Active History is on its annual August hiatus. In honour of syllabus-writing season, we have decided to repost a selection of teaching-related articles from the past year. First up is Jo McCutcheon’s piece on trauma-informed teaching, first published on 20 February 2024. While you’re here, we also invite you complete our survey. In recent years, teachers and heritage professionals have… Read more »
by Alessandro Tarsia Having completed my PhD in Indigenous history, I recently returned to my birth nation of Italy. It had been seven years since I visited the villages in my home region of Calabria. While I’d always been aware of the debates over the place of fascism in Italian historical consciousness, I couldn’t help but feel that something was… Read more »
Krenare Recaj In the third year of my undergrad, I was sitting beside my friend Jeremy in a lecture for the class America: Slavery to Civil War. The professor was going into explicit detail – showing photos and drawings – of the torture enslaved people in America were subjected to. The logic was that these details were necessary to properly… Read more »
In fairness to LAC, I recognize that their problems are rooted in chronic underfunding. That and a succession of governments measuring their success with inappropriate metrics. While wishing that management had made different choices under the pressure of inadequate financing, I also wish they were not forced to choose between outreach and basic archival services.
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.
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
(Editor’s note: Today marks the start of International Open Access Week 2023. Four years ago we published this post by editor Krista McCracken, explaining why open access is a core value of their work as a historian, educator, and archivist. “Where we publish matters,” argues McCracken, particularly when we work with communities or for non-academic audiences. That commitment to access… Read more »
