Active History

Photo by Fernando Arcos, public domain, https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-caution-cone-on-keyboard-211151/

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 train back to Ottawa after winter break. I was tired, trying to anticipate how students in a new class on the topic would respond to Ruth Kluger’s Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, and thumbing through it quickly to check it off my to-do list. It is a beautiful, horrifying memoir – but I had read material like this before. Next thing I knew, I was sitting bolt upright in bed the next three nights, terrified of something unnamed and with vague images from Kluger’s text fading from my mind.

(Before I go further, please note that this blog post contains references to Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust and the sexual assault of serf women in 18th century Russia).

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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.

Source: Students in a classroom at Carleton University, 1961. National Film Board. Phototheque. 1971-271, TCS 01186, Library and Archives Canada.

Jo McCutcheon

…to foster an optimal learning environment, we need to pay attention to emotions and how the learner is feeling, as learning cannot take place in the absence of emotion.

Myas Imad[1]

As a researcher and teacher who has read exceedingly difficult archival material and as someone who has openly sobbed in the middle of the reading room at Library and Archives Canada after finishing a work of fiction and in a few cases, after reading government reports and documents, I came to realize how important it is to carefully consider assignments, readings, and topics covered in class and explicitly warn students in the syllabus, on lecture slides, and before discussing some of these topics about the difficult material we encounter as historians and researchers.[2] I have learned over the past several years that content warnings, and a consideration of triggers are part of a pedagogical framework that can provide a learning and teaching environment that can support all students.[3]

The process of teaching and learning is dynamic and often challenges us to carefully consider our approaches on an ongoing basis. When I reflect on some past experiences of teaching difficult material, I feel that I did not always have the framework or understanding at the time to fully support the diversity of challenges inherent in my courses, beyond the course content. Looking to other professions, I noted the work that was taking place to provide a trauma-informed approach, and I wanted to review the whole of my classes to see how I could provide an overall approach in this vein. This post is a reflection of what I have learned and what I am working on.

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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 the increase in international students in Canadian schools, colleges, and universities. Another, less visible form of internationalization was the spread of Canadian curriculum to other countries. Also on the move were textbooks, teachers, and administrators who set up offshore schools and programs abroad.The first few offshore schools opened in the mid-1990s as a novel form of transnational education, when curriculum and credentials were transported across borders to other countries. Unlike traditional international schools that taught children from expatriate families, Canadian offshore schools were mostly attended by local students seeking a foreign high school education to prepare for university abroad and sometimes to avoid aspects of their own national education system. Now that it is 2024, and offshore school students and teachers have been learning and teaching for nearly thirty years, the time is ripe to think historically about this era and gather stories of this cross-cultural education. These stories can inform the next generation of offshore schools and help identify continuity and change over time, especially when the presence and plight of international students has recently been thrust into the political spotlight.

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These green doors mark the cadet entrance of 330 Danforth Tech Air Cadet Squadron, housed in Danforth Collegiate and Technical Institute, a secondary school in Toronto, Ontario. Originally an Army Cadet Corps, cadets have paraded at this location since 1940. Photo courtesy of author.

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

Rebecca Evans 

Our conceptions about good citizenship vary. Context, particularly space and time, matter. In citizenship education, young people participate and deepen their understanding of how to make change in their communities. They do so across various domains, inclusive of formal politics, political advocacy, civic society, and grassroots/community participation. Scholars Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne developed the What Kind of Citizen framework to capture different orientations to the concept of good citizenship.[1] Debates persist however and scholars agree that more education for supporting democratic citizenship is needed – and that knowledge, skills, and participation are significant elements of citizenship education.

In this blog post, I share the preliminary findings from my study on experiences in the Air Cadet program related to core concepts of citizenship education – agency, responsibility, and civic engagement. I focus in particular on the different ways participants make change in their communities today and how they relate these enactments as citizens to their experiences as youth in Air Cadets. This was a qualitative study. Over one hundred adult participants completed a survey. From the respondents, seventeen diverse participants were selected for in-depth study, with a view of building a deeper understanding of how the program functions as a civic educator for participants of diverse identities, including Indigeneity, race, gender, sexuality, religion, socio-economic status, and ability.

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