’s the problem?” Human history is so recent that all of it fits into the tiniest little slice on the 4.5 meter-long timeline. Remind students that when we talk about ancient Africa, or any ancient civilization, it really wasn’t that long ago. Tell them that next week, we’ll have a timeline of the last 5,000 years, to which we will add events as we go through the course. Click here to see the master timeline that we are using for the semester.
Activity 5: Folktales (15 minutes)
Ask students to reflect for a few minutes on all of the folktales they watched or read for homework. What did they have in common? What were some differences? Why do the students thing the folktales were written? (Help them come up with three common purposes for folktales: 1) morality tales to encourage good behavior, 2) creation myths, 3) stories to explain natural phenomena.
Homework Due Next Week:
- Choose an animal for which you will write a folktale similar to one of the Tinga Tinga episodes. What trait of the animal will you explain with your folktale?
Homework Due In Two Weeks:
- Watch Episode 1, Series 1 of the BBC’s Lost Kingdoms of Africa: Nubia.
- Watch Episode 1 of the PBS series Wonders of the African World: Black Kingdoms of the Nile.
- Read from Kids Discover: African Kingdoms magazine: pages 2-5.
- Finish Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid.
- Read African Voice: Northern Edition. Make a list of 3 questions that you don’t think most grown ups could answer whose answers can be found in this week’s homework.
- Complete the vocabulary packet (which you can buy from Kids Discover here).
Week 2: Museum of Fine Arts Field Trip
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston offers these great classes for kids, Artful Adventures. The three-week unit will look at both ancient and modern art from around Africa. Each week, we will spend a forty minutes in the galleries, learning about art from different ancient cultures in Africa. Then we’ll spend an hour in the studio working on painting a Tinga Tinga-style cover for a folktale each student will write.
Homework: Finish the homework assigned last week.
Week 3: Nubia
Activity 1: Kushite Deities and Reading/Writing (10 minutes)
The following two activities will be layed out on the table for students to work on when they come in:
Some of these were the asme as ancient Egyptian deities while others belonged only to Kush. Many of them had the head of an animal on the body of a man or woman. Students will read descriptions of Kushite gods and goddesses and match them to pictures. We got this activity from pages 6 & 7 of Step Back in Time to Ancient Kush.
Kush differed from many ancient cultures in that many people from all strata of life could read and write. Students will read a paragraph about the their writing system, which today is called Meroitic, and will try to find three mistakes in a picture of Kushite children learning to read and write. We got this activity from pages 16 & 17 of Step Back in Time to Ancient Kush.
Activity 2: Artifact Exploration (30 minutes)
In groups of two or three, students will look at pictures we printed from the artifact gallery from the online Nubia collection of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Each group will have two or three pictures to look at and try to develop ideas about what they were used for and what the culture was like that used them. To guide their exploration, they will fill in a worksheet, which you can see here soon.
Activity 3: Dice Game For Red Pyramid (30 minutes)
We prepared six categories of questions, and laid them out on the table under colored index cards, labeled: 1) True/False, 2) Fill In The Blank, 3) Book Review, 4) Literary Elements, 5) Book-to-Book, and 6) Book-to-Life. Book Review questions ask them to analyze the writing, make predictions, and focus on what makes a book work or not work. Book-to-Book questions ask them to make connections between the book and other books they’ve read. And Book-to-Life questions ask them to make connections between the book and their life. Click here soon for a list of questions. To play, a student rolls the dice to see which type of question to answer. They can decide whether to answer the question themselves or ask everyone else to answer. Again, making it a game somehow makes it fun to have a relatively advanced discussion of literature.
- Watch Episode 3, Series 2 of the BBC’s Lost Kingdoms of Africa: The Berber Kingdom of Morocco.
- Read “The Clever Snake Charmer” in Nelson Mandela’s Favorite African Folktales.
- Complete map worksheet.
- Complete the folktale outline.
Week 4: Berber Kingdom of Morocco
Activity 1: Animals on the Map (25 minutes)
We will describe three types of environments in Africa: Grasslands – dry, inland savannas with short grasses and thorn trees, home to many of the largest and fastest animals; Tropical forests – which are hot, wet, swamps, rivers, and small mountain ranges; Deserts – dry and barren with scrub and grass suitable only for pasture part of the time, where animals can live without water for several days.
Students will take pictures of various animals and try to tape them on a large laminated physical map of Africa. After we get them all in the right places, we’ll talk about how the animals are adapted to those environments. You can find a list of animals used on page 9 of Hands On Heritage Africa Activity Book.
Activity 2: Vocabulary Maps (25 minutes)
Using the vocabulary words from the homework, we will make extensive word webs. We’ll put one word, like conquer, in the middle of a large sheet of newsprint and then see how many more of the words from the vocabulary list we can connect to it. So we might draw a line from conquer to wealth, noting that groups often conquer other groups to gain wealth. Then we could draw a line from wealth to archeologist, noting that an archeologist might find Roman money in Ancient Egypt and conclude that Rome had conquered Egypt. We’ll also draw green lines out from each word and add words that have the same root. So we might add conquistadors and conquest. We’ll draw purple lines from each word to words that are synonyms, like dominate or defeat, and red lines to antonyms like lose to or liberate.
Finally, students will write two sentences that each use three or more words from the board.
Activity 3: Headbanz (30 minutes)
We own the game Hedbanz, and have enough bands for each child. Before class, we’ll prepare cards with the names of kingdoms, fictional characters, and historical figures that we have studied this far. All students put on a head band and place a card in it without looking. The first child begins by asking YES/NO questions in attempt to guess their character before the timer runs out. If they do so, they get a token for the students. If there is still time, they can take another card and ask questions until the time runs out. If time runs out before the player guesses their character, the teacher gets a token and the card remains in the band until Round 2. After every player has a turn, round 1 is over. Play for two rounds and count up the points to see of the teacher or the students with the game.
Activity 4: Eating Out
We’ll head to Baraka Café for a lunch of Tunisian food.
- Episode 2, Series 1 of the BBC’s Lost Kingdoms of Africa: Ethiopia.
- Watch Episode 4 of the PBS series Wonders of the African World: The Holy Land. Read African Voice: Eastern Edition.
- Write intro paragraph to folktale.
- Complete independent project planning project.
- Start reading Trouble in Timbuktu, by Cristina Kessler (due Week 8).
Week 5: Ethiopia
Activity 1: Make a Mancala board (45 minutes)
Among the earliest evidence of the game Mancala are fragments of a pottery board and several rock cuts found in what is now Eritrea and Ethiopia and which are dated by archaeologists to between the 6th and 7th century AD, but many believe that it is much older than that.
Using egg cartons, paint and beans, the students will make a simple mankala board, learn the rules, and play the game. Directions can be found on page 72 of Africa for Kids: Exploring a Vibrant Continent.
Activity 2: Timeline (15 minutes)
We will add important dates from Egyptian, Kush, Berber, and Ethiopian kingdoms to the classroom timeline.
Activity 3: Matching Game (20 minutes)
Before class, we will fill two trashcans with 20 inflated balloons in each. 10 of the balloons will have descriptions written on slips of paper and taped to the balloons. Ten of the balloons will have the names of the cultures, people, or events described on the first ten balloons. Students will form two teams. When I say go, the first person from each team will run to the trash can, pull out a balloon and bring it back to their team. When they tag the next person, that person will go to the can and pull out a balloon. This continues until they find have all twenty balloons. While the team is getting balloons, members who are not running can pull off the slips of paper, and begin matching them to other slips. They will tape the matching slips of paper next to one another on a poster board. The first team to correctly complete their timeline wins.
