Active History

Harrison Dressler

“ALL THE EVIDENCE DEMANDED,” read an article published in the Toronto Globe on February 2, 1917. Written by two former students—R.F. Henderson and Byron G. Derbyshire—the article alerted the Canadian public about an investigation into the Ontario School for the Blind (OSB), then as now, a residential school for blind people located in Brantford, Ontario. Roughly one year prior, Derbyshire had organized a counter-offensive against the OSB, collecting signatures from forty-two students before sending three letters to the Department of Education, documenting allegations of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.

Commissioner Norman B. Gash entered the OSB in May 1916, where he soon accumulated over one-thousand pages of first-person testimony: evidence that no longer exists, either lost, forgotten, or destroyed. On February 12, 1917, Commissioner Gash delivered the resulting report to the Department of Education. But the protesters’ allegations of sexual abuse were conspicuously absent, and their complaints of malnutrition were seriously downplayed.

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Paul McGuire

This is the second entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here.

Researchers continue to write about the value and importance of teaching Historical Thinking Concepts (HTC). There is a near consensus on the importance of moving from a transmission approach to teaching history to one that focuses on inquiry.  This ongoing discussion has been shaped by the works of several researchers including Sam Wineburg who wrote, “the essence of achieving mature historical thought rests precisely on our ability to navigate the jagged landscape of history, to traverse the terrain that lies between the poles of familiarity with and distance from the past.” (Wineburg, 1999, p. 490)

Wineburg’s challenge to history teachers, written over twenty years ago, is to take students on a journey to a foreign land – his jagged landscape of history. While the research supports this aspirational goal, is it possible to do this in the classroom? There is no question that teaching historical thinking concepts offer a new way to engage students in the study of history, but no one really writes about how to do this.

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