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 19th 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 20th 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 16th century France to 21st century Louisiana, Nova Scotia, Québec, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick.
It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and both my students and I know what is coming! Having explained today’s activity in yesterday’s class, the students prepare for the ‘worst experience’ one must endure. As I prepped my rambunctious class for ‘Life in the Trenches’ I hoped this activity would be everything I wished it to be!
As I am sure many readers of this blog are aware THEN/HiER’s funding and mandate are coming to an end. The final THEN/HiER board meeting was held last week (March 11th) and as the many tweets from the meeting show, it was an impressive gathering. While I am very hopefully that the initiatives begun by THEN/HiER will continue, I do think that this is an appropriate moment to reflect upon the many achievements of this community.
There’s something about the experience of a Victorian Christmas that makes many of us feel warm and fuzzy inside. Our sense of nostalgia seems heightened by the festive season. Because of this, perhaps we’re more prone to let down our critical lens on the past, and simply enjoy the visual candy. Surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of the season, we encounter compelling evidence to suggest that we can truly experience the past for real… as it once was.
In an interview with Shusha Guppy (2000) (writing for the Paris Review
Seven years in, it’s time to take stock of the Active History project. Since our 
Do you ever wonder: Why do we teach and learn about the past? How is history taught in the classroom? How can teachers influence the way in which students learn about the past? These are just some questions that I feel Understanding History Teaching: Teaching and Learning about the Past in Secondary Schools by Chris Husbands, Alison Kitson and Anna Pendry successfully answer in regards to British History.
Chatting with colleagues over the recent holidays (which already feel like they were long ago) I was often asked what I have been reading. While this often led to a discussion of an eclectic range of books, one which seemed to attract the attention of many educators was Joel Westheimer’s (2015) What Kind of Citizen? Educating Our Children for the Common Good.
In June 2014 I completed my PhD at the University of British Columbia thanks to the exemplary support and mentorship provided by the members of my supervisory committee, Peter Seixas, Penney Clark and Kadriye Ercikan. My dissertation entitled “Understanding Ethical Judgments in Secondary School History Classes”
My study of history and education has taken me from coast to coast to coast across this country, and a few places in between. With the immense support of my supervisory committee, Penney Clark, Peter Seixas and Michael Marker, I completed my PhD entitled 
Did you know that there are more than 1,500 museums in Canada? Museums encompass many disciplines of study, including history, science, nature, and the arts. Their collections range from tangible objects to intangible ideas, and their methods of presentation range from static displays to participatory environments._0.jpg)
Can you get enough of that Sugar Crisp? Does the crunch always give you away? And are Trix just for kids? Cereal slogans have become embedded in popular culture, and even satirized in television shows, most notably The Simpsons. Such slogans were made memorable at the time by the cereal mascots which voiced them in animated television commercials. However, these slogans were also often splashed across cereal boxes. Lucky the Leprechaun has been promising that his cereal is magically delicious since 1964 (except for a brief period in the 1970s when Lucky was replaced by Marvin the Wizard), and this slogan can still be found emblazoned somewhere on the packaging. Some of these slogans, however, have changed over time. Toucan Sam originally spoke the name of his cereal in “code” using Pig Latin.
What is the purpose of history education? I concede there are many. However, I want to explicate a single, necessary line of thought in reference to student and teacher experiences in the history classroom. History education requires a parallel to modernist thinking on education as a reduction of épistème (theoretical knowledge) and phronesis (moral knowledge) to techne (skills/knowledge for production). Rather than the exertion of autocratic rule over education; people should embrace education as a process that happens to the human enterprise; not as a process that is consciously achieved within human culture, but as a process that achieves culture.
Teaching about the Holocaust is, in my opinion, one of the most challenging, and important, tasks facing a World History teacher. Every year as I approach the teaching of the Holocaust I must consider how to convey to my students the horrors that occurred, how to explain the long-term and short-term causes of the Holocaust, and how to discuss the consequences and continued significance of this horrific episode in world history.
To understand the history teacher, it is important to account for the dynamic, inheritable, tradition upon which the educative role of the teacher is predicated. My aim is not an explication of the teacher’s traditionary role in education; nor will I critique this tradition. Rather, I will destroy these traditions in a positive manner. Heidegger states that destruction "is not a break with history, no repudiation of history, but is an appropriation [Aneignung] and transformation [Verwandlung] of what has been handed down to us…Destruction means—to open our ears, to make ourselves free for what speaks to us in tradition.” (Heidegger, p. 71–73 in Gallagher, p. 86). How can we appropriate and transform the traditional role of the history teacher?
This summer I had time to think about something new that I plan to do with my students this year. I am dedicated to engage students to discover the nation’s past by fusing the concepts of historical consciousness and citizenship education. While searching for resources to assist in this task I discovered a variety of interactive lesson plans published by “Canada’s History.” This website provides many useful lessons and brings together the experiences of teachers and students in history classrooms. 
When Scott Pollock of the THEN/HiER graduate student committee wrote to me this spring asking me to write on “what I’ve been up to since completing my dissertation,” my response was, “um, can I get back to you on that?” I was in the final months of a two-year appointment in Canadian History at McMaster, and “what next” questions were foremost in my mind. It wasn’t the right moment, suffice it to say, to write a reflective post on my years post-dissertation and where they had led me.