Activity 4: Eating Out
We’ll head to Asmara for Ethiopian/Eritrean food.
- Watch Episode 1 of the PBS series Wonders of the African World: The Swahili Coast.
- Read the folktales “The Enchanting Song of the Magical Bird” and “The Lion, The Hare, and the Hyena” in Nelson Mandela’s Favorite African Folktales.
- Write draft of folktale.
- Fill in independent project calendar.
- Continue reading Trouble in Timbuktu, by Cristina Kessler (due Week 8).
Week 6: The Swahili Coast
Activity 1: Scrapbook Page (40 minutes)
Before class, we will print out lots of pictures of Swahili coast (animals, buildings, beaches, etc) for scrapbook pages. We‘ll have a ton of scrapbooking materials available and pictures of Tanzania and Kenya. Students can make one or two scrapbook pages that depict aspects of ancient Eastern Africa. We’ll encourage them to write descriptive captions.
Activity 2: Bowl Game (30 minutes)
Before class, we’ll fill a bowl with 20 slips of paper. Each kid pulls out a slip and gives as many verbal clues as needed for the other kids to guess the person, character, kingdom, or event on the slip. Next, we put all of the slips back in the bowl. In round two, when they pull out a slip, they have to act it out with no words. The people and events on the slips:
Activity 4: Salt experiment to get ready for West Africa (20 minutes)
Salt was a highly valuable commodity in the ancient world. It can be mined from seawater that lies in shallow ponds. To see how it works, students will set up the following experiment and take it home to observe it for two weeks:
Each student should fill a small mason jar with hot water and stir in salt, one tablespoon at at time, until the salt will no longer dissolve. Tie one of a string to a nail and the other end to the middle of a pencil. Lay the pencil across the mouth of the jar so that the string hangs down but the nail does not touch the bottom of the jar. They should bring the jars home (they can put a lid on it to get it home and place the string in it once they get it home) and place in a warm place. They should write down an observation every day for two weeks.
Homework (All of this homework is due Week 8):
- Fill out independent study project.
- Read “Sakunaka” in Nelson Mandela’s Favorite African Folktales.
- Fill out salt observation sheet.
- Finish reading Trouble in Timbuktu, by Cristina Kessler.
- Watch Episode 4, Series 1 of the BBC’s Lost Kingdoms of Africa: West Africa.
- Watch Episode 5 of the PBS series Wonders of the African World: The Road to TImbuktu.
- Read from Kids Discover: African Kingdoms magazine: pages 6-13.
- Read The African Voice: Western Edition.
- Read Mansa Musa: The Lion of Mali, Burns picture book.
Week 7: Dance Complex Field Trip
We’re working with an artist in residence at MIT. He is from Senegal, and is from a family of griots. He will lead two workshops on dance, drumming, and storytelling.
Homework: Finish homework assigned last week.
Week 8: West Africa, Part i
Activity 1: Check in on Independent Projects (30 minutes)
Have each student talk about their independent study projects. Other students can ask questions or make suggestions.
Activity 2: Report on Salt Experiments (10 minutes)
Have students share what they observed. How do they think this might have applied to ancient Mali?
Activity 3: Cup of Doom for Road to Timbuktu (50 minutes)
Find an old soccer ball and in each hexagon, write a discussion question with a permanent marker. Have students sit in a circle and tell them that you are going to throw the ball to someone. You will say his or her name before you throw the ball. When the student catches it, he or she has to read and answer whatever question is under the left thumb. After answer the question, students say the name of another student and throw them the ball. Eventually, you can click here to see the questions I wrote on the soccer ball. If students don’t answer a question correctly or well, they have to draw a popsicle stick from the Cup of Doom. Each stick has a different ‘punishment,’ like doing 10 pushups or dancing like a chicken for 30 seconds. (Be prepared for kids to throw the question so that they can pick from the Cup of Doom. They love it!)
- Work on independent study project.
- Revise folktale.
Week 9: MFA2 Field Trip
We will continue our three-week unit at the Museum of Fine Arts.
- Work on independent study project.
- Revise folktale.
Week 10: Dance/Drumming II
- Work on independent study project.
- Start reading Nzingha, Warrior Queen of Angola (Due week 13).
Week 11: Crocodile River Field Trip
Through several interactive activities, students will explore the art and music of two West African kingdoms. They will also explore how West African music has influenced musical styles around the globe.
Homework (Due in two weeks, Week 13):
- Episode 1, Series 2 of the BBC’s Lost Kingdoms of Africa: The Kingdom of Asante.
- Watch Episode 3 of the PBS series Wonders of the African World: The Slave Kingdoms.
- Read from Kids Discover: African Kingdoms magazine: pages 14-15.
- Work on independent study project.
- Make final edits to the folktale.
- Finish reading Nzingha, Warrior Queen of Angola.
Week 12: MFA 3
We will continue our three-week unit at the Museum of Fine Arts.
- Finish homework assigned last week.
Week 13: West Africa, Part II
Activity 1: West African meal with member of the Asante people (20 minutes)
We will make jollof rice and banana cake, from pages 16-17 in Hands-on Heritage Africa Activity Book. It will be ready by the end of class, when we will eat with a member of the Asante people.
Activity 2: Adinkra Stamping (40 minutes)
Working with a local artist, and using traditional adinkra designs from Ghana, we will make our own
stamps to keep, and create a personal cloth, or join together as a group to make a large cloth. We will also use real adinkra stamps
carved from gourds in Ghana.
Activity 3: Skit Charades (30 minutes)
Before class, make a list of 7 or 8 scences from the Nzinga book, write them on slips of paper, and place them in a bowl. Place students in groups of two or three and have one person from each group come up and pull out a slip from the bowl. Then they’ll have five minutes to prepare their charade. Finally, groups will act out the scenes without talking and the rest of the class will guess. There may be time to chose another scene and do it again.
- Watch Episode 3, Series 1 of the BBC’s Lost Kingdoms of Africa: Great Zimbabwe.
- Watch Episode 6 of the PBS series Wonders of the African World: Lost Cities of the South.
- Read from Kids Discover: African Kingdoms magazine: pages 16-17.
- Read The African Voice: Southern Edition.
Week 14: Great Zimbabwe
Activity 1 – Folktales (45 minutes)
In groups of 3 or 4 (with one adult) students will read the folktales they’ve worked on all semester. After each student reads, we will give them warm and cool feedback. For warm feedback they can start with: “I really liked it when…” and “A detail that I really appreciated was _____ because it made me ___________.” For cool feedback they can start with: “I would have liked to hear more about…” and “A detail that was confusing/distracting to me was….”
Activity 2 – Pop Quiz on Great Zimbabwe (15 minutes)
Students will take a “pop quiz” on great Zimbabwe. Then have a discussion about testing, and how it’s just a way to discover what you’ve learned. “What’s the difference between the pop quiz and the bowl game or the soccer ball game?” Eventually, you can click here to see the quiz.
Activity 3: “Bingo” (30 minutes)
We created Bingo-type cards, with the names of: Kingdoms, Characters, People, Geography, and Artifacts & Buildings. I put clues on slips of paper, and pulled them out of a bowl. Students used highlighters to fill in their cards. We played until someone had a bingo. Eventually, you can click here to see the cards and clues.
Homework: Finish independent study projects
Week 15: Presentation/Celebration
Students will set up stations with the work from their independent study as well as other work from the semester of which they are particularly proud. Half the students will stand by their stations while all of the parents, friends, and the other half of the students walk around with clipboards and fill out feedback sheets. At the midway point, we’ll switch the presenters. Eventually, you can click here to see the feedback sheets.
Every family will bring a traditional dish, food, or drink from an ancient or modern African culture or country. We’ll party!
