Teaching History

Understanding Historical Thinking with Canadians and their Pasts

March 20, 2014

By Del Muise, Marg Conrad and Gerald Friesen, Canadians and their Pasts was a SSHRC-funded Community-University Research Alliance project, involving seven co-investigators from six different universities and a dozen community partners. At its core was a systematic survey of 3,419 Canadians on their engagement with and attitudes toward the past. Its key findings are discussed […]

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Synthesis and Fragmentation: the Case of Historians as Undergraduate Teachers

March 19, 2014

By Ruth Sandwell Collectively, historians’ work consists of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing a vast edifice of knowledge about which generalizations and synthesis will vary according to the purposes of the historians and the audiences to whom they are directing any particular manifestation of their work. Historians tend to identify their work exclusively with their purposes […]

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Historical Thinking and Teacher Professional Development: The Poor Cousin of Curriculum Reform

March 19, 2014

By Carla Peck Curriculum reform is an enormous and expensive undertaking. Educational jurisdictions across Canada regularly engage in curriculum renewal, investing time, energy and a great deal of money into redesigning curricula to reflect current research, trends and societal priorities in teaching and learning. In Canada, history (and social studies) curricula are no exception, and […]

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History Slam Episode Thirty-Six: Historical Thinking and Teaching History

March 18, 2014

Podcast: Play in new window | Download By Sean Graham As part of Active History’s Historical Thinking Week, the History Slam Podcast looked into how history is taught in high school. To do this, I traveled to an Ontario high school and spoke with both students and teachers about the challenges of teaching history in […]

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A Matter of Time

December 13, 2013

By Peter Seixas For the Historical Thinking Project, 2013-14 was the best of times and the worst of times. It was the best of times because two of Canada’s largest provinces made the most concrete and comprehensive headway in adapting the ideas of the Project for their curricula. Ontario implemented a new K-12 curriculum that […]

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Indigenous History in the Classroom: Four Principles, Four Questions

November 18, 2013

By Carolyn Podruchny Is teaching Indigenous history any different than teaching other histories? This question was posed to organizers of a day-long Teaching History Symposium on history, heritage, and education for Toronto area public school teachers, heritage experts, graduate students, and faculty members in the History Department at York University.[1] Rather than providing an answer, […]

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Music as a Gateway to Understanding Historical Practice

January 16, 2012

Popular culture serves as an easy way to capitalize on students’ everyday experience. Music can teach about the past in at least seven overlapping ways.

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Too Much Information: The Case for the Programming Historian

January 9, 2012

Depending on your vantage point, we have a looming opportunity – or a looming problem. Historical digital sources have reached a scale where they defy conventional analysis and now call out for computational analysis. The Internet Archive alone has 2.9 million texts, there are 2.6 million pages of historical newspapers archived at the Chronicling America […]