Last fall I successfully defended by doctoral thesis, got married and moved across the continent—all within a matter of weeks. I’m happy to report that America has been quite kind to me: I now have an intimate knowledge of the vagaries of the Los Angeles Metro system, call myself a permanent resident and can differentiate a coyote from a lost dog at 50 paces. Because there was a considerable lag between my arrival and my residency card, I took the opportunity to speak at a few conferences this year: one on inclusive museums (
Finding Franklin: New Approaches to Teaching Canadian History Symposium Ottawa, Ontario: Thursday June 4 and Friday 5, 2015
While teaching a Grade 9 Geography class last month, I had a student ask me why we were learning about history. We were exploring the question of why First Nations reserves are located where they are, and so I was giving the students some background information about First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples in Canada. Her question surprised me - I always look to the past to try to better understand contemporary situations. I believe that we cannot understand the present without understanding the past. I told this to her and we moved on, but I have kept thinking and reading about the purpose of history across the curriculum since then.
There is something good to be said about a University History Department’s efforts to maintain personal links with former graduates. Usually University links are purely financial; chasing after graduates with mailings and phone calls. History Departments, however, could provide an opportunity for graduates to stay connected to current scholarship in the field. Such is the situation at Laurier University where the History Department holds an annual gathering for history teachers in the Kitchener/Waterloo area, to attend the “Laurier History Teachers Colloquium.” Many are former graduates. For a number of years, the History Department has hosted an annual conference for teachers that feature lectures by Laurier faculty. Faculty share their research and teachers have a lovely lunch: tables set with white tablecloths, flowers and gift bags.
Peck’s (2011) chapter entitled “Ethnicity and Students’ Historical Understanding,” in Clark, ed., New Possibilities for the Past, raises many questions about the intersection between ethinicty and historical understanding. Peck’s main research question is: “What is the relationship between a student’s ethnic identity and his/her ascription of significance to phenomena in Canada’s past?” She conducted her research in Lower Mainland, British Colombia and included Aboriginal, immigrant, and Canadian-born grade twelve students (p. 312). To avoid any assumptions of student’s ethnic identities, “she asked students to complete a questionnaire eliciting demographic information and also asked them to write a paragraph describing their ethnic identity” (p. 312).
Teachers have been making use of historically themed computer games in their classrooms for decades, however there continues to be debate over this. 
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Expanding on my previous blog contributions, I’d like to introduce a project I’m currently working on, which involves object-based learning. Collaborating with a provincial history museum 
Historical distance is a complex problem for historians. Therefore, in a curriculum predicated on historical thinking, distance — the time between the events of the past and the present (Bevir, 2011; Phillips, 2013) — is an interesting area of inquiry for history educators and students. In order to treat this topic with integrity, this will be the first of three blog posts on historical distance. First, I will review how different schools of historical thought conceptualized the problem of historical distance; second, I will look at how temporal distance is being defamiliarized; and third, I will discuss historical distance in relation to history education.
The advancement of technology has contributed to a different way of teaching and learning. How can historians and history teachers best use virtual environments (VE) to teach historical thinking in the classroom? 
As many countries around the world mark the centenary of the First World War, we (especially history teachers teaching the 20th century) might see the topic as all too familiar. However, reading Margaret MacMillan’s (2013) The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 might change that. Through her book, what we may have known about this global conflict becomes defamiliarized. It is also a great, and timely, read.
I have a real interest in using visual sources to teach history. In December, I 
As an instructor of history methods in a B.Ed. program in Ontario, my current students and I have discussed a series of topics and issues regarding the .jpg)
The use of historical feature films in history classrooms emerged as a topic of debate in the 1980s, as technological advances, such as the VCR, made these films increasingly accessible. Those in favor of using historical films have pointed to the ability of movies to immerse us in the past, and have argued that historical films provide students an opportunity to develop their historical understanding, to gain increased historical empathy, and to connect the present to the past (Marcus & Stoddard, 2007; Marcus, 2005; Rosenstone, 1988).
I was fortunate this year to be given an opportunity by the 
I enjoyed a number of history related books this year, but one of my favorites was one that did not explore history as it happened in previous decades and centuries. It focused instead on how we experience history today through re-enactments, festivals, and living history events. Approaching the topic with humor, enthusiasm and thoughtfulness, Charlie Schroeder’s 2012 book
I have just finished up my first practicum as part of my teacher education program. One of the courses I had the opportunity to teach was Ontario’s Grade 11 "Open World History Since 1900: Global and Regional Perspectives." The teacher with whom I was working asked me to teach a unit on the Spanish Civil War. And so I began to think about how on earth I would be able to create meaningful connections between this conflict and the students in the class.
Searching for archival material/primary sources can be a daunting task if you’re not familiar with archival terms, resources and systems of organization.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a remarkable woman. She used words, characters, and powerful storytelling to bring the horrors of slavery into the homes of many Americans in the years preceding the American Civil War. Her most famous work, 
I recently had the privilege of attending the 
At this time of year many of us are thinking about the contributions and sacrifices of the Canadian forces over the last 100 years around the world. With recent attacks on military and political personnel at home, 
This semester at University of Ottawa, I am taking Dr. Lorna McLean’s graduate course on public memory. 
For educators interested in human rights, consider the recently opened Canadian Museum of Human Rights as your go-to source for lesson plans and teaching ideas. As someone who has been watching the museum develop from afar, I look forward to the day when I can visit in person. Yet, for those of us restricted by distance, the museum’s web site provides an effective outreach service that is equally beneficial.