- Watch Episode 2, Series 2 of the BBC’s Lost Kingdoms of Africa: The Zulu Kingdom.
Week 16: Zulu
Activity 1: Review Activities (15 minutes)
Students will complete the review activities in Kids Discover: African Kingdoms magazine: pages 18-19: 1) They fill in a timeline, placing eight kingdoms in the order in which they were in power. 2) They match the kingdoms with something for which they are known. And they do a word search with the names of nine ancient African rulers.
Activity 2: Dolls, Shields, and Spears (50 minutes)
Sotho brides carry a beaded doll, which they name. They then use that name for their first child. The Zulu tribe makes long painted shields covered with goat hide. The spears of Maasai warriors can be used as peace symbols when a black ostrich feather is attached to the tip of the spear with a string of beads.
Students can make a version of either a bridal doll, a shield, or a spear using instructions from pages 26-29 of Hands on Heritage Affrica Activity Handbook.
Activity 3: KWL (25 minutes)
We will revisit our KWL chart from the first day. Were there things we thought we knew that were wrong? Did we learn everything they wanted to learn? What else did they learn? What might they continue to learn about?
If you want to read more about some of the ideas on this page, you may want to read these posts:


Written by Deanna Stefanyshyn and Julie Kendell
Technology has the power to affect not only education but also culture, religion and personal thoughts and beliefs. While the world population is continually growing, our global world seems to be getting smaller as we are able to connect to people in a way that was never imagined. Radio and television were among the early contributors to this new form of mass media and played a role in affecting world political views and religious beliefs as well as changing how we view literacy in an educational setting. While these technologies started off as a form of entertainment, people quickly began to see the advancements and benefits that these technologies could bring to an educational setting. As with any new technology, the use of radio and television in the classroom faced resistance and limitations that set a pattern for inclusion of advancements even in today’s educational world.
The earliest known media available to teachers were termed ‘visual education’ or ‘visual instruction’ because they did not yet combine the advancement of sound. For example, silent films were used in the classroom along with photographs, well before films with sound and audio recordings gained popularity (Cortez, 2009). In fact, silent films showed so much promise in the educational world that Thomas A. Edison predicted “Books will soon be obsolete in schools …. Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years” (Saettler 1968, p. ). However, it was found that especially in the beginning of film use, teachers were only using it occasionally in their classrooms. Some reasons that were recorded were “teachers’ lack of skill in using equipment and film; the cost of films, equipment, and upkeep; inaccessibility of equipment when it was needed; and the time involved in finding the right film for each class” (Mehlinger, n.d.). What is not surprising is that these specific roadblocks are often the same reasons given by teachers today when discussing their use of 21st century technology.
School museums were a popular venue for the first visual instructional materials and allowed for distribution of portable exhibits including slides, films and study prints to schools (Saettler, 1968). In order to gain respect from teachers, it was very important that these materials were viewed as supplementary curriculum materials that would enhance lessons rather than replace the teacher entirely. Even today teachers continue to fight for their standing as the primary source of instruction while maintaining autonomy in their use of media. This very idea has brought forth professionals in the field to argue that:
“(a) teachers should be viewed on an equal footing with instructional media-as just one of many possible means of presenting instruction, and (b) teachers should not be given sole authority for deciding what instructional media will be employed in classrooms ” (Reiser, 2001, p. 55).
Considering this has been an issue in education for the past 90 years, there does not appear to be a definitive answer that will come anytime soon.
“Radio broadcasting is one of the greatest educational tools which has ever been placed at the disposal of civilized man. It is an instantaneous, universal means of communication. It is not a new art, but is a means of multiplying the efficiency of oral communication just as the printing press multiplied the effectiveness of the written word. In addition to that, it has certain decided advantages over the printed page which it in part supplants and in part supplements” (Tyler, 1935. p.115).
While, the invention of radio dates all the way back to the 1820’s when Hans Christian Orsted discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism, it wasn’t until between 1916 and 1920 that the first known radio news program was broadcast (Wikipedia, 2012) . As time went on the world of radio grew in both scope and popularity, and many broadcasts began to hit the radio waves.
Radio became a new form of communication and entertainment. Between the 1920’s and 1950’s many radio shows were broadcast, and gathering around the radio in the evening was a common form of entertainment. People, regardless of where they were located and what class they belonged to, could tune in to listen to news, sports broadcasts, comedy shows, dramas, live music and political addresses. Radio was a way for people to escape the care of their everyday lives. The world began to become a much smaller place in the minds of many people as they began to see that we were all, in a way, interconnected.
Radios grew even more in popularity during the late 1920’s and early 1930’s due to the Great Depression. While most other forms of entertainment were expensive, the radio provided entertainment free of charge right in your own home. Radio became a vital link to information and had the power to influence people’s opinions in a way that had never been seen before. People could find out what was happening in the world quickly after it happened and it was much faster than waiting for the newspapers to print a story. The invention of the radio also had an effect on religion as religious broadcasting was born. Benjamin Armstrong, former president of the National Religious Broadcasters, described radio and other electronic media as the “new Pentecost that communicates religious belief directly to the homes and hearts of individual listeners and viewers” (Armstrong, 1979, p. 7).
While radios became commonplace in most homes in the United States during the 1920’s and 1930’s, radio also began to gain popularity in the area of education. Many felt that radio had the power to bring the world to the classroom, and that radio programs could be presented as if they were textbooks of the air (Lindgren, 2004). While textbooks were the most common place to gain understanding and information at this time, it quickly became clear that other mediums could be beneficial if used properly. Usually the radio programs that were created were in line with the general classroom curriculum. However, studies have revealed that there were major contrasts between the content of schoolbooks and the content that was on the radio (Lindgren, 2004). Radio programs opened up the arena to discussing contemporary progressive ideas and political notions. These progressive ways of thinking were not readily available to students in a classroom. Children who listened to educational radio encountered views of society that were much different than the views that were shown in their school books (Lindgren, 2004).
Beginning in 1920, the Canadian National Railway, a non-educational agency, invested in radio infrastructure and saw the need for educational radio. The CNR used radios as a form of entertainment for their passengers; however, the president of the CNR Sir Henry Thorton saw both the social and commercial value in providing educational programming as a public service (Buck, 2006). Beginning in 1925, educational programs were broadcast in Canada. Success of the CNR’s educational broadcasts encouraged Thornton and the CNR to expand educational offerings, and they began to use this technology to reach the learning disabled. In 1926 broadcasts from the CNR were created for reception at the Point Grey School for Deaf and Blind in Vancouver (Buck, 2006). People believed that broadcasts of music and storytelling could help stimulate the brains of these students. This signified the first use of radio in Canada in the field of special education.
By the end of 1926 there were broadcasts on a regular basis that were intended for schools. Lectures, recitations and music were popular but other broadcasts, which included activity sessions, were also gaining popularity. These broadcasts gave students instructions on how to create projects and the students could then follow along.
Due to the successful example of the CNR educational broadcasts, several provincial educational broadcasts began in the late 1920’s. The University of Alberta’s CKUA began broadcasting in 1927 and Nova Scotia’s broadcasts at CMHS station in 1928. Although some of the broadcasts from these stations were specific to the province from which they were created, the national broadcaster, the CBC, carried some of the programs that were developed. They also broadcast some more generic programs that could be used in all provinces and continued to offer educational broadcasts for adult learners. An example of an adult educational broadcast was “Enquiry into Co-operation” where current affairs were discussed. The longest-lived adult educational program was “The National Farm Forum” which ran from 1941 – 1964. The CBC still provides educational materials today. They have a large digital archive with many radio and video clips that have been used to create a variety of lessons and projects for students. As well as these archives, they continue to broadcast radio programs on topics ranging from music appreciation to current events.
