LAC: The Scandal of the Archives
It is as if LAC had shoveled its digitized material out into a virtual dumpster and invited researchers to dive in. There are indeed treasures to be found here, but systematic research is out of the question.
Category Archives: Academic Culture
“Where are all the (non-white, non-elite) women?” Examining issues of diversity and intersectionality in the creation of women’s history lesson plans for Ontario educators
Tifanie Valade This is the fifth entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here. While history classes are often viewed as a neutral, apolitical venue for the transmission of “facts” about the past, history education is in fact a value-laden enterprise that seeks to construct and communicate overarching national narratives and national identities. Such narratives often… Read more »
When Class Content Gives the Professor Nightmares, It Might be Time for a Warning
This is the second in a three-part series on the use of content warnings in classrooms, archives, and museums. You can read the first entry here. Erica L. Fraser Looking back, I probably began using content warnings for students after giving myself night terrors from reading the memoir of a Holocaust survivor as class prep. I was on an evening… Read more »
Trauma-Informed Teaching: Creating Classrooms that support learning
In recent years, teachers and heritage professionals have wrestled with the question of when and how to provide alerts about materials that students or users might find difficult to navigate. This is the first in a three-part Active History series on the subject of content warnings that elaborates the crucial processes and approaches that inform this work. Jo McCutcheon …to… Read more »
Thinking Historically About a Generation of Canadian Offshore Schools
Ian Alexander This is the fourth entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here. In the 1990s a confluence of social, economic, and political conditions created a market for international education to expand in a multitude of ways around the globe. For those in communities across Canada, the internationalization of education has been most visible in… Read more »
No One Killed Canadian History. It is time to move on
The problem I have with these claims is that they often ignore the good work of historians who have taken a different perspective.
The Dawn of Tomorrow was a “First” Almost Forgotten By History
It was only after winning the prize that I fully grasped that I had pushed The Dawn out of the shadows of history, and into the forefront of discussions about Black Canadian newspapers, Black contributions to Canadian history, and Canada’s media history. I had awoken an entire field that I didn’t even know existed.
Entering The Jagged Landscape of History: Can We Teach Our Students to Apply Historical Thinking Skills?
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… Read more »
Quebec Tuition Fees: A Personal Reflection
This article is cross-posted with Borealia: Early Canadian History, where it was published on 23 October 2023. E.A. Heaman I am very sorry to see Quebec raising the fees on students not from Quebec. A long time ago I was one of those out-of-province students. I grew up in British Columbia and had never been east when I transferred from… Read more »
Did ChatGPT-4 attend my lecture?
Jim Clifford In the lead-up to my take-home exam last April, I was trying to think of questions ChatGPT could not answer. I hoped that by focusing on details from my lectures that are not available on Wikipedia and other similar online sources, the large language model would fail to provide a strong answer. I was dead wrong: