Teaching the Past

Sitting at home watching CTV during my early years when my family only had what we like to call, “country cable,” or the two channels you got when you lived in the boonies, I was raised on the Heritage Minutes played during commercial breaks.  This is where I found myself, for the first time, really interested in our history, through these one-minute snippets about the various heros and heroines of Canada, and the events, both good and bad, that have shaped us as a nation.   For many youth this is where their first encounter with our history starts; some students, like myself, come to love the dramatic narratives that rise out of these small, well-crafted pieces of film. 

Did you know that February 20 is National Heritage Day in Canada? First established in 1974 by the Heritage Canada Foundation, each year the third Monday in February is widely recognised across our nation as a day to encourage Canadians to identify, protect and enhance their natural, cultural, and built environments.

 A few months ago I wrote about a journal article I co-authored with Dr Kent den Heyer where we explored the challenges pre-service teachers had with telling historical narratives that are not the ‘grand narrative,’ that is, history as told from another perspective. We had conducted a study with student-teachers in their final term of their education program, assigning them the challenge of composing short videos of no more than eight minutes in which they must tell two narratives of Canada’s past that share an event in common.

On my way home from the British Library this week I found myself trampling over the past. I mean this in the literal sense; embedded into the sidewalk beneath my feet was a small iron heart with initials. I stopped, looked around, noticed for the first time that every few steps I took I was rewarded by more of these small tokens encased in concrete and taking the form of coins, lockets, and chains.

Imagine, instead of starting your history course at the earliest date covered, you start as close to the present day as possible, and go back in time from there. Teaching history backwards can be very effective at engaging student interest and teaching major historical concepts such as causality. It will also grab students’ attention!

Last month on this blog, Samantha Cutrara asked a challenging question that gets to the fundamentals of history education.  Who, she asks, is history education for?  This question is more complex than it seems, because, depending on the answer, it has a variety of implications for historians and history educators.  Implicit in this question is a set of power relations that often remain undisclosed in discussions about history and how it is taught.  By probing the implications that develop from the question of 'who history is for', it becomes apparent that we must ask a more basic question that helps us better understand the uses and abuses of the past. What do we mean by history education?

As the newest member of the THEN/HIER graduate student committee, I am looking forward to sharing thoughts and stories about education and history from Canada’s North. I would like to begin by introducing a recent history curriculum initiative in Nunavut, which is in fact part of the reason I was inspired to pursue my doctorate in education. Staking the Claim: Dreams, Democracy & Canadian Inuit is a required grade 10 social studies module, published in 2009, that examines the history of Inuit land claims across Canada. As this first entry will not provide enough space to explore it fully, this will be the first of several comments on what I view as the most exciting made-in-Nunavut curriculum module to date!

There are times when history tends to be overly focused on the specifics, especially in high school classes, and this can overwhelm a lot of students.  From my own experiences teaching grade eleven Modern History, the issue I ran into a lot was lack of experience with certain aspects of history (important historical figures, events, or dates).  With my two sets of grade eleven classes, both being lower level classes which needed a lot of attention and differentiation, the students sometimes ended up lost.  I came up with some easy solutions that can be applied to any social studies classroom:

Over the last couple of years my friend Dave Scott and I have been engaged in a dialogue about alternative and innovative pedagogies in social studies, particularly in history education, and how to make encounters with the past through history content relevant and engaging for students. Dave is a a social studies teacher at the Calgary Science School and a PhD student at the University of Calgary. Both Dave and I, like many social studies teachers, came into the subject area as people already fascinated and motivated to learn about the past, but we realize that students do not necessarily have the same enthusiasm for the content that we do.

We often talk about what history education is for – building national narratives, civic responsibility, or even critical thinking skills – but rarely do we talk about WHO history education is for. WHO ultimately benefits, grows, and is strengthened by the narratives we hear, the skills we teach, and the voices we emphasize? Is it the bureaucrats and politicians who have the ultimate say on what the curriculum will look like? Is it the teachers who need to interpret and assess the curriculum efficiently and perhaps even interestingly? Is it the Canadian nation writ large and those who have the power and privilege to maintain their power and privilege? Is it a general Canadian student who is expected to grow up to be a critically questioning, yet respectful, citizen in a changing, but generally unproblematized nation?