“The audiovisual era reinforced a principle that developed during the preceding visual instruction movement: Visual aids can teach more people more things in less time” (Cortez, 2009, p. 4).
Radio paved the way to bring mass media into the educational setting, but many people saw the limitations of only using hearing as a teaching tool. The idea that videos and television could reach the same number of people and incorporate sight, started the rise in educational television and audiovisual education.
In the 1920’s sound began to be combined with film therefore coining the terms ‘audiovisual education’, ‘audiovisual instruction’, and ‘audiovisual devices’. However, the transition was not a smooth one as many resistant teachers had just began to buy into the advantages of silent film. Furthermore, educators were concerned that their silent film equipment would become obsolete; a pattern that has repeated itself over the decades as more and more technology is introduced. However, the actual introduction of audiovisual materials would have to wait until the Great Depression was over before it really saw its rise throughout the education system (Treat, 2006).
WW2 provided a desperate need to educate many people in a short amount of time. This was the kind of movement audiovisual education required to gain the momentum needed in order to necessitate the funding to create videos for training military personnel. Not only did they need to educate a large number of military recruits, there was also a need to educate new industrial workers to replace them while they went off to war. A quick solution to train people quickly resulted in the opportunity to test out the new forms of media during the war. After the war there was a transition to use these types of materials in schools (Treat, 2006).
“No teacher in our schools can teach with full effectiveness unless he has a keen understanding of the role of the mass media in the life of his students” (Dale, 1954, p. 8).
Radio allowed information to be distributed to a much larger audience. Radio as an educational tool became popular and many studies proved its effectiveness, especially in the area of distance education. It was the hope that “competent and imaginative teachers in any community can and do use teaching aids such as school broadcasts to stimulate and vivify the classroom experiences of youngsters” (Reid, p.146). Using radios in education allowed students to see a broader spectrum of the world around them. They were introduced to more worldly views and had access to much more information. While educational broadcasts began at first as mere listening activities, they later became an interactive experience where students worked with the information that was presented to them in a variety of ways.
During WW2 many people believed that America’s victory was attributed to the their ability to understand and use audiovisual equipment with great success (Reiser, 1987). It is no surprise then that many of the first studies done on the benefits of audio visual materials were done using military instruction techniques. Studies done in the 1950’s surrounding military instruction looked at the effectiveness of TV, kinescope recordings and regular classroom instruction. It found TV and TV recordings to be superior to regular classroom instruction (Rock, n.d.). In a separate study by Rock et al. (1959) it was found that TV instruction was at least as effective as regular instruction and more effective for learning challenged groups. However, Reiser (2002) did a review of many of the different studies involving a comparison of learning using different mediums for instruction delivery. He found that regardless of the method of instruction all participants learned similarly (Reiser, 2002).
The discrepancy among these research findings may have come about for several different reasons. With the introduction of audiovisual materials, teachers began to feel threatened in their role as educators. Some believed that videos would take over as the main means of instruction therefore rendering many teachers obsolete. Furthermore, many of the first studies involving audiovisual education were funded by government agencies in specialized situations. The requirements of educating military personal are different from educating students in a regular classroom. It was obvious that during the time of TV instruction, advocates wanted the research to prove that their work in bringing audiovisual materials to the classroom was warranted. Finally, the actual ability to deliver the lesson by any of the mediums could impact the ability to learn. Just as a poorly created computer program may not benefit instruction, so might an ill prepared or unenthusiastic teacher. Therefore, in these studies, there are many variables that can impact the findings, resulting in no definite answer as to the exact educational benefits of audiovisual materials, especially in its infancy.
However, in terms of teacher satisfaction, one study did a comprehensive survey of teachers in elementary and secondary schools using in-school TV lessons in Science, Music, French, and Spanish. It found that 89% of teachers found it valuable enough to continue (Hansen, 1953). While the resistance towards obtaining devices and materials needed to incorporate audiovisual in education was present, it is clear that there was some movement towards integration of audiovisual into lessons from both learning and teaching perspectives.
Criticism and Limitations
There were some limitations to the use of educational radio in Canada. In rural areas sufficient power could often become an issue and weak signals were also a challenge. Radio receivers were still expensive, and not all schools had the funds to invest in the technology needed to participate in radio broadcasts. Because there were no recording abilities at this time, students and teachers had to be available at the time of the broadcast or else they would miss out. Some people also worried about the advertisements that came with educational programming.
There were limitations to simply broadcasting information to a passive audience so shows began to become more interactive. Audiences began to become more involved in broadcasts which resulted in a higher number of listeners with sustained listener attention. Audience participation was encouraged in most programs and this resulted in a larger variety of content and presenters.
Just like radio, the introduction of audiovisual education came with its fair share of issues. During the 1920’s there were two emerging sides to the audiovisual educational debate. While some educators embraced the need for instructional films to keep up with increased school enrollments, others shied away with the misperception that they were too complicated, that teachers would become robotic, or that commercialization would take over (Cortez, 2009).
Furthermore, television and other technological advancements have brought about many critiques from researchers including one by Neil Postman in his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” He put forth the idea that television has turned our society into an audience that is dependent on the need for constant entertainment. In fact, he suggests that “television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information – misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing” (Postman, 2006, p. 106) Furthermore, he uses Sesame Street as an example to demonstrate how parents used it to excuse themselves from the guilt of having their children watch TV arguing that it was actually benefiting them by teaching their children to read. However he argues that “we now know that “Sesame Street” encourages children to love school only if school is like “Sesame Street.” Which is to say, we now know that “Sesame Street” undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents” (Postman, 2006, p.143).
This new idea that teachers needed to be aware of how and where students might be able to obtain information, called for a change in the definition of what was once clearly defined as literacy. Audiovisual materials did not alter the concept of literacy; they in fact forced experts to create a new form of literacy. This new term ‘media literacy’ is defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms (Aufderheide 1993). In earlier times students had limited information available to them. They were able to obtain information from their textbooks or from oral conversations with others. However, new technologies such as the radio and various audio visual materials, such as films and television, provided new ways of thinking about the world around them. Students were no longer at the mercy of their teacher to be the bearer of all things educational. They could learn on their own through these new types of mass media. Students needed to learn how to understand and use the mass media that was being introduced in many classrooms and in their homes. Students needed to become critical thinkers as the media began to shape students understanding of their environment in a way that was never accessible before.
While educational technology began as silent films in museums, it quickly transitioned to include radio broadcasts and audiovisual materials. As technology advanced, the ability to deliver mass media changed the way information was delivered and began the shift away from the teacher being the bearer of all information. While many saw the benefits of being able to educate more people in a shorter amount of time, there was also a lot of criticism and limitations that hindered its progress. However, the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks and eventually technology prevailed forcing educators to adapt to a new form of literacy in the classroom. Once again history demonstrated its ability to repeat itself, as many of the issues that were raised with the introduction of radio and audiovisual are parallel to those issues teachers currently face with internet and other technologies of the 21st century.
Aufderheide, P. (1993). National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy. Conference Report. Washington,DC: Aspen Institute.
Bagley, W. C. (1930). Radio in the Schools. The Elementary School Journal, 31(4), 256-258. doi: 10.2307/996158.
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Cook, D. C., & Nemzek, C. L. (1939). The Effectiveness of Teaching by Radio. The Journal of Educational Research, 33(2), 105-109.
Cortez, J. (2009). Audiovisual Education, History of. In E. Provenzo, & A. Provenzo (Eds.), Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education. (pp. 62-64). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Dale, E. (1954). Introduction. In N.B. Henry (Ed.), Mass Media and Education. The Fifty Third Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education Part II (pp. 1–9).Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education.
