Readers might be interested in seeing a slightly longer version of Catherine’s comments on her own blog at http://catherinecaughell.blogspot.com/2010/01/where-ontario-curriculum-meets-local.html.

The truth is, the role of local history in our curriculum (at least at the secondary level in Ontario) is already well-established. Although we currently only have one mandatory history credit in high school, it does include a strand entitled “Communities: Local, National, and Global” which explicitly includes the study of local history. The larger description for this strand is as follows:

Communities may be viewed from local, regional, national, and world perspectives. Communities interact with one another through commerce, cultural exchanges, colonization, war, and international agreements. These interactions are the basis of today’s globally connected world. Over time, communities and their interactions have changed because of factors such as changing technologies and patterns of human migration. It is through the study of communities that students begin to understand who they are in time and place. [1]

Since teachers are legally bound to the curriculum as laid out by the Ontario government, it is not a matter of should but of must; it is part of our responsibility as secondary school teachers to include local history in our lesson plans in order to ensure that all curriculum expectations for the province are being met. The problem is that few teachers do and those that do often don’t do so effectively. Perhaps the question that we should really be asking is “how do we, as teachers and historians, go about incorporating local history in more MEANINGFUL ways within history curricula?”

I believe that one way to do this is for schools and teachers to allot time not only for discussing history on a local level with their students, but also showing it being done. I realize field trips are difficult and time consuming to organize, but as educators we should be exposing students to local archives, historical societies, historical architecture and historic sites and/or monuments. This type of exposure to local sources of history would fit seamlessly (I think) into the Historical Inquiry section of the curriculum and is therefore easily justifiable to administrators.

[1] http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/canworld910curr.pdf

As a university history educator, I think local histories should play a more prominent part in our curriculum for a couple of reasons:

1.) I agree with Harry Chapman’s argument that students should learn about the places they live. Not only does this have the potential to make a history education more immediately relevant, it is crucial for students to know the history of their own communities, if they hope to be engaged participants in those communities.

2.) When learning the methodologies of archival research, it is vital for undergraduate students to work with primary source documents. While there is a bounty of digitized primary source documents available on the web, most undergraduate students will only be able to access full collections of physical documents in local archives. By offering students an education in local history, we can provide important opportunities to work with primary source documents in local archives.

This is not to undermine the importance of broader national and global histories. Any good local history will, obviously, consider trends, patterns, and conditions beyond the boundaries of a local community. At the undergraduate level, however, I think a component of local history is important.