By Sarah Glassford and Ruby Madigan
Preamble
During the winter 2014 semester, we (the authors) experienced HIST 309A “Canada and the First World War” from opposite sides of the teaching-and-learning equation. Sarah was teaching the course, offered by the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) Department of History, while Ruby was a student taking the course as an elective.
We came at the course from very different angles: Sarah pursued a traditional “straight-through” path from high school through undergraduate and graduate education to the professoriate; Ruby followed a more circuitous route, returning to university as a mature student. Sarah was a single working woman; Ruby was a wife and mother of a young child, attending school full-time. Sarah was a Canadian citizen teaching Canadian history she had learned within Canada; Ruby was an American citizen, now encountering the Canadian version of the First World War for the first time.
We talked outside of class about many things, including the fact that we were uniquely positioned to think together about what it means to teach and learn the history of Canada’s First World War in the early twenty-first century. This post is the product of several conversations and a more formal Q&A email exchange over the two years since the class ended. We draw no broad conclusions, but hope to spark further conversations about what and how we teach, and how that teaching is received and experienced by students.