This post was written by Melissa Otis, a PhD Candidate at OISE/UT. Melissa attened our second Approaching the Past event at Zion Schoolhouse in Toronto and these are her reflections from the event:

I was privileged to attend the second Approaching the Past event entitled "Secret Lives, Affective Learning" on 29 November 2011.The event occurred at the Zion Schoolhouse on Finch Avenue East located in what was once a farming community north of Toronto called L'Amaroux. The schoolhouse was built in 1869 and has been restored to the year 1910. Those of us in attendance witnessed several performances to illustrate the use of drama to teach history. Seated in early twentieth-century desks bolted to the floor, the audience watched the performances and wondered how we, too, could use drama to teach history in our various forums.

After reading Alex Zukas’ “Different Drummers: Using Music to Teach History,” a 1996 article about incorporating music in the history classroom, I was inspired to see that if anyone had created resources to teach history with music in the internet era. I was lucky enough to discover the historyteacher’s YouTube Channel. Created by Amy Burvall and Herb Mahelona, two history teachers from Hawaii, “History for Music Lovers” features parodies of popular songs detailing historical events and figures.

The Canadian press has recently been replete with stories and op-ed pieces covering the National Panel on First Nation Elementary and Secondary Education, which this month wrapped up a series of roundtable discussions.  The panel, created through a partnership between the Canadian federal government and the Assembly of First Nations, has a mandate to develop options and to suggest legislation for improving on-reserve education across the country.  Inequitable funding for band-operated schools in many First Nations communities has created a crisis.  Despite education being a treaty right for many First Nations, the panel notes that &qu

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." Does this quotation also hold value in our Canadian History and Social Studies classrooms? Is the ultimate measure of a teacher and a classroom not how it tackles the everyday, but instead how it tackles the controversial?

I recently attended a session with OISE’s Jill Goodreau and Karen Pashby on Teaching Controversial Issues in our History and Social Studies Classrooms, and have been reflecting ever since on what a little controversy can bring to our classroom. It certainly does nobody any favours to avoid these challenging issues – in many ways, they promote the most valuable opportunities for critical thought and understanding of perspective.

In her November 8, 2011 blog about Remembrance Day fellow THEN/HiER Blogger Katherine Joyce asked how we as teachers should teach about war? Should we try to remain objective, teaching ‘just the facts,’ or, should we take a stance, either pro- or anti-war? Joyce’s question gets at the very heart of the issue of the place of ethical judgments in the history classroom.

THEN's "Imagining Gateways" conference was held in Halifax over Oct. 27^th- 29^th and was a real whirlwind. Although it came and went by so fast over the course of those three days, here is a summary of what I took from this great conference. 

Just over two-and-a-half years ago, during the keynote address to the 2009 Annual Meeting of the National Council on Public History, historian Jill Lepore spoke about the absence of historical sophistication within the realm of public discourse. Quoting a recent article by Motoko Rich in The New York Times, in which the author coined the phrase: “an unprecedented pileup of historic news,” Jill Lepore suggested that it is during times of dramatic change that societies feel a need to look back on the past for answers.

Within a round-table discussion about the Great War and Education at The Great War: From Memory to History, an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Western Ontario, Robert Cupido at Mount Allison University put forward his argument: History, as taught in Canadian schools, is not really history at all. Instead, it is an exercise and engagement in commemoration. And the key distinction, the important point of difference, is that commemoration encourages a shutting-down, or shutting-off, of the critical thinking skills at the heart of historical instruction.

Remembrance education must and will continue to evolve and change as time gradually erodes away the living memory of past wars. With the passing of veterans of the First World War, and even the passing of the vast majority of civilians who lived through that conflict nearly a century ago, what is it that we in the present are supposed to remember about a war that is not part of our living experience? Remembrance Day began as a veteran’s event to recognize, recall and honour the deaths of comrades.