As I have mentioned in previous blog postings I have been teaching Canadian history for well over a decade now. During that time I have found resources for, and interesting ways to teach, a wide range of topics. One area that I continue to find challenging, however, is teaching about the development of our human rights in Canada.
Similar to bringing students to an actual museum or historic site, bringing records of events and history to students enables them to get a better understanding of historical content, enables them to critically think about the implications of these records, and asks them to analyze components of records otherwise left alone in a textbook or worksheet.
Through this blog I hope to spark discussions around the ways in which we teach about military regimes, violations of human rights, and the transition to democracy in the recent past - using the history of Chile as an example.
As a new sessional instructor teaching B.Ed students, I am observing the challenges and opportunities that pre-service teachers face when they are exposed to the 
I have recently gone back to school to become a high school history teacher. As a teacher candidate, I see the theories that I studied about history education as a grad student in a more practical light. So, I have decided to focus this post on an amazing resource collection that we as teachers can use to teach the history of human rights in our classrooms.
Setting the stage
This past summer I attended the ISCHE conference at the University of London, England with a focus on education and war. My paper "
If history illiteracy is on the rise
It isn’t a new experience, but it still feels disappointing when I come across a ‘national’ study that neglects the territorial North. I have written about this with regard to history education 
Every week at some point during the school year there are opportunities when the class is ahead of schedule, no assemblies are taking place in the gymnasium, and furiously marking assignments in order to submit them for report cards is not required. On these days teachers have the options to move on with the curriculum, play a movie, assign silent reading and so on. Or, perhaps the teacher suggests to the class playing an educational game that not only involves all students participating in their learning, but also reinforces what students have learned throughout the year. I would like to suggest a game that not only works in the history or social studies classroom, but in a wide range of environments that engages students to collaborate with each other, critically analyze historical evidence, compare and contrast information, authenticate records and have fun.
The theme for Congress 2014 held last week at Brock University was "Borders without Boundaries", appropriate for a university bordering the United States. I had the opportunity to present as part of a roundtable at the Canadian Historical Association (CHA)--their sub-theme: Boundaries of Historical Inquiry of course.
It is widely recognized that until the 1960s and 1970s the teaching of Canadian history in secondary schools focused upon the lives of “significant” individuals (mostly white men) and the development of the nation-state. As the study of Canadian history at the post-secondary level broadened to include the lives of women, working people, and others neglected by the traditional grand-narrative, K-12 education began to slowly change as well. In terms of gender history we can see evidence of this in curriculum documents and textbooks, which began to make references to significant women, such as Laura Secord or Nellie McClung in the 1970s and 1980s. While these changes were positive the addition of a few women, all of whom conformed to traditional criteria for significance (i.e., they had an impact on the development of the nation-state), it did little to change the historical narrative being taught in schools.
The 
Professional Chess, as I know it, is as much a game of memory, as it is strategy.
This month’s theme on “Teaching the Past” - labour history - challenged me to look for how one might go about inquiring into this topic, and what one would find, in Arctic Canada. One of the most intriguing teaching resources from the past I have come across is a book called Then and Now in Frobisher Bay by Thomas H.W. Martin, edited by Neil Sutherland for the Gage World Community Study series, published in 1969.
The mention of working class history stirs up images of factory workers, construction labourers, and other physically demanding and low-income types of work. Working class history is typically misinterpreted as a male domain of history, with major history textbooks often ignoring the work of working class women inside and outside of the home. Last year, as part of my Master’s program, my colleagues and I curated an exhibition for Museum London dedicated to the history of labour in London, Ontario. In particular, my group focused on the many contributions that women made to the city's history of labour.
“It all started with a defeat…” is but one of the numerous catchphrases used by Québec students to describe the narrative experience of their province according to Jocelyn Létourneau’s most recent book, Je me Souviens? Le passé du Québec dans la conscience de sa jeunesse (Fides, 2014), published last week.
The sell is small, and big. It is the small touches that may just pull in a reluctant student for just long enough to embed the hook and let the inherently engaging task of a historian (truth, no?) take us home.
With new history curriculum across the country focusing on historical thinking and disciplinary concepts, history teachers are looking more and more for good primary documents that will be engaging and meaningful to their students, and provide opportunities for critical thinking. This means providing more than political speeches and military accounts. 
We are reminded that history is alive constantly: by governments, the news, on the web, on television, in school—the list goes on. And yet, to fully appreciate the role that history plays in our contemporary lives, sometimes a powerful reminder comes our way. For me, it was the opportunity to participate in Mount Royal University’s “Understanding Atrocities” conference that took place in February 2014. 
David Harms has designed an interactive history simulation website for teachers that encourages problem solving, collaboration, higher order thinking and decision-making. According to Harms, 
I could tell you the name of the student that led me to buy a big, red,paper mache apple for class, but I won’t. There was one, in a different class, that made it clear that participation marks – those most wretched of all forms of evaluation – need to be clearly explained to students.I remember their names too. I could even name the student that led me to buy a notebook in which I document all the conversations I have in my office hours, but I won’t. I don’t believe in smearing people.However, I will tell you that these students were damned smart.I will also say that they caught me completely off guard, making them important students in my work as a Teaching Assistant.
Recent THEN/HiER Blog posts have tackled how to include family histories in the classroom and have offered a myriad of online resources that allow students and teachers alike to perform research from the comfort of their own homes. These tools are great for developing core research skills that every student needs – but let’s not forget the basic library research experience that every young researcher needs! With the surge in popularity of genealogy research, local libraries across Canada have cultivated extensive local history collections that can rival large institutions. These special collection areas require the researcher to venture past the stacks and into ominous reading rooms that include a mixture of archival holdings, books, microfiche, and more.
