Collectively, historians’ work consists of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing a vast edifice of knowledge about the past, the generalizations and syntheses about which will vary according to the purposes of the historians and the audiences to whom they are directing any particular manifestation of their work. Notwithstanding the tendency of historians to identify their “real” historical work and their “real” audiences exclusively with their research and writing rather than with their teaching – particularly their undergraduate teaching – I am going to begin by arguing that historians “do” history as much in their teaching as they do in their scholarly...

Canadian teacher educators, like their international colleagues, have grappled with the complex question of how best to transform history teaching in schools. Curriculum reforms across Canada, grounded in recent research in history teaching, urge a shift away from the transmission of historical information towards the cultivation of historical ways of thinking. These reforms reflect the belief that “history is the most sophisticated way we currently have of knowing about and organizing the past, and that it attempts to meet certain criteria.”¹ They require that history teaching facilitate students’ ability to reason in the discipline, understand its core concepts, and apply...

What role does the past play in the lives of history student teachers? Do they see teachers as reliable sources of information about the past? How does history help define their teaching practice? Student teachers face a critical task. Throughout their history education programs, they are encouraged by their professors to nurture a professional learning community and develop as practitioners of the discipline. At the same time, they eagerly venture into the practice of the classroom where issues of acculturation, conformity, discipline, and efficiency often put them on an outbound trajectory, as if the domains of history and schooling were...

In his chapter “Moving from the Periphery to the Core: The Possibilities for Professional Learning Communities in History Teacher Education,” Alan Sears notes that student teachers have:

… little or no actual experience with the processes they will be teaching and, therefore, probably aren’t very good at them themselves; as well, in my view much more importantly, the candidates have a strong cognitive frame that history teaching essentially involves the passing on of historical information and not the fostering of historical thinking.¹

This situation holds true in Quebec, as elsewhere in Canada. Many student teachers experience a discrepancy between the...

History and social studies educators in Canada generally accept the idea that student teachers should emerge from their pre-service programs with an understanding of history as an active, knowledge-generating process rather than a passive absorption of stories about the past – however well told or well written by others.¹ This idea is now a fundamental part of the Canadian history education discussion.² Nevertheless, teacher education programs – like school curricula – are battlegrounds for competitions over time and resources. History has to carve its place in multidisciplinary social studies.³ And the social studies methods courses too often find themselves in...

How might we use historical perspective, or, more accurately, multiple historical perspectives to address a number of issues facing teacher education in general and history education more specifically? These issues include teacher education’s limited influence on future classrooms dominated by expectations for coverage and control practices, the depoliticized manner in which we currently take up the “historical” in teacher education, and the regnant form of knowledge as a thing valuable only to the extent it can be exchanged for preferred material and symbolic positioning within the vulture capitalist machinations increasingly dominating school-university spaces.¹

While these are related issues, I primarily...

David Livingstone is reported to have said that teaching by example is not the best way – it is the only way. Robert Blume wrote, “Teachers teach as they are taught, and not as they are taught to teach.”¹ This advice must be taken seriously if methodology instructors hope to affect how their students teach when they eventually reach their own classrooms. Unfortunately, scant attention has been paid to the role of university-based methodology instructors in the widely reported inadequate state of history and social studies teaching in Canadian elementary and secondary schools.² Surprisingly, relatively few studies document how teacher...

Throughout the past century, one of the recurring themes for reformers in history education has been the importance of using primary sources to teach history.¹ In the last four decades, a growing body of research in educational psychology and history education has focused on theories, practices, and strategies for using primary sources effectively to teach history.² By 2005 it could be stated that belief in the importance of using primary sources for teaching history had achieved a degree of orthodoxy among history and social studies educators.³ Reproductions of millions of primary sources have become widely available online for free, or...

This chapter describes an experiment in history teacher education that took place within the broader educational context of social studies teacher preparation at the University of New Brunswick. The experiment was premised on the supposition that a robust understanding of the relationship between historical thinking and both the teaching and learning of history demands discussion about, and immersion in, authentic historical research, and that this an appropriate social studies approach. As Alan Sears suggests in this collection, student teachers mustdohistory in order to challenge the dominant world view that identifies history teaching with a mechanistic transmission of knowledge...

Student teachers who are hoping to teach history in the secondary school system in Ontario enter professional teacher education programs with a minimum of subject knowledge guaranteed by admission standards. They emerge as newly qualified teachers who are expected to have developed a broad range of teaching skills and habits of mind. These include a desire to find out about the students and the school in which they will teach, a solid grasp of instructional methods, knowledge of the factors influencing how they will teach, and the habit of reflecting on their actions and on those of their students.

However,...

My answer to this question, which was asked by an experienced teacher during a week-long summer institute focused on teaching historical thinking, was short and succinct: “Yes.” A murmur started to creep around the crowded lecture theatre and I could tell that, at least for some in the room, the idea that historical narratives like those in history textbooks are constructions (involving the use of evidence to make decisions about historical significance, analyse continuity and change, or understand historical perspectives) was something new. If history isn’t what is found in textbooks, what is it? This moment clarified for me the...

For many, the public museum requires little explanation. As an educational institution, museums are typically seen as the place where exhibitions and displays of objects inform the public about the past, culture, art, and nature. Although public museums have long been aware of their vested educational authority, there remains a general tendency to consider them as sites that disseminate specific knowledge to the public. Furthermore, while within the field of museum studies there is wide recognition of how the museum’s educational role serves a particular, though generally unquestioned intent, there is a general lack of agreement about the extent to...

Alan Sears notes in his chapter in this volume that student teachers “haven’t struggled to define a ‘significant’ and unexplored (or underexplored) question about the past to study, sat with a pile of diverse sources trying to weigh their relative merits … or tried to make judgments about the moral actions of historical agents.”¹ This, he argues, helps to explain why history teachers often replicate the model through which they studied history: the transmission of information through note taking, lectures, PowerPoint, or perhaps documentaries and Hollywood movies. Sears urges us to take seriously the three-stage nature of teacher education: one...

The secondary school history and social science department in which I worked had an annual enrolment of approximately one thousand students. The only mandatory history course accounted for a few hundred students; the rest of these history students enrolled in senior-level optional courses. Even more remarkable, in some years we had the highly unusual situation of having more students enrolled in the department than were students in the school. I believe our success as a department was the product of two equally important factors: first, the pedagogical practices taking place in our classrooms; and second, the work we all did...

We ask, “How can teachers in a small rural school cultivate students’ historical understandings through a project based on local events?” Over two terms, secondary students in the West Kootenays of British Columbia immersed themselves in “place-based education,” a multi-disciplinary, community-focused exploration of the local internment of 1,400 Canadians of Japanese descent in 1942–1946. The project unfolded as a partnership between the school, two filmmakers, a rural teacher education program, two arts organizations, two museums, and a national website. Given the scope of expertise and resources, it represented the kind of boundary work across professional communities that Alan Sears...