A major premise of Remembrance Day is to take up John McCrae’s challenge to hold the torch high and not break the faith of those who gave their lives in the wars of the past. As teachers, what is our role in meeting that challenge? How should we teach about the war? Should we try to remain objective, teaching ‘just the facts,’ or, should we take a stance, either pro- or anti-war?

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
- From John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields”

As a writer of historical fiction, David Adams Richards is best known for his ability to explore elements of humanity within characters who "come from the fabric and the soil of the Miramichi." During Congress 2011, he spoke about this sense of place and what it means to those who identify with New Brunswick’s past.

Over the past couple of weeks I have had some really concerning conversations about the state of teaching and learning in Canadian universities.  In one, a colleague of mine – a university instructor – claimed that universities do not have an overall curriculum governing their operation.  In another, a senior educator stated bluntly that students learned little in the average undergraduate program.  Both of these statements took me aback and got me thinking a little more deeply about teaching and learning in the classroom.  Surely universities and individual academic departments have curricula that structures student learning outcomes, I thought.  But to what extent does this govern the content of specific courses and class pedagogies?  And in what ways do we measure what students learn from university programs as a whole?

Whether we have an informed view of the past or not, an understanding of history is an important part of how we situate and re-evaluate our position in local, regional, national and international contexts.  Because the past is so important to connecting and situating ourselves to others and the places where we live, it cannot be taught entirely from the classroom.  History, I believe, is best taught collectively and collaboratively, with lessons that anchor into a student’s everyday experience and understanding of the past.

Did you miss Imagaining Gateways? Here are our live tweets!

Thursday Night:

I grew up in a household where pop quizzes about Sir John A Macdonald were not uncommon, and my Grandma wore a t-shirt that said "Give Us Back Our Dominion Day." In my family it was never ever too early to be learning about History.

In surveying the research about teaching historical literacy, it becomes evident that an educator’s own epistemological stance (their philosophical worldview) about history will have a direct impact on how and what students learn about the past. It seems inevitable that our own biases will be present – no matter how objective we may try to be - in the choices we make about what constitutes an appropriate source, good question, or valid response about the past. Of course, curriculum documents guide us in making many of our choices… but in between the lines of outcomes and assessments, lays the fuzzy area of interpretation; and interpretation is always open to individualised meaning.

Recently I have begun working on a research study with my PhD supervisor Dr. Peter Seixas, and Dr. Kadriye Ercikan that focuses on developing and validating a tool for assessing historical thinking of students in Grade 11. The data collection involves a large-scale administration of the assessment tool to approximately 500 grade 11 students in British Columbia and will be used to investigate the relationship among the tasks, and the three concepts of historical thinking (historical evidence, historical perspective taking and the ethical dimension) that are assessed by the tasks. (For more information on Dr. Seixas’ conception of historical thinking see the Historical Thinking Project).

There are more histories and more stories of our collective past than the ones most often told in schools. Many of these are fascinating, insightful, and very interesting, revealing aspects of Canada and what it is to be Canadian that are not in textbooks.  How might teachers and students go about finding these stories? Built into the title of my blog entry is the double-entendre 'taking on', which plays on how we assume the role of another-in-the-past-that-is-not-me when we, as teachers and students, try to see through another’s eyes and speak with another’s voice to tell stories of our nation-state’s past we may have never heard, read, or imagined before.

How many times have you come across a book that really inspires you and you automatically think, "I NEED to share this with my students, it ties in with everything we're learning right now!"?  I know this has happened to me several times and it's a great way to encourage cross-curricular projects or novel studies in your school.  I have come across many teachers in both the Social Studies and English departments of various schools that work in sync with one another to create excellent cross-curricular units for their students.  I hope to be able to incorporate some of the novels I have read into my future classrooms and find myself constantly searching for new books to read that relate to different grade levels, curriculum outcomes and that are relevant to the students.  Social studies does not have to come straight from textbooks.

From talk of wounded soldiers at Spadina House to pictures of the No. 2 Construction Battalion at the City of Toronto Archives, the first Approaching the Past workshop in Toronto on October 5 engaged over fifty-five teacher candidates, teachers, and educators with the history of Toronto and the First World War. By focusing on the importance of primary sources, both parts of the workshop illustrated the ways in which the study of history can be contextualized and nuanced to expose the intricacies of the past outside the often static print of textbooks. The workshop also focused on how stories about the past can be localized for students.