Hansen, C. F. (1953) Teaching by TV in the Washington, D. C., Public Schools Washington, D. C.: Board of Education
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Mehlinger, H. D., & Powers, S. M. (n.d.). Technology in Education – School. Retrieved from http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2495/Technology-in-Education-SCHOOL.html
Postman, N. (2006). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York, N.Y: Penguin Books.
Reid, S. (1942). Radio in the Schools of Ohio. Educational Research Bulletin, 21(5), 115-148. doi: 10.2307/1473784. Retreived from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/1473784
Reiser, R. A. (2001). A History of Instructional Design and Technology: Part I: A History of Instructional Media. Educational Technology Research and Development, 49(1), pp. 53-64.
Rock, R. T., Duva, J. S., Murray, J. E., & Fordham University Bronx NY Department of Phsychology. (1959) The Comparative Effectiveness of Instruction by Television, Television Recordings, and Conventional Classroom Procedures.
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Depression. The Journal of Popular Culture, X: 501–519. doi:
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. (2012, Oct 25). Invention of Radio. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_radio
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Perspective writing is an aspect of narration many writers struggle with. Yet point of view is an important element of storytelling. Read a complete guide to point of view including first person, second and third, plus objective point of view, with definitions and examples:
Contents of this POV guide
In this guide, we’ll begin by exploring what point of view is and involved vs objective narrators. From there, we’ll discuss ten tips to use point of view in your story like a pro.
What is point of view?
Point of view means the perspective from which a story is told. For example, a first person narrator shares their perspective of events using the pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’.
What is a viewpoint narrator?
Viewpoint narrator means the character whose perspective we are currently reading (or group of characters).
For example, Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), narrates the opening chapter (and the rest of the story). He is thus the viewpoint narrator (no other character gives their own perspective, except via what Holden shares).
Reading a story via a character’s point of view helps us understand them, through what they say (and what they leave out) and experience. As Harper Lee says in To Kill a Mockingbird:
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (J. B. Lippincott & Co, 1960), p. 36
Points of view and the meaning of ‘person’
‘Person’ in grammar is what helps us understand who is speaking, who is being spoken to or about, and who is neither speaking nor being spoken about. For example, if I say ‘I’ll give the letter to him’ to someone, the person I’m speaking to (the addressee) knows I will not give the letter to them, because I did not say ‘to you’.
In narration, person helps us understand the connection between characters and the action – for example, whether the person narrating the story is directly involved in the action or the narrator is standing outside the action, looking in (more on involved vs objective narrators below).
The most often used person in point of view (according to several blogs and other sources) is third-person POV (where narration uses he/she/they or gender-neutral, third-person pronouns).
He had to walk with care. The stone steps were ancient, worn smooth, their valleyed centres ready to trip him up.Karen Jennings, An Island (Karavan Press, 2020), p. 3. Read our interview with the author here.
The argument for why this is the most common, is, according to The Balance Careers, that it provides the most options. It allows female narrators, male narrators, gender-neutral narrators. The non-human ‘it’. Groups or individuals. A story restricted to a single perspective or switching between characters’ private viewpoints and experiences.
Points of view and persons
|First person||I/we||I wandered, lonely as a cloud.|
|Second person||You (s. or pl.)||You turn the page, and suddenly…|
|Third person||She/he/they/neutral||They said that they were gender non-binary. She told them she was going to get their pronouns right.|
Per the table above, English grammar has three persons (first, second, third) whereas other languages (for example Gujarati) have different forms of ‘we’ depending on whether the word ‘we’ includes or does not include the people being addressed. See Quora for more about differences between languages and grammatical persons.
Examples of books in each point of view
What is first person point of view used for?
It is the most common POV used in stories that are written as fictional autobiographies. For example, coming-of-age novels where the narrator is closely involved in the events of the story such as Charles Dickens’ classic, David Copperfield.
First person POV example: I Capture the Castle
Dodie Smith’s novel I Capture the Castle (1948) about a 17-year-old coming of age during wartime, begins, ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.’
Second person POV example: If on a winter’s night a traveler
Second person novels are much more uncommon, due to the ‘choose your own adventure’ effect of addressing the reader as ‘you’. The reader, in effect, becomes a character in the story.
Italo Calvino uses this viewpoint to whimsical effect in If on a winter’s night a traveler, where you, the reader, go to a book shop and buy the book you are reading at the start of the story:
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you…And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered.Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1981).
Another use of ‘you’ is slightly different – ‘you’, the intended recipient of a letter. If you write a chapter (or a whole book) in letters, you might write your character addressing another character as ‘you’. For example:
When you wrote to me about air raids back home, I couldn’t sleep for weeks. You must keep safe, and have courage that this time will pass.
Third person POV example: A Game of Thrones
Examples of books written in third person POV are everywhere.
The first book in George R. R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series, A Game of Thrones (1996), is written in third person limited. This means one character’s perspective is given at a time, in third person, with the narration limited to what they know, see, think and feel.
There are eight different viewpoint narrators in A Game of Thrones who take up the story at different points over its course.
It reads as though the narrator is a camera following each viewpoint character, seeing what they see:
Will could see the tightness around Gared’s mouth, the barely suppressed anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of his cloak.George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (Bantam Spectra, 1996), p. 3.
Objective point of view vs involved
Before we continue with tips on using point of view, it is useful to explore two types of POV: Objective point of view and involved.
What is objective point of view?
In an objective point of view, the narrator is not involved in the action of the story. Like a fly on the wall, they might report characters’ actions, words, and expressions, yet the narrator cannot tell the reader exactly what any one character is thinking or feeling.
This point of view relies heavily on inference. If you want to tell your reader a character is angry, for example, your narrator has to show this through characters’ words, expressions and gestures.
Think of this POV like a CCTV camera – simply recording events within its field of view, without any emotional or interpretive partiality.
Example of objective POV
In her excellent writing manual Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin has a detailed chapter on POV. Here, she also refers to objective point of view as ‘detached author’, ‘fly on the wall’, ‘camera eye’ and ‘objective narrator’. Le Guin says:
The author never enters a character’s mind. People and places may be exactly described, but values and judgments can be implied only indirectly. A popular voice around 1900 and in “minimalist” and “brand-name” fiction, it is the most covertly manipulative of the points of view.Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and discussions on story writing for the lone navigator or the mutinous crew (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1998), p. 88.
Le Guin says Raymond Chandler is a good example of an author who frequently uses this POV, and gives her own example of objective POV, in third person:
The princess from Tufar entered the room followed closely by the big man from Hemm. She walked with long steps, her arms close to her sides and her shoulders hunched.Le Guin, p. 88.
Note how the princess’ hunched shoulders and arms close to her sides suggest a controlled, anxious quality, but the narrator in objective POV cannot say ‘she was anxious’. Description in objective POV does all the telling.
What is involved POV?
Involved POV or an involved narrator is a narrator who is involved in the action of the story. Unlike an objective narrator, they can access what characters are thinking or pass judgments on characters’ actions.
Le Guin uses the term ‘involved author’ as a synonym for the omniscient narrator. Says Le Guin:
[In involved author the] story is not told from within any single character. There may be numerous viewpoint characters, and the narrative voice may change at any time from one to another character within the story, or to a view, perception, analysis or prediction that only the author could make […] The writer may tell us what anyone is thinking and feeling, interpret behavior for us, and even make judgments on characters.Le Guin, pp. 86-87.