Last week's 
One project drawing out the incredible diversity of local history here in New Brunswick focuses on artillery units raised in the province over the past century. L
In thinking about teaching ‘the past’ something that I find interesting is the issue of who is doing the teaching. How well are they prepared and supported to teach histories (perhaps) they themselves didn’t learn? This is an important question in parts of Canada where teachers are frequently itinerant – living in a community specifically to take up the job of teaching, often temporarily (2 years or less). These folks are usually not teaching in their home region or even a place they intend to make their home, they did not grow up learning the history of that place, and may not identify with the people of that place. While schools of education advertise a teaching degree as a ‘ticket to travel’ in the globalized marketplace, in practice teachers often need substantial supports to meet expectations of programs that value cultural- and local-responsiveness. This is certainly true in many schools north of 60°.
Last December, the THEN/HiER blog was abuzz with interesting discussions about family history in the classroom. As my colleagues have pointed out, family history can “maximize student engagement and learning” (
In Heather McGregor’s post, 
Environmental history is a topic of undeniable importance, and one that I must confess I know far too little about. As a result of this I was quite excited to learn that this would be topic for this month’s THEN/HiER blog! Having closely read all of this month’s entries I feel that I have been given a great deal to think about!
When it comes to creating historical narratives, it’s important to go right to the source(s).
There can be no argument against the fact that today’s graduates are expected to be well rounded, inquisitive, and analytical – but more importantly, they are expected to be tech-savvy. As a recent graduate of a Master’s program myself, I find that today’s entry-level job positions go far beyond asking for the traditional skills that used to be acceptable resume features; no longer is it acceptable to write that you can competently use Microsoft Office and move on. Instead, today’s arts and culture field is searching for new graduates that are fully immersed in new and emerging technologies and completely confident in their abilities to use programs such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Google Apps, and more. Many students of history expect their work to be done mostly from textbooks and other forms of documents. This is an expectation that can and should be broken down in the classroom.
The rewards for being a Teaching Assistant are few and far between. I knew this to be true before I came to graduate school and signed up for this meagre means of sustaining my studies - made possible only with the additional support of scholarships and bursaries and research assistant positions - because I had experienced it when I was teaching high school social studies in a small city in the prairies. I also suspect that this is true of all jobs. Our warm fuzzies come in the form of employment, of money, of the things that money can buy (or the things we often wish we could buy if we were getting more money for our time). Funny how these warm fuzzies are not warm for long.
I am mostly an educational historian, and I came to educational history by way of environmental history. After all, as an historian of the Arctic and Arctic peoples how could one not begin with the environment? Preparing this blog and thinking about environmental history in terms of teaching (only too briefly), is, in a way, a ‘returning’ for me.
This monthTHEN/HIER has seen a number of thought-provoking blog posts about the role that family history plays in the life of both the student and the teacher. Heather McGregor wrote an excellent 
I found Heather McGregor’s post for this topic insightful, and this statement in particular at the end of her piece stood out to me: “engaging with family history shows students that their own questions about the past are important.” Elementary school is the place where students’ horizons can be narrowed just as easily as broadened, as we begin to teach them which histories are more valued than others. Barton (1997; 1996) notes that students are most likely to progress when they can ask questions and have access to sources that are significant to them; he, like Lévesque (2008), suggests family or community links are an important factor here.
History educators often encounter learners who are not as passionate about the past as they are. In mandatory history courses this is a perpetual challenge.
Education about colonialism, especially in a settler society, often becomes quite personal. Not only am I, as an instructor, more aware of how I position and identify myself, but my students are also more vocal about their own subjectivities and backgrounds. This is not unique to my teaching methods; I’ve heard the same from other colleagues who teach pre- and post-confederation Canadian history. An activity that might be helpful, then, is to harness these feelings of personal interest and ask students to examine colonialism, and resistance to it, through analysis of their own family history.
This month’s Teaching the Past blog theme dealt with using imagination to teach history, and we heard from a range of perspectives, which I hope you have enjoyed. As a museum educator, I’m often facilitating imaginative play in the galleries where I teach, particularly in the Discovery Gallery at the Royal Ontario Museum. The “Try It On” section is a very popular part of the gallery, where visitors can try on helmets, a sixteenth century breast plate, a tunic, a medieval dress, an imperial Chinese court robe, a kimono, reproductions of the accoutrements of a bejewelled Ancient Egyptian. While I have seen first-hand the joy and excitement that dress-up can induce, I often wonder what kind of messages we are sending about people in the past when we ask students to dress up and “become” them.
The museum has always been a place that has activated my imagination. All I needed was a text panel to provide context and I would be transported to another era. It did not matter if the object was a Victorian dining set or a piece of a fallen meteorite – I was entranced. I still believe that the museum is an exciting place to activate the imagination for experiential learning, but a large piece of this activation depends on participatory practices. As a public historian, I am a strong advocate that the more engaging an activity is, the more rewarding and memorable the experience will be for a child. This past year I was able to put this into action in the context of museum education at Museum London as part of my Public History Master’s program at Western University.
Something happened to me earlier this semester that doesn’t happen often after teaching a tutorial. I was climbing the stairs from the second floor to the sixth, and wandering around the halls covered in posters of faces of famous writers, anthropologists, and political scientists. Each poster featured quotations from some brilliant-but-now-cliche thing running across profile photos in hideous 90s fonts (thank you English Department for not changing your hallway decor), and I was smiling.