These days, everything is going digital – even the archive.

National, provincial and municipal archives and libraries present wonderfully digitized sources, and many of the most interesting sites are community based. Building on Cynthia’s post about the “nationality” of formal archival collection,community driven projects can provide glimpses into how historical events are being remembered, interpreted and “archived” outside of institutions. Forgive me if I indulge my own interest (research and otherwise) in the Great War; these are a sampling of the sites I find myself getting lost in and distracted by.

This fall, more than half of Canada’s provinces and territories will have a provincial election. Ontario, PEI, Manitoba, and the Northwest Territories had their election last week; Newfoundland and Labrador and Yukon Territory will have their election this week; and Saskatchewan will have its in November.  Elections are ostensibly about the future, but the campaigns and the results can tell us a great deal about the tenor of the times.

You'll think twice about complaining about having to teach 100 years of History in only a semester. David Christian uses 18 minutes to explore 13.7 Billion years of History and the lessons associated with it. Most importantly, that human survival and progress is dependent on the crucial element of collective learning.

“What big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning.”

Let's face it, we all have those students who are not interested in what we have to say about history.  Many of us with a great passion for history may have our feelings hurt when our students don't appreciate the finer things that the social studies have to offer, especially if you've spent several years studying the specifics so that you're overly qualified and overly eager to share these details of history with your students.  So the real question is: how do we get our students interested in history?  Two words: primary sources.  

Here is a great example of how to easily integrate primary sources such as posters into your social studies classrooms.

It is September once again and teachers and students are back together once again, sharing common spaces and sharing opportunities to talk about the recent and distant past.   What kids might have done last summer is still fresh in their minds, but, perhaps, what they did in school last year is a bit less fresh and bit less accessible.

As a teacher, how might I take advantage of this to help kids to develop and enhance understandings and appreciation of how the many ways history and the past inhabit us and play a key role in shaping our conceptions and perceptions of the present? There are a multitude of opportunities to explore this with students, and here are some suggestions built around some throughline and essential questions...

Ian McKay asks teachers: “Do you really want to be answerable to the interests that… will be teaching your students how great, romantic and exciting war can be?”

As featured in THEN/HiER’s podcast series, I recently spoke with Professor Ian McKay, Queen’s University, about understandings of history in Canada.

Understandings of Canadian history, McKay argues, are focused around a new set of Canadian heroes that reinforce understandings of Canada as a warrior nation at the expense of understandings of Canada as a peaceable kingdom and welfare state. This new focus corresponds to what McKay calls a “durastic dumbing down of Canadian public discourse at the hands of a very consistent, coherent elite that wants to push us into an ever more militarized posture, and that’s what we’re trying to warn Canadians against.”

For the past several years, I’ve been interested in outdoor education, and about the possibilities for teaching history in the outdoors. This year I’ve discovered more and more people who share this interest, and I have been lucky enough to attend two workshops focused on teaching history outside.

The first was a joint workshop of THEN/HiER and ActiveHistory.ca called Teaching History in Diverse Venues. Jennifer Bonnell summed up the workshop here. Highlights included visiting the Etobicoke Field Studies Centre, one of the Toronto District School Board’s outdoor education centres, where the staff took us through several history-focused outdoor activities. My favourite involved dividing the group into ‘families’ and having each family choose a site to build a first home, and then building a temporary shelter. It allowed the settler experience to come alive.

Welcome to our new blogging space!  With the fantastic new user-friendly THEN/HiER site we have been  able to design a blogging space right in our site! Last year's Teaching the Past site was a great trial run for exploring blogging but all our bloggers felt disconnected from our THEN/HiER 'home' and are happy to settle within this site  to build our community and readership right here on the site.

Like history? There’s an app for that | ActiveHistory.ca.

… there are greater prospects for historical apps, since they have the ability to integrate texts, images, and other data from (and about) the past with the mobility of smartphone technology….

