This month in our history education series, I’ll be looking at Manitoba’s social studies curriculum. A review of their website and recent news articles suggests that Manitoba strives to be student-centric and responsive in their curriculum. Last year, Manitoba established a new Indigenous-focused school system with a new curriculum, and while most of the provinces heard the call to action… Read more »
This month, I wanted to take a break from reviewing the provinces’ History and Social Studies curricula to return to a question I posed in a 2011 blog post following the data collection for my doctoral dissertation. The question is: Who is History education for? Seven years on, I feel no closer to an answer and feel like, in many ways, exploring… Read more »
As part of our History curriculum series, and as a complement to December’s post on collaborative curricula, Cynthia Wallace-Casey discusses New Brunswick’s unique diverse, regional, and bilingual approach to History and Social Studies curricula. As the only officially bilingual province in Canada, New Brunswick holds a unique position regarding history education and collaborative curriculum development. In this province, it is as… Read more »
By Samantha Cutrara Should Canadian students be taught with the same history curriculum across the country? I often hear this question posed – sometimes in jest, sometimes in seriousness – at the end of a conference or symposium or in the comments section of an article. It is not currently a very active debate, but this question always seems to teeter on the… Read more »
By Samantha Cutrara As a contributing editor for Active History, this year I will be exploring the Canadian history curriculum across the country. Conceptualized as a series, each post will build and develop off the findings of the others, so that we may conclude in June with some critical ideas about how Canadian history is designed to be taught and… Read more »
By Samantha Cutrara This academic year I’ll be writing a series of blog posts for Active History focused on history education in Canada. In these posts, I’ll be outlining the Canadian History and Social Studies curricula for each province and identifying some possible opportunities for collaboration between historians/archivists and teachers in elementary and secondary schools. As I mentioned in my… Read more »
By Samantha Cutrara What is the purpose of learning history? Are we doomed to repeat it? Do we lose grounding? Are we stranded without space or place? Does history provide us with the skills for understanding evidence or content for narrating experience? As adults, as educators, as historians, we answer these questions with a blend of cliché and seriousness, never… Read more »
A series of blog posts by Samantha Cutrara looking at children’s historical books. In a series of posts, Samantha explores a selection of children’s books on particular topics of “other” histories in Canada. Her intention was not just to critique children’s books, but to deconstruct the semiotics of the historic spaces that get created through this medium. The series explores how these histories are… Read more »
Canadian history is often perceived as dull, but I argue that Canada’s history has been made dull in order to obfuscate the diversity of experiences that were legislatively supposed to be outside the experience of the newly confederated Canada
Samantha Cutrara, PhD My last two blog posts for ActiveHistoy.ca deconstructed pre- and post-Confederation Canadian history in children’s books. My findings suggested that stories that explored difficult histories or social justice topics often did not connect these stories to larger national forces and thus felt isolated from the rest of Canadian history. These findings suggest a dangerous separation. Historians, teachers,… Read more »