Imagination is an exercise in perspective. Stressing with students a Lowenthal-inspired view of the past as foreign country, with an understanding of the “pastness” of the past and the ways in which past environments are in fundamental ways different (albeit connected to) the world that surrounds us, complicates traditional uses of imaginative exercises in the university classroom. Historical “acting” – that is to say asking students to impersonate historical events and figures from the past – removes some of the critical thinking lenses expected from students studying the past at the post-secondary level. So, is there room for imagination in post-secondary history classrooms?
Imagination in history “requires two somewhat complementary but incongruent elements: (1) an appreciation for different perspectives on human activities and beliefs; and (2) an acknowledgment of a shared humanity that transcends time, space, and culture” (Lévesque, 2011, p. 131). The role of imagination in young children’s historical thinking is not discussed in much detail in relation to the historical thinking concepts, although several researchers suggest that it is significant, some in terms of specific concepts, others in terms of historical consciousness more generally. Wineburg (2001) suggests that a sense of wonder is what motivates learners to engage in historical inquiry. Lee (2005) calls the historical thinking concepts the tools of historical imagination (p. 71).
: Remember Your Teachings
A class of elementary school students gather around a recreated log cabin in a county history museum. A volunteer, dressed in a long calico dress and white apron reminiscent of nineteenth century homesteaders, holds up artifacts and asks the students to guess how the objects might have been used. They don't look at all familiar and some scaffolded questions about object use and material are in order. Some of the students seem impressed by the flat iron, foot warmer, or candle moulds. They begin to talk about how different their lives would be if they had to churn their own butter, wake up in time to prepare a horse carriage, or live without a refrigerator. These kind of conversations have the potential to bring history closer to students' everyday lives. Students can think about how the daily routines of their own lives might have been different in another time, even in the same country they now call home.
I recently had the opportunity to attend a public lecture sponsored by the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society, held at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, on October 15. Guest speaker was Alan Sears, PhD, Professor of Education at the University of New Brunswick, and member of the Executive Board of THEN/HiER. His presentation was entitled “Battle Lines in the Schools: Teaching the History of War and Society for the Common Good.”
On the heels of a fantastic regional conference at the Museum of Anthropology on October 7, I would like to extend conference chair Kate Zankowicz’s resource list with a few additional books that reflect two of the major themes of the conference program. Considering collaborative and participatory practices in museums was one consistent thread, as was attending to Indigenous histories, objects, and relational practices, often within a decolonizing context, as Heather McGregor addressed in her 
Last week THEN/HiER delivered a fantastic regional conference at the 
In June 2013 I had the privilege to present a paper at the Agricultural History Society conference in Banff, Alberta. The impressive breadth of subject matter and the range of papers being presented imparted to me not only how far-reaching agricultural history is, but also its utility in a number of other historical disciplines. My own studies in Canadian and military history often incorporate aspects of agricultural studies, but after this conference it is apparent to me how agriculture can be much more forcefully accentuated in the history classroom.
As I sat on the breathtaking banks of Lake Louise, I pondered over just how far the story of my hometown had come. My trip to the Agricultural Historical Society’s annual meeting began with a simple desire to know more about the place I called home. In the 1960s, my little town of Marana, Arizona (positioned on the very north end of the Tucson Valley) accomplished what few biracial towns of the era were able to do. Specifically, they overcame racial differences, socioeconomic dilemmas and prevailing prejudices and hardships of the day to become the most dominant high school athletic dynasty of their state. Sports carried them from cotton fields to colleges and from ordinary students to role models for students of their alma mater today..JPG)
Rather than fly into Banff, Alberta for this year’s annual meeting of the Agricultural History Society, my colleagues and I chose to drive. We shared a desire to fully experience the many landscapes that make up the 2400-mile stretch from Starkville, Mississippi to Canada’s first national park. As expected, the cross-country road trip was exciting, and we began to worry that the actual conference would pale in comparison to our action-packed, if at times arduous, journey.
In June of 2013, I had the opportunity to attend the Annual Meeting of the Agricultural History Society in Banff, Alberta. As a veteran of the conference (this was my fourth time presenting), I believe Banff definitely provided the most exciting venue for the meeting, and it was the first time the meeting was held outside of the United States. I was reaching the end of my graduate school career at the time of the conference and had my thoughts turned toward teaching and incorporating agricultural and rural studies into the classroom. The sheer volume of excellent panels, roundtables, and presentations made it difficult to choose which ones to attend, but the panels I went to made me think about several important themes to focus on in teaching and researching rural history.
“It’s more than just a recipe for pizza dough.”
The 2013 Agricultural History Society annual meeting highlighted a lot of firsts for the organization. This year, marked the first time the society held their meeting outside of the United States as well as hosting the most panelists and conference attendees on record. It proved to be four days of some of the most compelling and diverse scholarship produced by historians today.
In education, we are always looking for different ways to contextualize the material to keep our students engaged. Technology affords many opportunities to do so; in this blog post I will be discussing how to create an augmented reality by using digital media.