A Canada Day editorial from the Michael Levine, the executive vice chair of The Historica-Dominion Institute

“Canada, like any good narrative, is made up of a collection of stories. And it’s those stories, and their storytellers, that form the core of our collective memory, and that intangible sense of Canadianness.”

Tell — and teach — Canada’s stories – thestar.com.

June 21st was National Aboriginal Day in Canada and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how Aboriginal stories can be better integrated with our teaching of History.

As the Program Coordinator for The Historica-Dominion Institute’s Canadian Aboriginal Writing & Arts Challenge, I spend a lot of my time working alongside Aboriginal communities to share the collective and personal stories of their youth. Not only has the experience been incredibly moving for me personally, but as a teacher, I’ve found incredible value in their storytelling.

In many (though not all) classrooms, Aboriginal experiences are told in isolation, or in a piecemeal way. Students learn about Aboriginal peoples when studying the arrival of Europeans, and often not beyond that. However Aboriginal experiences did not end there. Take this example:

Who speaks for the forgotten?  This was the topic of discussion for Antonine Maillet’s Big Ideas lecture held during the recent Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Fredericton, New Brunswick (Canada).  The Hon. Antonine Maillet is a well known Acadian author and linguist, whose fictional heroine La Sagouine (The Washerwoman) has come to epitomise the resilience and strength of Acadian heritage in North America.

La Sagouine dominates Acadian popular culture as a stalwart figure. Existing in somewhat contrast to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s romantic Evangeline (made popular by the 19^th century epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie), La Sagouine does not pine for what has been lost. La Sagouine is strong. She is confident. Pragmatic.  Optimistic. These are the descriptors that have transformed Maillet’s character into a symbolic figure for the 20^th century Acadian Renaissance. In many ways she also represents the lifeways of many rural New Brunswickers before the introduction of Equal Opportunity social reforms in the 1960’s.

“This is a true story” – states Maillet in the opening line of her introduction to the published monologue entitled La Sagouine (1979). True – in that her character springs from a historical tradition. False, however – in that La Sagouine never really existed as a living person. She is fictional, yet also represents the nameless who will never be found in any archival record. She encapsulates a generation of Acadians who have long-since been forgotten. Who speaks for these people? How are they remembered? This was the topic of Maillet’s “Big Ideas” lecture.

Interestingly, Maillet’s discussion draws attention to the importance of not limiting historical inquiry to the written word; for just as the vast majority of us will never warrant inclusion in the school textbooks of 3011 and our names may never be found in archival collections (except perhaps by a great-great-grandchild tracing her past), so too are the voices of the forgotten lost to us except within the vernacular history of alternative sources for historical inquiry.  How can we hear them calling to us?  Antonine Maillet has sought their voices in the oral traditions of Acadia, that span from 16^th century France to 21^st century Louisiana, Nova Scotia, Québec, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick.

“The Greenwich Mohawk site represents this history, from booming industrial hub to abandoned contaminated factory site. At 52 acres it is the largest of Brantford’s brownfields. For twenty-five years the Greenwich-Mohawk brownfield has loomed large in the community’s conscience as a horrible memory of Brantford’s industrial decay, and as a symbol of Brantford’s current problems and difficulties in moving forward.”

Active History on the Grand: Greenwich Mohawk Site and Community History | ActiveHistory.ca.

Nationalism is modern but it invents for itself history and traditions. (Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, 1983) Public institutions in Canada, particularly those with a national focus, are mandated to present a national perspective on the past. Such a mandate raises the essential questions of “Who defines nation-ness” and “What represents a nation’s true identity”.

 It is likely that most of us writing here are history junkies of various sorts; consumers of the past with a desire to better understand the present, and, perhaps, imagine something of the future. I suspect that many people involved in the business of teaching history to kids are history junkies of sorts, too. As such, we have a responsibility to reevaluate how we share history with the young so that we all become better and more critical consumers of history. In “What kind of citizen,” Joel Westheimer asks “If students from a totalitarian nation were secretly transported to a Canadian classroom to continue their lessons with new teachers and a new curriculum, would they be able to tell the difference?” It begs a few questions for Canadian teachers of history to consider: Is the purpose of teaching history to the young different in a totalitarian nation state than it is in a democratic nation state like Canada? How might our own critical engagement with history help us to better imagine our history teaching as a site of democratic nation building?

