By Timothy Humphries As the official guardian of Ontario’s historical record, the Archives of Ontario is keenly aware that it must offer the public easy access to its vast and diverse holdings, and provide widespread opportunities to know more about our province’s rich and storied past. To this end, the Archives has long sought partnerships with museums, libraries, art and… Read more »
By Merle Massie The University of Saskatchewan has been front and center in national and international news this past spring, owing to the public fallout of an ugly internal battle regarding the university’s past and future directions. And historians have been active generals and foot soldiers on all sides of the battle. Because when you’re talking about shaping past and… Read more »
ActiveHistory.ca is pleased to announce the publication of Sean Carleton’s Rebranding Canada with Comics: Canada 1812: Forged in Fire and the Continuing Co-optation of Tecumseh: In the current age of austerity, the Harper Government allocated over $28 million to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. For many historians this proved to be an unpopular decision. It even… Read more »
By Peter Seixas After all is said and done, and The Historical Thinking Project has been laid to rest, the biggest question in history education is still up for grabs. What is history education for? Leaving aside whether it is well taught or poorly taught, what are we aiming for? Here is a smattering of possibilities, as they surface from… Read more »
By Jill Colyer When I first started teaching I didn’t feel very successful in my history classroom. (Of course, it is hard to feel successful at all when you first start teaching because the entire experience is overwhelming and incredibly difficult.) After a few years, my feeling that something was missing in my history classes hadn’t gone away. I didn’t… Read more »
By Jocelyn Létourneau Translated by Thomas Peace On peut lire la version française ici Who was the first Premier of Quebec? In what year did the asbestos strike take place? What was the pivotal moment in the Quiet Revolution? Very few young people in Quebec can answer these three questions correctly. In trying to address this problem, scholars and pundits have… Read more »
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 in a recently released book… Read more »
By Elisabeth Tower Museums today acknowledge that their visitors are learner communities and that those learner communities bring with them knowledge and authority about the past. This may take the form of personal memory, family heritage, past learning or experiences. Further, learner communities may have their own evidence about the past and may bring different lenses to the interpretation of… Read more »
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 and audiences as specialist scholars…. Read more »
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 currently much work is being… Read more »
