We are all our history. Yet in Canadian classrooms, students are often left questioning how they can study a past that does not reflect their present. Despite curricular revisions, the mainstream narrative that shapes the way we teach students about the Canadian nation can be divisive, separating "us" from "them." Responding to…

This article summarizes the results of interviews concerning intersections found among social studies and history education, climate education, and Indigenous studies. We explore what may be involved in curricular and pedagogical reform that better features these intersections, and what considerations arise in approaching reform in schools,…

What do secondary school students in Ontario, Canada, need to know about the world in which they live in? How did a secondary school 'World Politics' course that emerged in Ontario in the 1960s address this question? The 'World Politics' course that emerged in the 1960s clearly came about as a result of societal and educational developments.…

Scholars disagree about the implications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action for history educators and curriculum developers. Some scholars contend that responding to these Calls to Action requires rejecting the discipline of history and historical thinking approaches currently being implemented in history and social…

Similar to educators in mathematics, science, and reading, history educators around the world have mobilized curricular reform movements toward including complex thinking in history education, advancing historical thinking, developing historical consciousness, and teaching competence in historical sense making. These reform movements, including…

"Historical thinking" has a central role in the theory and practice of history education. At a minimum, history educators must work with a model of historical thinking if they are to formulate potential progression in students' advance through a school history curriculum, test that progression empirically, and shape instructional…

In the 1980s, in Quebec history textbooks, authors presented history through linear, monocausal designs and attributed most social, political or economic changes favourable to democracy to unstable external causes or to stable external causes. They seldom attributed the evolution of democracy to "unstable internal causes". These…

History curriculum reform proposals and debates are a persistent feature of the contemporary educational landscape in England and, very probably, a "sign of the times" that can reveal a great deal about contemporary predicaments and concerns. History curriculum controversy is also a global phenomenon and one that can fruitfully--and,…

The latest round in Canada's History Wars was set off by reports on May 2, 2013, that the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage was going to "undertake a thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects in Canadian history." As details of the Heritage Committee's review emerged, controversy erupted as politicians, historians,…

Although historical thinking has been the subject of a substantial body of recent research, few attempts explicitly apply the results on a large scale in North America. This article, a narrative inquiry, examines the first stages of a multi-year, Canada-wide project to reform history education through the development of classroom-based…

This paper examines the debate over the teaching of Canadian history that has been in progress in Canada since the early 1990s. It considers four criticisms: schools do not teach enough Canadian history and students, therefore, do not know it; the history that is taught is no longer sufficiently national; social history has destroyed the old…

Points out that the achievement of educational goals advocated in reports issued by the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation will require a curriculum different from the one recommended in the "Ontario History and Contemporary Studies Guidelines." Recommends a reevaluation of students' needs…

Asserts that the two problems with history teaching in Canada are the failure of historians to engage with the schools and the inability of many history teachers to feel at home in their subject. Reviews five crises in the teaching of history over the last 100 years. (CMK)

Examines recent changes in history curriculum in Ontario, Canada. The curriculum decisions stress ethnicity and cultural pluralism in English Canadian society. The new curriculum for elementary school history and social science is entitled "Multiculturalism in Action," and the secondary curriculum includes a unit on Canada's…

In 1997, the Quebec Department of Education, as part of its reform of elementary and secondary curriculum, assigned the responsibility for citizenship education to history teachers. To explain this pairing, three questions are examined: Why must citizens be educated? What contributions do historians bring to our social heritage? How can the…