This June, I attended the Agricultural History Society’s Annual Meeting for the first time in my academic career. It was a thought-provoking conference, as I was surrounded by fellow scholars of rural and agricultural history. In preparation for my (first!) blog post, I read posts by other THEN/HiER members, and found Neil Adolph’s 28 May 2013 blog “What's the Role of Presentism in History Education?” particularly interesting. Ultimately, I agree with Adolph that using history to contextualize present events is both useful and important, and that we need to teach our students to think in these larger contexts. Bringing this together with my reflections on the AHS Conference, and on agricultural history more generally, I argue that such an approach would be particularly beneficial for the contemporary debates about food production and agricultural innovation.
Once a seemingly moribund field, agricultural history now teems with new life. Well, moribund might be a bit extreme, but around the time I started graduate school in 2007, I remember hearing members of the profession say that they had trouble generating excitement about agricultural history and had to fit their agricultural interests into other boxes. Notably, this was just as Michael Pollan’sThe Omnivore’s Dilemma began to take the country by storm, a surge that shows little sign of receding six years later. At a roundtable on agricultural history in the Age of Pollan held at this year’s meeting of the Agricultural History Society, there was general agreement that interest generated by Pollan’s work has helped turn courses on agricultural history into sought-after options in course catalogs.
After first attending the Agricultural History Society Annual Meeting in Manhattan, Kansas, in 2012, I was eager to return for the 2013 Annual Meeting in Banff, Alberta. I found this year’s conference, like the first one I had attended, to be highly engaging and incredibly inspirational and motivational. My understanding of the topics and approaches being pursued in agricultural history was broadened because of this conference, and the feedback I received in terms of my own research projects, was indispensable. There were so many panels of interest to me that I had difficulty trying to select which panel to attend. This spoke to the quality of the papers and the salience of the topics addressed. A list of the papers given on the diverse range of topics is impossible here, but even a cursory review of the program leaves the impression that there is some very interesting work being conducted in the field of agricultural history.
For the first time in its ninety-four year history, the Agricultural History Society (henceforth AHS) held its annual meeting in Canada, choosing Banff, Alberta as its venue. While the AHS has traditionally maintained a strong international audience, this year’s meeting was particularly diverse, with scholars from the Netherlands, New Zealand, England, Canada, and the United States in attendance.The level of Canadian participation was unprecedented, making this an extremely useful conference for those studying Canadian topics.
Why study history? Not a historian myself, I sometimes wonder if dwelling on the past is an upstanding profession. The Agricultural History Society conference reminded me that history, at its best, is as much about “why” as “how”. For instance: Why did the U.S. Farm Bill become a plaything of agribusiness with a few food stamps slapped on for postage? The answer to this question requires a bit of history. Because it matters when the Farm Bill and agribusiness came to exist, if the two are inseparable. (This is usually where the historian begins to preamble for a few decades, leaving the rest of us feeling fatigue.) For instance, at the conference Adam Romero presented a paper about how Shell Oil applied byproducts from the synthesis of glycerol to kill nematode lodes in Hawaiian pineapple stands in the 1940s. This predates the term agribusiness.
Traditionally museums were places of "high" culture, places that developed during the times of the industrial revolution and during the Victorian era. They displayed models of industrial innovation as well as historical artifacts for the benefit of the working and middle classes, while also promoting cultural and nationalistic values of the nation-state. Today however, both privately and publicly funded museums are places where historical education for students and masses of tourists happens constructively, outside of the classroom. Museums are places “where we not only see evidence of the past and explore how others have interpreted it, but also where we can learn how to ‘do history for ourselves.’” (
When Thomas King’s An Inconvenient Indian came out this past winter, I was fascinated. Serendipitously, it was timed with the early stages of the IdleNoMore. I read the book twice. I read about the book extensively. I listened to interviews. Thomas King did something beautiful. In 
Much discussion has been taking place in the past few months over the Conservative government's interest in reshaping Canadian history. This debate is perhaps best embodied by historian Jack Granatstein’s recent history face-off with historian Ian McKay (Warrior’s Nation, BTL, 2012) on CBC 180 (May 9, 2013), wherein he argued that it was time to tell the "Conservative side" of history. The politicizing of history is not new but it does challenge the careful and critical work of historians. History, like other disciplines, is open to different interpretations and debate and reflective of changes over time. The 1960s saw the inclusion of social histories that included narratives about the working class, and other groups who had previously been marginalized or omitted in historical examinations.
It is common to hear that teachers should be concerned about social justice, and teach to enhance it in Canadian society and beyond. Indeed, many dedicated and sensitive teachers are doing excellent work to address issues many people would associate with social justice, and the history classroom is often a place to consider this theme and the questions it raises. The study of the past inevitably provides case studies of violations of human relationships and the efforts of communities to renew and reconstruct those relationships.
History is often riddled with conflict, disagreement, and injustice. Many museums work hard to present difficult histories in ways that encourage empathy and remembrance, while providing visitors with a link to current struggles. Visitors may experience difficult histories through objects, photographs, text, audio-guides, tours, living history experiences, programming and more. Some museums ask visitors to imagine what an individual's life might have been like, or compare narratives from exhibits with their own experiences. Some use new technologies and interactives, while others are more subdued, focusing on pictures, quotes, or statistics. 
Earlier this week, I went in to the Tzeachten Community Center to cast my ballot in the advance polls for the BC election. The irony of voting at a First Nations administrative office for an election in a province that has a history of exceptionally unjust treatment of Indigenous peoples has had me thinking a lot about elections, social justice, and Canadian history.
My semester is over. I finished marking my students’ finals in record time and chained myself to my desk on some beautiful Vancouver spring day in the process. However, I’m no longer a Teaching Assistant. I have graduated to the much-more-impoverished position of Former Teaching Assistant. Although being unemployed does not excite me at all, I appreciate the opportunity to focus on my own work a bit more.
