Please visit to read posts from the past month – awesome posts such as:

• “History Has Left the Building” by Katherine Joyce
• “Warrior Nation vs. Peaceable Kingdom? Ian McKay on Understandings of History in Canada” by Mary Chaktsiris
• “What Did You Do Last Summer? A pedagogic opportunity” by Laurence Abbott
• “Teaching and Learning with Primary Sources” by Caitlin Johnson
• “10 (+1) Reasons Why Heritage Fairs are Good for You!” by Cynthia Wallace
• “Ethical Judgments in History: Are they right or wrong?” by Lindsay Gibson
• “TED Talk: Big History & Collective Learning” by Laura Fraser

We have new blogging space! 

We loved our home here at WordPress to exploring blogging, but all our bloggers felt disconnected from our THEN/HiER ‘home’ – So we are excited to annouce that

with the fantastic new user-friendly THEN/HiER site we have been  able to design a new blogging space right in our site!

Like last year, our focus for this blog is to explore and connect with issues pertaining to the teaching and learning of history in Canada, in whatever forms that teaching and learning take place. Our bloggers are mostly grad students in various stages of their graduate work who are wrestling with these questions, both in theory and practice, in their dissertation work.

In the new space, our bloggers will discuss a range of issues, including but not limited to:

• The practice of history teaching and learning
• The use of primary sources in the classroom
• Forms of remembrance and the effects on memory
• Web-resources helpful to educators
• Articles or books that may be of interest to readers
• Interesting content to bring into one’s classroom
• Issues of assessment and evaluation
• Ways to connect and collaborate across Canada

Original blog posts will be published twice a week and will be interspersed by links to other blogs with interesting content for readers.

We are always looking for more regular bloggers as well on feedback on what you like or suggestions you have for going forward.  Once a month we will also be looking for a guest blogger to cover a specific topic in a unique way. Stay tuned or contact Samantha Cutrara for more details. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Other interesting item to note:

Information is now up for our upcoming national conference

Imagining Gateways:

Collaboration & innovation in teaching and learning history

Taking place October 27-29 in Halifax

In collaboration with the Nova Scotia Social Studies Teachers’ Association & The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, THEN/HiER invites you to participate in three days of discussion with historians, history educators, museum staff, and community members interested in pedagogy and practice related to history teaching and learning.      Click for more info

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.

The second workshop was called Experiencing History and was organized by Approaching the Past.  The activities that Bob Henderson took us through emphasized the role geography has had in our history, particularly river systems.  In one, he had us create the Humber River watershed with a rope, and then place historical events along it, in their appropriate locations.

Outdoor education has a wide variety of benefits, including engaging students who don’t enjoy being at school, and experiencing a greater connection to place. Some jurisdictions, such as Scotland, have recently recognized the benefits of incorporating outdoor learning throughout the education system. It takes a lot of hard work to plan outdoor activities that are meaningful and connected to the curriculum. If you are interested in adding some outdoor lessons to your history classroom this year, you should check out Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence Through Outdoor Learning for ideas on how to do so, and also look at Scotland’s social studies curriculum (which includes history).  There is a legend which identifies curriculum outcomes as either particularly suited to outdoor learning, for outdoor or indoor learning, or for indoor learning only. This gives a nice sense of what sort of learning outcomes, although different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, are best suited for outdoor learning. And remember, have fun!

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 a 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.”

During our twenty-minute conversation we discussed the construction of the past in Canada, and the increasing importance of militarism in this construction as reflected in the new Canadian citizenship guide and school curriculums where, for example, the First World War is revered in high school text books as definitional of the whole country while most events after the 1960’s are brushed aside. McKay argues that “the function of an education system is to create critical, aware citizens rather than unthinking spouters of the party lines.” Yet by teaching students myths about the Canadian past, such as the Battle of Vimy Ridge as the birth of the nation, McKay argues teachers are distorting the past and engaging “not in education, but in propaganda.”

McKay explains:

“We are in a moment of intense danger here, and I would like teachers to step back from these very easy, sweet deals that are put forward by interests outside the educational system and at the very least have a countervailing voice….shouldn’t we be giving enough attention to peacekeeping as a Canadian ideal, as a peaceful solution to the world’s problems? This was for a long time seen as a fundamental part of the Canadian idea, that Canadians were not in fact an imperialistic, warlike people. Do we really want to trade in that model for the new one?  Or do we want to think more critically and imaginatively about the old model?”

In the last question (at the 19:50 mark), McKay discusses his conceptualization of the Liberal Order Framework and other strategies that can be used by teachers and the public to critically think about the construction of Canadian History.

McKay ended our podcast with an appeal to Canadian teachers:

“My core thing I would love to leave with your audience is – okay – maybe this is our book writer’s image of a Canada that is becoming progressively militarized. So, as an educator read tomorrow’s newspapers. Read the issue after that and the issue after that, tune into the television, watch the world around you, watch the highways of heroes promotions, watch the national defense advertisements and come to your own conclusion. Is this the same Canada you lived in five years ago, is it the same Canada you lived in ten years ago, or has something fundamental changed? And if something fundamental has changed, by these signs of the times that come around us, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to become complicit in this change, or are you going to fight to expose it and to stop it?”