Example of involved POV
Le Guin uses the same example of the girl from Tufar to show how omniscient narrators are able to tell us what characters are feeling, or interpret what their movement, expressions, or gestures mean:
The Tufarian girl entered the room hesitantly, her arms close to her sides, her shoulders hunched; she looked both frightened and indifferent, like a captured wild animal. The big Hemmian ushered her in with a proprietary air…Le Guin, p. 87.
Le Guin contrasts omniscient narration with limited third person, describing limited third as ‘the predominant modern fictional voice’. She suggests that this is because modern authors moved away from uses of POV in Victorian fiction such as narrators breaking the fourth wall to address the reader and share asides or moralize.
To modern readers, an omniscient narrator who addresses the reader directly can read as the author being overly or preciously involved in the reader’s progress through the story. Yet, as Le Guin says, omniscient or ‘involved author’ is also a highly flexible POV option for narration. Omniscient narrators also do not have to address the reader directly, necessarily.
Brainstorm Viewpoint Characters
Find each of your viewpoint narrators’ personalities and attributes in structured steps to build your story outline.START
Point of view tips: Choosing, changing and more
To use point of view in your story well:
- Ensure who narrates is clear
- Use caution with major POV changes
- Note how point of view impacts structure
- Let genre guide POV choices
- Have a clear reason for each viewpoint
- Ask – can my reader trust this narrator?
- Use character voice for deeper POV
- Reserve first person thoughts in third for key moments
- Study books with multiple viewpoint narrators
Let’s explore point of view further:
Ensure who narrates is clear
Clarity is the largest challenge in using points of view, especially when there are multiple viewpoint narrators in your story.
If you have have two or more viewpoint narrators, consider using the name of the viewpoint narrator who tells a chapter either beneath the chapter number or instead of it.
William Faulkner does this in his novella As I Lay Dying (which has 15 narrators in total!). Faulkner simply prefaces each chapter, each POV change, with the next narrator’s name.
If you are changing POV within a chapter, consider using a dinkus or asterisk to set apart different viewpoint narrators’ sections clearly.
If you want points of view to switch with less interruption, make sure you use transitional phrases, for example, ‘Meanwhile, on the other side of town…’ to show the cut, the scene change, one would see in a film or TV show.
Dom observed the guards’ routes on the sly, dressed in rags, mingling with the usual beggars on the square. Right under your noses, he thought, smirking. Meanwhile, across town, his accomplice Sol inspected their plan again, brow furrowed as he tried to imagine every possible surprise.
Use caution with major POV changes
In stories with multiple perspectives sharing the telling, POV changes are inevitable. Think carefully, however, about:
- How often the POV changes (how often will your reader have to readjust to who’s narrating?)
- Changes from one person to another (e.g. from a first person narrator to a third person POV)
The bigger the change or leap, the more of an adjustment it is for your reader.
Your reader may also wonder who is the main character if, for example, one character has a smaller part in first person (which reads more immediate) and then you give other characters each their own POVs which tell the lion’s share of the story.
On major POV changes, Le Guin says:
Any shift from one of the five POVs outlined above [first person, limited third person, omniscient/involved author, objective/detached author, observer-narrator] to another one is a dangerous one. It’s a major change of voice to go from first to third person, or from involved author to observer-narrator. The shift will affect the whole tone and structure of your narrative.Le Guin, p. 90
If you are writing a story with, for example, four narrators, it may make the most sense to write all four using the same person (first or third) unless you have a very good reason to ask your reader to make a greater adjustment whenever you switch POVs.
Note how POV impacts structure
As Le Guin cautions in the extract from Steering the Craft above, shifts in point of view affect the tone and structure of your story.
Point of view case study: Using multiple viewpoint narrators
For example, a client for a manuscript evaluation had written a psychological thriller about a protagonist caught between two antagonists.
Part of the challenge in the narration identified in the evaluation lay in the choice to give both antagonists’ perspectives with each having their own viewpoint chapters.
Although this was an interesting (and typically modern) approach to narration, it created structural challenges:
- The POV departed from the main character who the reader would likely be rooting for (and most emotionally invested) in for long stretches of time
- The antagonists’ viewpoint chapters often recapped the same events from each other’s contrasting perspectives, which diluted narrative suspense as the reader knew what would happen already in the next narrator’s section
- The antagonists were not as likeable as the protagonist, so the reader could grow impatient to return to the character they could empathize with
In this scenario, the point of view recommendations were:
- To cut between the antagonist’s viewpoints more frequently, even combining them within the same chapter to give both perspectives, so that the narrative could return to the protagonist at more regular intervals to maintain suspense and a sense of their own progress
- To not recap events whose outcomes the reader already knew unless the recap provided new information that moved the story forwards
Let genre guide POV choices
How do you choose the right POV for your story?
Genre is a helpful guide. For example, according to editor Kathryn Lye writing for Harlequin:
The recommended POV [for publishing romance with Harlequin] is third person with some first person thoughts included as well, usually in key moments. More Harlequin series romance books have been written entirely in first person the past five years, so it’s not off the table if the author thinks the POV serves the story better.Kathryn Lye, ‘Back to Basics: POV Tips from Editor Kathryn Lye’, Harlequin, February 24 2022.
Read widely (and recently) in your genre. What are the most common POVs? You may find readers expect a specific POV simply because it’s what they’re used to.
A reader had very strong words on the Now Novel blog for a post that suggested anything other than third person POV was acceptable in any story. Point of view raises strong feelings in some readers.
Have a clear reason for each viewpoint
If you are going to mix persons in a multi-character novel where you use several points of view, make sure you have a clear reason for this choice.
If, for example, you have two narrating characters who both seem equally important to the story’s events, your reader may well wonder why one tells their story in first person while the other’s perspective uses third person limited, with third person pronouns.
The third person viewpoint narrator may have, for example, a dissociative personality condition where they think of themselves more like a character, from outside. Or they struggle to gain subjectivity, a sense of self. Unless the reason for the mix is self-evident, using the same person viewpoints in a multi-narrator story is advisable for the smoothest transitions between POVs.
Ask – can my reader trust this narrator?
Another interesting aspect of point of view in stories is the idea of the unreliable narrator. Do each of your narrators tell the complete, unvarnished truth? Do some embellish, lie, distort or manipulate the reader? Or simply not fully understand what they’re seeing or experiencing?
This is a very modern aspect of POV, with the rise of the anti-hero-as-narrator (think of the serial killer character Dexter, for example) in the 21st Century.
This is particularly interesting to think about in terms of deception (of self and other) as well as the limitation on what individual narrators see and understand.
In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, for example, one of the viewpoint narrators is a child member of an American missionary family who relocates to Central Africa. Because the narrator is a child, she misreads the visual signs of malnutrition as children having full bellies.
A gripping point of view often reveals both what a narrator knows and is able to understand, and the limits of their knowledge, awareness, or development.
Use character voice for deeper POV
What is deep POV in narration? It is narration which shows your reader how your characters think, feel and perceive by getting right into their heads.
Deep POV is of course impossible in objective narration, because the narrator can only show the signs of what characters think or feel.
In this example of deep POV, by contrast, every passing feeling influences the way a character tells the story, the words they choose (and their positive/negative subtext or inference):
Oh my God! The exam venue’s doors (the shitty, rundown PE hall at the bottom of campus) are about to close as I squeeze through at the last second. My elation quickly becomes despair when I see the questions they’ve set. There goes my average.
Use of exclamations, informal language, sarcasm, etc. creates a deeper POV here than if you were to write, ‘I was running late for my exam but got there just in time…’ A cooler, more removed POV may reflect a calmer demeanor, though deep POV gets to the heart of emotion and reaction, putting your reader inside your character’s mind.
Reserve first person thoughts in third for key moments
What about when you’re writing in a specific point of view and want to insert another, for example, a character’s thoughts within third person?