At a 1971 meeting between the Palo Alto Research Centre and Xerox, Alan Kay uttered the famous statement: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” This isn’t the full quotation of course, and taken out of context it could be viewed and used in various ways. When I read it I thought of history education, and that understanding the past is key to seeing a future for oneself. Keith Barton and Linda Levstik (2004; 2011) as well as Peter Seixas (1993) emphasize this in some of their research. One of my favourite quotations on this topic comes from Amy von Heyking’s (2011) chapter in New Possibilities for the Past:
Using technology, either as a historian or a teacher, can be wonderfully helpful or hugely frustrating. Everyone has stories about fighting with their word processor, or being unable to upload files as needed, or being confounded by glitchy USB keys. And while, despite these occasional setbacks, some of us embrace these new technologies for the benefits they offer, others remain passionately low-tech: pen and paper is still the note-taking method of choice for many colleagues of mine. But whether you’re a student or a teacher, it’s clear, our lives are becoming increasingly intertwined with new technologies.
I’m never sure how to offer writing feedback to my students.
Integrating multiple perspectives into history and social studies education presents a range of challenges for teachers and students. Perspectives are complex and perspective communities, particularly when we speak about national, religious, cultural, ethnic, or linguistic groups, are diverse and multi-faceted. Perspectives are tied to ways of knowing and living in the world. They are ideological, and gendered, and they are socio-economically, geographically, and temporally situated. Perspectives have a past, present, and future, and these intersect and overlap in a multiplicity of ways with the interests and perspectives of other perspective communities.
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Recently, a group of high school students I was working with told me how boring they find history class, especially Canadian history. Now, I must admit that although I have heard this sentiment expressed many times over the years, it just about broke my Canadian history-loving heart. So I asked some questions: what were the students learning about? Why did they find it boring?
My seminars have presented me with an odd challenge this semester. I am teaching a course in which I have very little background. I am teaching students who have already learned about all of the content before. I am teaching students who are nearly entirely from another country. And I’m teaching students who are dedicated to their reading and their work and their learning. I suppose this is what happens when you are teaching the history of China from 1800 in a city like Greater Vancouver (where, I was recently informed, the dominant conversational language is now Mandarin).
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to bring Indigenous perspectives into learning communities in ways that are responsible, respectful, reciprocal and relevant (Barnhardt & Kirkness, 1991). To me, it is equally important to emphasize the importance of making space for northern Canadian perspectives in history education. 
Hindsight is 20/20…or so it seems.
Driving along Highway 1 from Vancouver towards Chilliwack, BC, can be beautiful on a clear day; the route leads you away from the coast, takes you over the Fraser River, and eventually, deposits you in the middle of the Fraser Valley, on flat plains ringed by mountains. Though the drive affords some stunning views of the landscape, the predominant sight you glimpse as your car hurtles along the concrete corridor that unites Canada from sea to sea is a serial procession of tacky advertisements emblazoned on large billboards, looming over the speeding vehicles. Over the past few years, however, new billboards have been cropping up around Chilliwack, and these ones are…different.
In previous posts, I wrote about the potential of objects to make the people, places, and events of the past feel closer and more real. These encounters can offer teachable moments, and provide unique and memorable learning experiences. They can lead learners to new questions and generate discussion. Sometimes, however, these physical encounters are not possible. A history class might not have the funding to visit a museum in person. The relevant objects might be located in museums across oceans, or be too fragile to handle, or even too fragile to display. 
History can seem like a foreign country to many students, a country which they do not have any interest in visiting. As a teacher, making history relevant to students may be one of your most important, and often difficult, tasks. Opportunities constantly arise which allow you to connect the past to the present — you just have to be able to see them and be willing to modify your lesson plans to use them!
Penney Clark’s newly edited collection of essays in New Possibilities for the Past: Shaping History Education in Canada was the first book that was used for the Read/Review/Respond blog. In response to Katherine Ireland’s 
With all the Valentine’s Day festivities fresh in our minds, perhaps now is a perfect time to talk about love and emotion – in the historical sense, of course.
As I mentioned in my last 
My last 
I often encounter pleasing, surprising, and startling learning moments in my curriculum and teaching courses and I try to turn as many of these into pedagogic opportunities for my students. I have encountered a multitude of learning moments in the five years I have been teaching undergraduate courses in social studies curriculum, and these encounters have helped me to realize that engaging teaching is really an ongoing series of such moments. While the novelty of grand-narrative-awareness, for example, has long ago passed for me, I am fascinated with how my students cope with its novelty, especially how it complicates and potentially implicates them in the story they have long taken to be fundamentally and universally true.
My history work with young students has been almost exclusively focused on oral rather than written language. As the K-2 students I have worked with are still learning to read, reading and writing were not going to be effective methods of historical inquiry. I had to search for methods of doing history that engaged them in what Barton and Levstik (2011) call “talking historically” (p. 24). I relied heavily on their 2011 book Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools (4th ed.) because I had found so little research on doing history with young students before they’ve learned to read. They point out that with a historical text, only so much information can be gleaned, whereas conversation offers greater depth for practicing the skills needed in historical investigation:
With use of multimedia becoming more common in history classrooms, how can visual artifacts or sources such as photographs and art works be used to support, extend, or even complicate historical thinking? Grasping and keeping students’ attention is one thing -- assessing for the way students use these sources in historical analysis is another! This question can be particularly challenging when entering into a space of “difficult history” or historical trauma, such as residential schools history in Canada (see my previous 
I’m not sure about you, but I have been told lies about being a teaching assistant. “Your professor is going to give you all the supports that you need.” “The students will come prepared if you tell them that they are expected to.” “It doesn’t take long to respond to e-mails.” And, as I had a successful first week in my seminars and am now preparing for my second week, I find myself running up against the first lie that I was ever told about seminars: the first week is the most important.