In this blog post I continue my series of posts that discusses the use of primary sources for teaching history. My purpose in this particular post is to provide a rationale for using sets of sources to teach history. I describe a project that I assigned to a cohort of pre-service teachers in a social studies methods class in the fall semester of 2010 that asked students to identify and select “sets” of primary and secondary sources focused on a particular historical topic in the curriculum.[1]

Over the past week, I’ve found myself immersed in a pile of undergraduate essay marking. The comment I find myself writing constantly into paper margins and scribbling at the end of essays is one urging students to think critically about not only the content they included within their essays, but also about the overarching narrative of national history itself. From the Conquest, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812 to the post 9/11 world, many Canadian history courses at the undergraduate level attempt to present students with a narrative that makes sense of the past through the lens of the Canadian nation-state. In a retelling of Canada that moves through the past as a series of events and developments culminating in the birth and maturation of a “nation,” how can we encourage students to think about the construction not only of nations but also of their histories?

“In the history courses I took in school in the 1960’s, we read about history, talked about history, and wrote about history; we never actually did history.” (Chad Gaffield, 2001)

Among historians, there really is no doubt that history matters. We are engrained with the essential belief that without knowledge of the past, we are unable to contextualize the present – and it is only through history that we are able to gain insight, and learn from those who lived before us. Most historians agree that history must be evidence-based and that the practitioners must respect established methods of analytical inquiry that are as objective as possible. The controversy arises when one begins to interpret the evidence, and this becomes even more complicated when we consider the how and what of presenting history to students.

I was a history major when I worked on my first undergraduate degree. And, while I developed competencies in a handful of interconnected European historical narratives, I did not learn very much about how narratives come to be. I do recall working with primary sources, but these supplemented my textual encounters with established discourses in modern European history where the questions we took up as students, while not necessarily resolved by scholars, seemed, nonetheless, resolved in the eyes and minds of my professors.

Now, as a doctoral candidate in social studies curriculum, I look back at that undergraduate history experience to try to figure out some of the overt and covert curricular outcomes of those history courses I took two decades ago.

We all go into our research with key ideas. For me, some of those ideas are: students are smart and have an instinctual interest in histories that will help shape their futures; history is emotional and that it is important that the emotive aspects of history are not stripped out of learning for the stake of standards; history is a language of the nation and like all languages, power and privileges are written into the words we say and the narratives we craft; and finally, we all have prior knowledges and preconceived beliefs that are important to articulate before, during, and after learning.

My ideas have been shaped and crafted by an innumerable amount of experiences, learnings, and observations, but when I think of some key articles that shaped the work I am doing right now, these five (plus two bonus) articles come to mind. I thought I’d share them as well as the key ideas that I have gleaned from them.

In my last blog entry I discussed a few of the obstacles that educators face when using primary sources in their history teaching, and promised that my subsequent blogs would provide tips and suggestions for using primary sources for teaching history. Before doing so I thought that for this blog it would be helpful to backtrack and discuss some of the reasons history educators have suggested for using primary sources in the class. It is important to remember that the commonly discussed reasons for using primary sources presuppose that primary sources are being used purposefully and effectively.

When I first moved to Toronto from British Columbia ten years ago, I took up a job with the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, coordinating an oral history project on the Scarborough community of Agincourt. Conducted in partnership with the Scarborough Historical Museum, the project took on a life of its own, interviews yielding more interviews as our network in the community expanded. In the end we conducted over 50 interviews with long-established residents and newer arrivals to the community from places as far flung as Sri Lanka, Egypt, Estonia, and Hong Kong.

What is interesting and worthwhile about the study of past? Engaging with the past is often full of complications for students and instructors alike. For students, especially students at post-secondary levels, engaging with the process of doing history can be somewhat of a pragmatic minefield. As my fellow bloggers have noted here, there are practical complications surrounding the use of primary sources in the classroom, and as I discussed last time, there is a tension surrounding the not-so-apparent construction of lectures and lecture material.

