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 »
Samantha Cutrara As a scholar interested in teaching and learning Canadian history, I am embarking on a series of blog posts for Active History about the representation of the post-confederation period (1867-1920) in picture books for children ages 4 to 10. In my last post, I looked at the history of residential schools and used a list published by the… Read more »
By Samantha Cutrara Children’s historical books can serve many purposes. They can teach children about history, as well as develop emotion and empathy about figures from the past. In “Recreating the Past,” Evelyn Freeman and Linda Levstik argue that children’s historical fiction fosters ongoing process of historical interpretation in which the child is an active participant (pg. 331). From my own experience… Read more »
Rather than asking questions about who history education is for, perhaps we should inquire about what we mean by history education?
The next Approaching the Past workshop will be held on Wednesday April 27th at 7:oo pm at Toronto’s historic Fort York. The theme of this workshop is “Teaching the War of 1812,” and will feature a tour of Fort York and two short presentations by Karen Dearlove and Carolyn King. Karen will be discussing the upcoming Ontario Visual Heritage Project… Read more »
ActiveHistory.ca is a website that connects the work of historians with the wider public and the importance of the past to current events. It developed from the conference “Active History: History for the Future” at Glendon College in September 2008. We define active history variously as history that listens and is responsive; history that will make a tangible difference in… Read more »