Since the beginning of December 2012, hundreds of thousands of people across North America (Turtle Island) have gathered together to protest ongoing colonial injustice towards Indigenous peoples. Under the leadership of four women (
Even before I was a teacher, my sense was that histories that aren’t presented as set in stone are always the most interesting. Histories that students can explore for themselves, where they can discover and investigate conflicting accounts, are the most compelling. Yet this sense isn’t always shared by others in public forums who have significant power to decide which histories are privileged, from teachers to policy makers.
It took me years to find a photo of her at the Royal Ontario Museum. In the end, the fabulous technician at the institutional archives, with the use of some miraculous search term that I would never have thought of, found the photograph. This is the only photo that exists of her in the ROM archive.
What should students know and do with the War of 1812?
In my 
Although Canadian "history wars" are usually fought within academic realms, recent federal initiatives have made tangible the broader struggle over national memory and collective identity. Overhauls of the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC), new passport designs, and the controversial $100 bill, not to mention massive cuts to Library and Archives Canada (LAC), and a multi-million dollar campaign to celebrate the War of 1812, have generated significant debate and caught the attention of Canadians more than historical dilemmas usually do.
Remembrance should not be just a once-per-year assembly and moment of silence event, but woven deliberately into the everyday curriculum. Further, remembrance as an act of teaching and learning needs to be extended to all of the fronts and spaces where human conflict causes and precipitates death, destruction, relocation and other war-related consequences.
The problem with the recording of past is that it is almost completely lost. Only the tinniest fraction of information survives the ravages of time. We might find brief glimpses of the past by finding a forgotten toy, a published book, a carefully preserved painting, a dropped arrowhead or a pot in a grave. We use these bits and pieces to try and create a shadowy image of the past but it will always be fragmentary at best. The vast majority people who lived (and their prized possessions) will never been seen or heard from again.
While many of the chapters in Penney Clark's edited collection, New Possibilities for the Past: Shaping History Education in Canada, discuss classroom learning, Viviane Gosselin's chapter, “Historical Thinking in the Museum: Open to Interpretation” challenges readers to think about history education in a museum setting. Gosselin reminds readers that “museums are one of the few public institutions mandated to facilitate lifelong learning about the collective past” (246). When people are no longer in school, they will still encounter history in museums. Museums are uniquely challenging learning spaces because they are sites of informal history learning: the museum experience is less structured than the classroom, and museum educators do not have as much time to teach and assess learners as school teachers do.Visitors also respond to a diverse range of teaching strategies, and they also represent a variety of ages, backgrounds, and prior knowledge.
The first of four blog posts Reviewing the edited collection New Possibilities for the Past: Shaping History Education in Canada (UBC Press) and Responding to the question: "Is our conception of history education “evolving” or is today’s focus simply a historical trend once again in vogue?" 
Every year around Remembrance Day I buy poppies and I lose poppies.
Here's a run-down on what happened on the final day of the Colloque international des didactiques de l'histoire, de la geographie et de l'education a la citoyennete (The International Didactics of History, Geography and Citizenship Education Symposium).
Greetings again from the University of Laval.
We had a very stimulating day at “History and Emotion: Between Collective Memory and Historical Thinking”, a graduate THEN-HiER sponsored conference at the University of Laval in Quebec City.
A couple of years ago I had a group of students who complained about what they felt was too much of a feel-bad-eurocritial-apology-demanding curriculum in social studies. They wondered why it was that the social studies and history concepts and content we talked about in social studies curriculum courses seem to offer an overly critical self-loathing vision of Canada that differed from the pleasant self-laudatory one they encountered in school and from TV commercials. Their Canada as peace-keeper to the world and multicultural, agrarian, rugged, beautiful, frontier wonderland could not be the same Canada of residential schools, the "Indian" Act, the Komagata Maru, and the head tax to limit Chinese immigration. These visions of our country are seemingly irreconcilable binary renderings of the past and present.
A couple of weeks ago I was discussing teaching Aboriginal history with a colleague. We had both heard stories from some Aboriginal students who at some point in their education had heard their people discussed in the high school and university classroom in a derogatory manner. Aside from the sad news that racism is still alive and well in some of our classrooms, the person with whom I had a conversation - someone with much more teaching experience than I - emphasized that often these concerns are not directly addressed with the teacher and professor.
As a museum educator who is often called upon to teach using First Nations collections, I have grappled with expressing the different knowledges at play in the colonial space of a museum gallery. My personal goal as an educator in a museum is to frame my “lesson” (often an informal conversation) by interrogating the epistemological space of the museum itself: I never position the museum as the purported ‘expert’, the purveyor of absolute truth or as the hallowed ‘preserver’ of culture.
I just returned from my first 
As the newest member of the THEN/HIER 
I was privileged to attend the second Approaching the Past event entitled "
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.
From talk of wounded soldiers at Spadina House to pictures of the No. 2 Construction Battalion at the City of Toronto Archives, the first 
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. 
Ian McKay asks teachers: 
“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 