The convention is to italicize to make in-the-moment thoughts distinct from surrounding ordinary narration. For example:
What on earth, she thought. That wasn’t there when last I looked.
As editor Kathryn Lye in the article quoted above for Harlequin says, it is best to add first person thoughts ‘in key moments’.
Use this device too often and it becomes distracting for the reader, to have to adjust between first and third continuously.
Study books with multiple viewpoint narrators
How do you master point of view and changing points of view within a story unobtrusively, without drawing attention to narrative devices?
Read widely and read books written in POVs you may be less familiar with. Even if you stick with the ‘modern’, widely-used limited third person, knowing how to write in first or how to write omniscient narration adds another tool in your narratorial kit.
Try practicing rewriting a short scene in different points of view – first person, second person, third, objective or involved – to get a handle on the effect each has on structure and tone.
Need help cleaning up your POV use? Get a quote for professional fiction editing services today.


Representation of Marginalized Groups in American Culture and Literature
When it first appeared in 1450, the word “representation” was defined as “something which stands for or denotes another symbolically; an image, a symbol, a sign” (“representation”). Since then, it has been used in the context of law, art, and even mathematics. In 1553, that shifted to include the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “the act of putting forward an account of something discursively; a spoken or written statement, esp. one which conveys or intends to create a particular view or impression” (“representation”). To “create a particular view or impression” has gained value in American culture and literature over the years as the ability to represent oneself or another in a just and faithful way has become a point of an issue when it comes to marginalized groups, minorities in particular (“representation”). Without the ability to put forth a true image of a person, group, or institution, the threat of misrepresentation becomes apparent, leading to the chance of such marginalized groups becoming stereotyped, overlooked, and cast off without the true information. With instances of this happening all over the country, people from marginalized and minority groups are using literature to stake their claims over their own groups and cultures and represent themselves.
Authors and poets Langston Hughes and Louise Erdrich have done just that with the poem “Visitors to the Black Belt” written in 1949 and the novel Love Medicine written in 1984. In eighteen lines, Hughes relays his disdain for “you,” the “visitor” that does not truly see what his experiences in life are. By calling his audience “visitors” in the title, Hughes is implying that there are those that only visit long enough to receive the surface-level gist of his home in Harlem. They see that he lives “across the tracks” and the jazz movement that started there, but they do not see the “hell” that it truly is. These oversights come from a lack of correct representation.
The same theme of misrepresentation carries over into Erdrich’s novel as it tracks a slew of Chippewa narrators spanning fifty years. The reader follows as experiences jump from person to person, year to year, putting together a storyline from multiple perspectives. As different people tell their stories and the stories of others, the lives of two Native American families are faced with death, falling in and out of love, the effects of conflict, and “love medicine,” or special gifts. The novel offers layers upon layers of narration through a non-linear narrative structure that leaves pockets open not only for the characters but for the author to craft a true depiction of her Native American culture in the way that she wishes to present it.
The concept of true representation in literature has been a topic of debate in recent years, and Robert Warrior states in his Keywords essay “Indian” that, while the Native American “experience” has been overlooked and misunderstood, it is not enough to create “[inclusivity]” by “creating a new branch” for it in academia. He further supports this claim by quoting Craig Womack who states that “[w]ithout Native American literature, there is no American canon. Let the Americanists struggle for their place in the canon”. The idea that Native American culture is the foundation of all American culture, including literature and art, does hold value, especially when one takes the colonization of these groups into account. There is much room for speculation about what would have happened had the Americas not been colonized, but the fact remains that, as of 2014, only approximately two percent of the United States population was of Native American descent (US Census). That leaves the rest of the population with limited access to a small group of people, further exposing the risk of misrepresentation in the media, arts, and literature. In that case, having tribal literature at the base of the American canon could increase the amount and reach of proper representation before misrepresentation.
Though Warrior and Womack made these claims with Native Americans in mind, the idea of the American canon not only belonging to Americanists can have a positive impact on other misrepresented groups, such as the black Americans that Hughes wrote about. In the first stanza of his poem “Visitors to the Black Belt,” Hughes picks apart the geographical and metaphorical line in which he and his community are stereotyped and disregarded. His distinction between the “visitors” that talk about “across the railroad tracks” and his experience “here/ On his side of the tracks” is a play on the idiom “right side of the tracks”. In her American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, author Christine Ammer defines the idiom as “the desirable part of town,” leaving the opposing “wrong side of the tracks” to be undesirable or unattractive. The example given for the undesirable part of town is as follows: “The children from the wrong side of the tracks often came to school without having eaten breakfast,” suggesting that the “other side” could be experiencing poverty or food shortage. This trope has become common and also implies that people from the wrong side of the tracks are dangerous, criminals, dirty, or have other negative characteristics. The line “to me it’s here” indicates that Hughes knows of the distance between his life and the life that the outsiders are seeing, while he is also attempting to make it clear that what he is being forced to contend with is happening as he experiences them much differently than the others.
While the misrepresentation of lifestyle and home is explored in Hughes’ work, it is the misrepresentation of individuals and their families that is showcased in Erdrich’s novel. For example, Maria Lazarre and her family act as the people from the wrong side of the tracks in Love Medicine. Her family members are described as dirty, “horse-thieving drunks” who are “so low that you cannot even think they are in the same class as Kashpaws”. Because of these stereotypes that perpetrate almost all areas of her life, Marie spends the rest of it trying to live above what others think about her.
Even when she is grown with children of her own, Marie’s thought process when she visits a nun she knew when she was a teenager reveals her ever-significant need to prove others wrong and present herself in ways that she believes she deserves. “ by now I was a solid class. Nector was a tribal chairman. My children were well behaved, and they were educated too,” she says, describing a life that is a far cry from alcoholism and thievery. This situation lends itself to overcompensation, as Marie’s actions show that she believes her life and accomplishments must be bigger and better than what she had before in order to receive respect, acceptance, or any other positive attributes. Much like Hughes, the ways in which she was unjustly described impact how she interacts with others and how their opinions impact such communication. In both situations, residents of the Black Belt and members of a family that is looked down upon must fight to present themselves as they truly are.
In the same breath, the second stanza in Hughes’ poem simply explains that visiting Harlem will not constitute the full extent of the experiences living there. To the visitors and tourists, to see Harlem as “up” there is looking at it from an outsider’s perspective, whether what they see it as good or not. To Hughes, “here” in Harlem may have been a different world. Take the Harlem Riots of 1943, for example. After a black soldier attempted to intervene in the arrest of two black women, white policemen shot him. The false news of his death caused an uproar in the city and a riot ensued, ending with six deaths, hundreds of arrests and injuries, and thousands of dollars in damages. Though the conditions that surrounded and sparked the riot were based on an inflated cost of living, food shortages, and “racial discrimination,” among other things that predominantly impacted black Americans, the news did not accurately depict that. A 1943 article from the New York Times stated that spokesmen for “Negro organizations” agreed that “the disturbances in Harlem were not race riots but outbreaks of hoodlumism” a day before another article stated that stores were closed after the riot “because they were wrecked by hoodlums”. In the event of an outsider reading this news, Harlem may look like an area that was run and wrecked by such “hoodlums,” rather than by people who fought against unsatisfactory living conditions. To the outsider, Harlem may have looked like removed chaos, while it was much more involved and real for Hughes. This limiting act of misrepresentation not only twists the truth but also contradicts Hughes’ attempt at accurately presenting himself and others through his literature.
