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 →

History Education in Canada without Historical Thinking? A worrisome prospect

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By Heather E. McGregor

Recently Peter Seixas announced that the Historical Thinking Project (the Project) was denied ongoing funding by the Department of Canadian Heritage. This change was said to be because the purposes of the Project do not coincide with, as quoted from The Canada History Fund, “projects that celebrate key milestones and people who have helped shape our country as we know it today”.

Key accomplishments of the Project to date can be viewed here. Jurisdictions across Canada have taken substantial steps to adopt the Historical Thinking Concepts in provincial and territorial curricula, and the approaches recommended through this initiative have begun to make a difference to history education. I am exceedingly disappointed to hear that the federal government is moving towards funding initiatives that are as limited as the celebration of key milestones and key people. The Department of Canadian Heritage seems to be out of touch in setting this direction at a time when decision-makers across Canada have indicated their support for historical thinking as a mandatory part of student learning in public education.  Continue reading →

Lessons from the Past, Promises for the Future: Reflections on Historical Thinking in Canadian History

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By Thomas Peace

“Our historians have almost wholly ignored the existence of slavery in Canada.”

Two weeks ago these words echoed through Fountain Commons here at Acadia University.  Historians, educators and activists had gathered for Opening the Academy: New Strategies for Exploring and Sharing African Nova Scotian Histories. The message those of us in the audience heard was that African-Canadian history remains a marginal field in Canadian history. The words above – evoked at the conference, but originally delivered by T. Watson Smith in 1898 to the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society – still hold true today.[1]

It’s not my intention here to delve into the relative merits of this comparison (though a look through Watson Smith’s address makes one wonder just how far historical research has come over the past 115 years). Rather, I want to use Watson Smith’s statement as a way to introduce a more fundamental point about teaching history and communicating information about the past: it isn’t easy and it’s highly political.

This week ActiveHistory.ca has put together a series of blog posts that focus on the Historical Thinking Project. Scheduled to close its doors at the end of the month, the Historical Thinking Project has made a tangible difference in Canada’s historical landscape. Continue reading →