After All is Said and Done

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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 time to time in public discussion and debate.

  • We teach history to promote national solidarity, a shared collective identity among people, most of whom will never see each other face to face.
  • We learn history to meet obligations to our forebears, who struggled, sacrificed and suffered to make the world that we have inherited.
  • We teach history to transmit the wisdom of the great actors, thinkers and writers of past generations to the next.
  • We learn history to transcend the past’s follies and foibles, the “mistakes,” that we are otherwise “condemned to repeat.”
  • We teach history to come to terms with the crimes and injustices of the past.
  • We learn history to preserve traditions.
  • We teach history for its own sake.

Each of these has considerable currency.  Any talk show host moderating a discussion of history education is likely to get stuck on one or the other.  Yet, many of them are in large part mutually contradictory.  They do, however, have one thing in common (other than the last, which I find nonsensical): they underscore the connections among past, present and future. Continue reading →

The Need for Professional Development and Support for Teachers

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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 have this feeling in my other classes. When I taught psychology, or law, or politics, I felt that students were highly engaged in the subject matter and that they felt and cared deeply about the issues under investigation. Students would often come in to my class and share that they’d had an argument with a parent over dinner about an issue we’d explored in class, or that they’d seen a news item or documentary about something we’d explored together and they wanted to discuss the new information they they had learned.

Nothing like this ever really happened in my history classes, although I always had a few history buffs in my courseses who were excited about every minute detail we studied. These students often, in fact, had more historical information stored in their heads than I did. Continue reading →

Teaching History: Historical Consciousness and Quebec’s Youth

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By Jocelyn Létourneau
Translated by Thomas Peace
On peut lire la version française ici

Letourneau - 1Who 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 explained to us that today’s youth have only a limited historical understanding and are generally disinterested in the past.

I don’t think that this is true, at least not entirely. Young people care about the past, though – with a handful of exceptions – their historical understanding is narrow rather than broad. In fact, my research suggests that rather than having no historical imagination or representations, they employ a somewhat simplistic understanding of the past as a useful tool for situating their lives in the present. In other words: youth understand without knowing; they have a strong personal vision of history at the cost of a comprehensive knowledge about the collective past.

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Understanding Historical Thinking with Canadians and their Pasts

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By Del Muise, Marg Conrad and Gerald Friesen,

cdns and pastsCanadians 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 Canadians and their Pasts exploring the rise of a public historical consciousness in the years since the Centennial of Confederation in 1967 and analyzing how Canadians’ responded to the survey’s seventy questions based on age, culture, education, ethnicity, gender, and language, etc. This brief note restricts itself to a few observations on questions bearing directly on “Historical Thinking” among adult Canadians in their everyday practices of thinking about the past. Over the course of the project several conferences and symposia explored aspects of the project, many of them listed on its web site. Continue reading →

The Necessity of Historical Thinking in Museums

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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 that evidence.  The struggle for museums has not been to acknowledge that this authority about the past exists within its learner communities.  Rather, the challenge lies first with getting learners themselves to acknowledge and assert their own authority in or with the museum, and second for the museum and learner to navigate these shared authorities between and amongst them. Continue reading →

Synthesis and Fragmentation: the Case of Historians as Undergraduate Teachers

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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. But if history is a dialogue amongst people about the interpretation of meaningful evidence left over from the past, that dialogue occurs not only in our published articles and at scholarly conferences, but also in our undergraduate teaching. And it is through teaching, not writing, that historians reach what is certainly our largest, and what may be our most important, audience: undergraduate students. Continue reading →

Historical Thinking and Teacher Professional Development: The Poor Cousin of Curriculum Reform

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By Carla Peck

Plaque on the Last Chance Saloon in Wayne, Alberta. Photo Credit: Carla Peck, 2013.

Plaque on the Last Chance Saloon in Wayne, Alberta. Photo: C. Peck, 2013.

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 done across the country to revise how history is taught and assessed in kindergarten through to grade twelve.

But changes to history and social studies curricula do not automatically lead to changes in teaching and learning. Why not? Doesn’t it automatically follow that if curricular content changes, then what is taught and learned will also change? No, it doesn’t.

Allow me to explain. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Thirty-Six: Historical Thinking and Teaching History

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By Sean Graham

As part of Active History’s Historical Thinking Week, the History Slam Podcast looked into how history is taught in high school. To do this, I traveled to an Ontario high school and spoke with both students and teachers about the challenges of teaching history in 2014 and some of the strategies used to get students interested in the past. While everyone had different opinions on what worked and what didn’t, there was unanimity on one point: the material must be presented in an engaging manner.

In the first part of this three-part episode, I talk with a grade 10 student about her changing perception of history. That is followed by my chat with a grade 12 student who is interested in teaching history as a career. The final part features my conversation with two teachers about teaching history, the methods they use in their classes, and the barriers to reaching students. We also discuss the content vs. skills debate and the pros and cons of digital tools in the classroom.
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Democratically Creating Historical Thinking for the Common Good

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By Stanley Hallman-Chong

The history curriculum in Ontario is part of a larger set of curricula that embrace several other subjects and disciplines, including Social Studies, Civics, Geography, Law, Politics, and Economics. Hence when the Ontario Ministry of Education proceeded to review its history curriculum, it sought to create a common structure and an element of unity that would encompass all of the subjects and disciplines together. With this Hegelian task in mind, we will see how historical thinking became a part of Ontario’s revised curriculum and provide some account for why it took the shape it did. Continue reading →

Historical Thinking in the Secondary School Classroom

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By Lindsay Gibson

What has changed and what has remained the same about historical thinking in secondary schools since Stephen Harper became Prime Minister in 2006 (also happens to be the same year the Historical Thinking Project began)?

It is difficult to make generalizations about historical thinking in secondary school classrooms across Canada because there are differences in curricula, teachers, and students in each province and territory. Furthermore, as a secondary school social studies teacher in B.C. for the past twelve years I have limited experience in secondary school classrooms outside of B.C. beyond attending and presenting at national, regional and provincial social studies and history conferences, meetings, and workshops. In order to make any substantive claims about historical thinking in secondary schools it would be necessary to conduct a contemporary version of the pan-Canadian research study led by Hodgetts (1968), who investigated the teaching of Canadian history, social studies, and civics in schools across Canada.[1] Regardless of these difficulties, in this essay I highlight the achievements that have been made in embedding historical thinking in secondary school classrooms, and discuss the obstacles to increasing the uptake of historical thinking in secondary classrooms across Canada.

The Historical Thinking Project (hereafter HTP) aimed to reform history education by focusing on four interrelated areas: rewriting of provincial curricula, classroom materials, professional development, and valid and efficient assessment strategies. Continue reading →