The act of telling another person’s stories and experiences also has significance in Love Medicine, though it is in a more relaxed and conversational way as opposed to news articles. Though many of the active characters in the novel tell their own stories, some leave the representation of their lives and personalities in the hands of others. Characters like Moses Pillager are spoken of in biased ways by those that already have certain opinions of them, leaving the reader to accept that or stipulate about the legitimacy of such claims and stories. Rushes Bear becomes one of these characters, and her progression from a mean-spirited woman with “hardened lips” and a face like a “wedge of steel” to someone who was hardened by life and softened by loneliness is only shown by someone who had a much better opinion of her than the first. The reader, who was introduced to the Rushes Bear that was to be avoided by Lulu only finds that in her later years, she was stuck with Marie, who reveals the true nature of her character. Without Marie’s testimony, Rushes Bear would have lived and died as the villainous mother, her loneliness and pain unknown; without Lulu’s stories, her cruelty would have less weight. It is only the joining of the two that gives the reader the most well-rounded sense of who Rushes Bear was.
The opposite of unloading the truth is covering it up, and in the third stanza of “Visitors to the Black Belt,” Hughes describes the ways in which jazz is making Harlem’s visitors overlook the “hell” that he is experiencing. By only using the two words to represent his experience with the South Side, Hughes could be implying an all-or-nothing mentality, meaning that, while he and his community are suffering in the cold, the visitors are only seeing a musical movement that has liberated and entertained. In Robert Mcruler’s Keywords essay on “Normal,” he states that “racialized populations” like Hughes in Harlem are among those that do not count as “normal”. After that distinction, he claims that “[l]ives lived beyond the confines of the normal have been marked as illegitimate and targeted for surveillance, control, correction, confinement, and even elimination”. While there is evidence to support that claim, Hughes’ situation may add another action to groups living outside of normalcy: actively ignoring the abnormal. When a stranger visits Harlem and sees the bright and lively jazz community, they may overlook what is going on beneath the layer of goodness rather than seeing the plight of a space’s residents. If that is the case, the act of proper representation becomes that much more difficult when members of a different group cannot or will not look at or search for the truth.
In his closing lines, Hughes takes the reins and actively moves from calling the visitor “you,” to “outsider,” suggesting that he is holding his ground and taking ownership of his home. In doing so, he is giving his home and peers value, making the visitor the minority, and making himself a priority. The next and final line suggests the same notion of Hughes taking matters into his own hands when he says “ask me who am I”. By inviting the outsider to inquire about his life rather than creating opinions based on location and what he’s known for, Hughes is setting the stage for his own chosen representation. Hughes’ act of asking for the chance at self-representation is one of the obvious ways to take control of the presentation of his life, though the mere presence as a misunderstood group in literature also has significance.
As a Native American author writing about Native American life, Erdrich enters as a part of the latter group. Though she is not writing a dictionary about everything needed to know in order to truly understand Native Americans, her portrayal of members of that group in all of their glory adds to the true American canon mentioned previously. By not sugar-coating her culture and recognizing that there are Native Americans that commit adultery, drink too much, have mental illnesses, and so on, Erdrich is arguably posing a more accurate depiction of what she knows of her culture. Out of context, the representation of less-than-perfect people from marginalized groups may not be beneficial, but when looking at what representation Native Americans have, anything is more substantial than one-dimensional sports mascots and stereotypical Indians in headdresses and loincloths that act as the face of some consumer goods. In that situation, authors like Erdrich who write such cultures into representation are needed alongside groups that fight for the same proper exemplification such as the National Coalition Against Racism in Sports and Media (NCARSM) that was formed five years after Love Medicine was first published. According to their website, “the impetus which formed the NCARSM was the … media coupling imagery with widely held misconceptions of American Indians in the form of sports team identities resulting in … stereotyping”. The formation of the NCARSM at that time groups Erdrich’s novel with the fight to reclaim Native American identity, culture, and representation in a correct and faithful way, showcasing that authors and poets are not the only ones fighting for accurate depictions.
When it comes down to the writers as individuals, both have been put into separate categories of literary movements because of their ethnicities, further widening the gap of representation in American literature. Langston Hughes, who is one of the faces of the Harlem Renaissance, is technically a modernist, but his work is also classified as Black Modernism. Author Adrienne J. Gosselin states in her article “Beyond the Harlem Renaissance: The Case for Black Modernist Writers” that “American literary history views Modernism as largely a European movement,” often citing literature such as The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, and “In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound as significant to the time. She continues to claim that “while American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance both share such primary Modernist concerns as alienation, primitivism, and experimental form,” black writers from that time are often classified simply as Harlem Renaissance writers instead of black modernists or modernists in general. Hughes exemplifies such models of Modernism as “Visitors to the Black Belt” which illustrates the separation and isolation that he experiences as a black man in Harlem while also straying from the traditional poetic form by switching lines in the middle of sentences and foregoing verse. The act of separating him based on race and not writing style or themes thus creates an atmosphere not conducive to proper representation as his participation in such literary movements is not inclusive nor all-encompassing.
Though Louise Erdrich’s novel is a Postmodern text, her Native American heritage puts her in the Native American Renaissance movement. As she is also taking part in a sector of literature that boxes her by ethnicity before the text, Erdrich earns her place as a postmodernist by writing outside of the traditional novel form with unreliable narrators, disconnected plot lines, and breaks from reality that the reader must unpack themselves. In a sense, her postmodern writing is similar to Hughes’s but more potent. As Michael Bérubé is quoted in Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology, he states that postmodernism is “30% more Modernism for your money”. Erdrich’s use of the non-linear narrative strategy mentioned previously and themes surrounding magic-like powers, isolation, and the breakdown of character’s lives over time stretch into postmodern criticism and commentary of how identity is formed through culture and experiences, the disjointed society that people are living in, and an escape to the deconstruction of words and reality that Ihab Hassan attributes to the movement. Such characteristics of writing have been seen in other celebrated Postmodern works such as Beloved by Toni Morrison and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut that challenge the ways in which the truth is found and perceived. In spite of the similarities in these pieces, Erdrich’s place in the Native American Renaissance creates a barrier between searching for and finding postmodern literature that represents an array of cultures and groups.
When isolated, “Visitors to the Black Belt” and Love Medicine may act as works for entertainment purposes or a general commentary on society, while there is something much bigger than that happening underneath the surface. The stereotypical ways in which the marginalized groups in both pieces are presented in the media, arts, literature, and every other part of society are often uncontested or inaccurate, making the act of true representation that much more important. In order to create a climate that caters to all Americans and their right to show themselves as they truly are, it is up to the members of such misrepresented groups and faithful allies to push that into the spotlight. The use of literature offers another point of view and looks into such groups, giving this issue in American culture an avenue to be resolved or lightened, and Hughes and Erdrich have used their writing to become participants in that. While Hughes’s poem has a direct correlation to the inaccurate representations that he experiences, Erdrich’s writing proved to be multifaceted in its exploration of the misrepresentations of characters while also becoming a source of information about the Native American culture that she knows. Despite their efforts, the amount of time between the conception of both texts proves that the fight for representation was and continues to be an ongoing battle, and similar contributions to American literature will pick up where they left off.
- “ABOUT.” Coalition Against Racism, www.coalitionagainstracism.org/about.
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- Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. HarperCollins Publishers, 2009.
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- ‘RACE BIAS DENIED AS RIOTING FACTOR: SPOKESMEN FOR NEGRO GROUPS LAY
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- ‘representation, n.1.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/162997. Accessed 2 June 2019.
- Warrior, Robert. “Indian.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, New York University Press, 2014, pp. 130-132.
- US Census Bureau. “American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month: November 2015.” American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month: November 2015, 3 Aug. 2018, www.census.gov/newsroom/facts-for-features/2015/cb15-ff22.html.
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