With the upcoming Approaching the Past session in mind, I thought it an appropriate time to blog about the transition from student of history to teacher of history. History has been my favourite subject from Grade 8 onwards. Admittedly, I was first seduced by the antics of William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellions of 1837-38. From this first seduction, I devoured most everything history, and perhaps was even a little Hermione Granger in my classes. When the transition came to teach history (or, as I do in my current job, develop tools for teachers to use), I found the creation more difficult than the consumption, and came to the following conclusions:

“What might it mean to live our lives as if the lives of others truly mattered”? This is the question that Roger Simon poses in his discourse on the pedagogical significance of remembrance-learning. His response: if the lives of others truly matter, then we should accept the memories of others as counsel and learn from them. Memory and remembrance provide the framework by which individuals have the ability to re-experience the past through the lives of others. Although highly transient in nature, memory and remembrance are the triggers that allow us to make connections between the past, present and future.

Engaging with the past is a profoundly personal experience that is driven by memory. Be it personal, collective or historical, each of us finds our sense of identity by (to borrow the words of Robert R. Archibald) “connecting the dots” between ourselves and others across time. In this way, we are able to make sense of the events that happen in our lives or in the lives of others.

Among the many aspects of my doctoral work that I enjoy is teaching social studies curriculum and pedagogy courses to undergraduates, especially the opportunities to engage students in dialogue and exploration of the role and place of history and historical thinking in social studies. There is a curious quid pro quo in this relationship – while I have the opportunity to share and contextualize insights from scholarly research on history and historical thinking in relation to teaching practice, students share with their peers and me diverse, complex and highly varied understandings of history and its relationship to schools, curriculum, and their future students. For many undergraduate students majoring in social studies, history is a discrete disciplinary domain filled with concrete things, and, while appreciating the work of historians is complex and intellectual, these soon-to-be social studies teachers too often assume that the product of historians’ work are objective accounts of the past.

The digitization of information, and the growing technologies used to manipulate and analyze it, is rapidly changing the context of the classroom. A couple of weeks ago Ian Milligan, one of my fellow editors at ActiveHistory.ca, reported on the growing debate over the use of laptops and other technology (like cell phones) during class time.  Milligan makes a compelling argument for the importance of allowing students the use of their computers in the lecture hall.

Two questions that THEN/HiER members often ask are: ‘Do historians and history educators work together? Should they?’ From the general vibe of THEN/HiER, the answers usually come out the same: “No. Yes.”

These questions point to the valuable knowledge that historians can share to augment history teaching practice and that valuable practice that can influence a historian’s craft. While this collaboration hasn’t been as fruitful as many want, the question is still out there, flagging to some that there is a missing opportunity.

The importance of using primary sources for teaching history is almost universally accepted by history teachers, history educators and historians and other members of the history education community. However, in my experience as a high school history teacher, university social studies methods instructor and PhD student in history education throughout the past decade I would argue that primary sources are not used very often, and not very effectively in high school history classrooms. I am not blaming teachers for this state of affairs, instead I am going to discuss several obstacles that prevent teachers from using primary sources effectively in their history classrooms.

Constructing an eighty-minute lecture about Canada and the First World War to present in a university lecture hall is a somewhat daunting task. How much importance do I place on the diplomatic alliance structure that raised arms in Europe and beyond after the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on 28 June 1914? Do I reference the contemporary band of the same name? How much time do I spend talking about the military battles of the Canadian Corps – Passchendale, Ypres, the Somme, and Vimy Ridge, to name a few? Or the many domestic and social developments that occurred, including technological developments, economic restructuring, conscription, internment, and the extension of the vote to women? As I sit down to write this history lecture, I find myself grappling with a seemingly simple question: What do I include?

Part of the purpose of this blog is to discuss experiences and strategies related to teaching history in diverse venues. In the fall of 2010, I was invited to teach a course on the History of the Great Lakes to a group of 88 retirees as part of Glendon College’s Living and Learning in Retirement program. The course ran for 12 weeks from September-November 2010, with 50-minute lectures held every Friday morning, followed by a 40-minute question and answer session.