Let’s Talk History! on Your Campus

by Cynthia Wallace-Casey
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick

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.

This year, in recognition of National Heritage Day in February, the THEN/HiER Graduate Student Committee has initiated a program to advance more interdisciplinary dialogue about doing history. How this works is that history graduate students are invited to participate in an informal discussion with social studies/Canadian studies education students, on their university campuses, about historical inquiry.

For historians, doing history involves, among other things, research, writing, scholarly, and public dissemination of historical knowledge. It also involves adopting critical historical literacy methods that open up the interpretive nature of history. These historical literacy methods are key to teaching younger students how to think historically.

"Let’s Talk History" offers an easy and practical way of experiencing pedagogical-content knowledge in action.

As a member of the THEN/HiER Graduate Student Committee, I invite you to initiate a "Let’s Talk History!" dialogue on your campus. Let’s start talking with the next generation of social studies teachers and historians in Canada... along the way, we just might make some new friends, share, network, and deliberate.

Are you intrigued? Interested? Excited?! If so, please contact me via this blog post – or any of my fellow committee members. Funding is available to assist with related costs, and we can provide you with everything you need to make your event memorable. We invite you to be a part of this unique February initiative. Start up a dialogue on your campus!

Let’s Talk History! - A Dialogue about Doing History

On February 17, 2011, students on the University of New Brunswick campus came together to talk history. This was an activity planned by members of the faculty of Education as well as History, in recognition of New Brunswick Heritage Week. It was a pragmatic occasion, designed to provide participants with an informal setting where they could pause and reflect upon how historians think historically.  

As a key part of Let’s Talk History, history graduate students were invited to participate in a dialogue with education students from Ian Andrews’ Teaching Canadian Studies class. This involved matching ten history students with Andrews’ fifteen social studies students, so that the latter could gain first-hand pedagogical content knowledge about history education. The Benchmarks of Historical Thinking provided a framework for their discussions.

As each history student talked about their research question, their method of inquiry, and epistemological lens, it became evident that there were many factors motivating their thoughts about the past. The history students spoke of their long-view perspective on continuity and change; of how history is a human experience; and how they are challenged to think beyond the parameters of presentist ideologies.

For their part, the education students were able to quickly identify elements of the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking in the explanations. They also witnessed the passion and motivation that historians hold for their research topics. History, for these students, is not (to borrow a phrase from Thomas Holt) "what somebody else already knows;" history is an act of intellectual exploration that empowers each individual to reach beyond the framework of what is already known.

Let’s Talk History was an excellent example of how the next generation of social studies teachers can learn to integrate the historian’s craft into classroom instruction. It also gave students an opportunity to network, dialogue, make friends, and share across disciplines. Given the positive response received by participants in this pilot project, I would recommend that it be duplicated on campuses across Canada in 2012.