For the full podcast, visit http://www.thenhier.ca/en/content/warrior-nation-vs-peaceable-kingdom-podcast-dr-ian-mckay-understandings-history-canada

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.”[1] During Congress 2011,  he spoke about this sense of place and what it means to those who identify with New Brunswick’s past.

Drawing upon the historical experience of mechanisation in the forest industry, Adams Richards explained how such concepts of modernisation are not new to Atlantic Canada. Here, he said, generations of people have weathered the sense of inevitable progress that is associated with global change.   Often, such progress carries with it what Adams Richards describes as a “great anonymity” that threatens individual identity. It undermines a shared sense of belonging that comes from being part of a particular place and a particular way of life.

Within the abyss of anonymity, a sense of place is often regarded as a label of misfortune or unknowing ( “that people who live where we live would not know about what more successful people know about the world.”); and so, to have a sense of place is thus to be restricted from being part of another more cosmopolitan place.

Yet, a sense of place can also be empowering. It carries with it a unilateral freedom that is grounded in a temporal sense of shared humanity. In the authors’ words:

Even on a patch of frozen soil, a solitary man is his own true nation, and free as he chooses to be. No moment or comfort is ever secure, no matter where we live; or future certain for any of us, no matter where we live. How we respond to this is up to us alone. Each one of us can choose to be free.

So, what does this have to do with history education? (You may be asking yourself right now).  I see this Big Thinking lecture as very relevant to our discussions on the teaching of history for two reasons.  Firstly, Adams Richards touches upon the imaginative element of history. His highly descriptive style of writing makes it possible for the reader to empathise with people in the past. This emotional layer adds a vibrant richness to the past that cannot be found in empirical evidence alone. But is it history? Indeed, in my humble opinion, the best historians are those who are able to fill in the spaces between the lines of evidence and contextualise the past in vivid, rich, detail.

A second reason why I feel this lecture is very relevant to discussions on the teaching of history, is that Adams Richards describes a particular sociological phenomenon whereby history intersects with collective memory. Indeed, through his writing, the author presents a darker side of life in Atlantic Canada: “a world of hurt and alarm … a world that has faced globalisation for years and years” Such a world is not unique to Atlantic Canada; yet it has become deeply embedded in our collective memory. Even so, it need not cage us in, because memory can be fluid and ever-changing.

The role of history education should be to enable each of us to look critically upon the narratives that shape – or threaten – our individual identities. As David Adams Richards has pointed out, how we respond depends upon us alone.

Listen to David Adams Richards’ entire lecture here:

… 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….

“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:

“With Friends,” by 26 year old Whitehorse artist Joseph Tisiga, examines the ‘Sixties Scoop.’ This was a period where government and private organizations would, in the auspices of caring, remove Aboriginal children from their homes and place them into foster care.

Now imagine you’re a History teacher (which for many of you, shouldn’t be hard!). Imagine presenting this work to a group of students and asking them to explore the piece for meaning, bias and historical context. They would learn that the artist’s mother was one of those children removed from their home. They would see the sinister nature of the painting. There would be the opportunity connect with prior knowledge with the Hudson’s Bay blanket in the foreground.

Teach Aboriginal experiences more regularly and teach it in a meaningful way. In examining just that one piece of artwork, students can gain a broader sense of Aboriginal experiences, develop a deeper understanding of the specific event in question, build research and critical thinking skills, connect to prior learning and could learn to better communicate their findings.

Yesterday was National Aboriginal Day. But I would encourage all teachers to use each day and each lesson to explore all of the perspectives Canadian communities, heritage and history has to offer.

Information on and Winners of the 2011 Aboriginal Writing & Arts Challenge are posted at www.our-story.ca.

For other resources on Aboriginal history, visit THEN/HIER’s Repertory of Primary Source Databases and Sites of Interest in History Education.

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.

For those who are disempowered in any society, the keeping of oral traditions and the preservation of collective memory is very important. As Maillet points out, “they” can never take your voice. Indeed, our schools could benefit greatly from the humanist agenda of making space in our classrooms for such forms of vernacular history.  This is because, with each generation, it is the youth who bear responsibility for perpetuating the essential elements of collective memory that define cultural identity. In the words of Maillet: “C’est vous [les jeunes] qui vont décider le futur de l’Acadie”

In Acadia, the collective identity of the voiceless has been preserved in the dialect and words of a language that is more ancient than the french of modern France. As Maillet so poignantly illustrates in her discussion about the forgotten, the generational links between past and present can be found within the stories and songs of Acadia.  Here lie the traces of the voices of the forgotten. As educators, we would do well to never forget this.

Listen to Antonine Maillet’s entire lecture here: http://cwallacecasey.podomatic.com/entry/2011-06-20T05_33_08-07_00