Canada’s Historical Thinking Project Meets Critics on the Field of Race and Power

• In Event: Race and Nation in Canadian History Education

Abstract

“Canada’s Historical Thinking Project Meets Critics on the Field of Race and Power”
Peter Seixas

Co-authors: James Miles and Matthew Webster

In 2006, a colloquium of 40 researchers, teachers, government and non-government organization representatives gathered in Vancouver, British Columbia to discuss how historical thinking could be cast as a central feature of social studies and history curricula, assessments, professional development and teaching materials in Canadian schools. The meeting led both to a definition of historical thinking, suitable for communication with teachers and students, and to a strategy for promoting it (Seixas, 2006). In the five succeeding years, the Historical Thinking Project (born as “Benchmarks of Historical Thinking”) caught the imagination of ministries of education, funding bodies, textbook publishers and teachers’ organizations (Seixas, 2010). Funding for a full time project manager, enthusiastic teachers in pilot districts, incorporation in provincial curricula and new textbooks, and annual summer institutes provided an exemplary case of the mobilization of history education research into the field.

At the same time, implementation of the Project’s ideas generated a new round of research and critique, both empirical and conceptual. The objective of this paper is to engage in and further stimulate dialogue arising from the Project. The first author was the founder and director of the Historical Thinking Project. The co-authors were participants in the 2011 Historical Thinking Project Summer Institute. Seixas’ initial section of the paper provides a summary history of the project and an overview of the conceptual framework that has been at its core. The next two sections provide conceptual critiques from two different perspectives.

Miles juxtaposes the photography of Vancouver conceptual artist Ken Lum, whose work focuses on identity, migration, race and history, with some iconic historical photographs that have been used repeatedly both in the materials of the Historical Thinking Project, and in Canadian textbooks of the last decade, as they shift towards explicitly multicultural images of Canadian history. Drawing on cultural studies (Hall, 1997) and the vocabulary of visual culture studies particularly (Duncum, 2010), he questions whether a less than critical use of the Project materials may stimulate a racialized gaze that does little to challenge the status quo (Gagnon, 2008).

Webster is equally critical, arguing that ministries of education, textbook publishers and public history agencies may well incorporate the historical thinking concepts, as articulated in the Project materials, in ways that legitimize and renew existing practices of power and domination. He uses the work of Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) to address issues of power and the production of history. Trouillot’s central notion of “silences” in history becomes an analytical tool with which Webster demonstrates an implicit conservatism in the historical thinking concepts as currently construed.

This paper represents a conceptual intervention into a successful, research-based curriculum reform project. It contributes to a vibrant dialogue around the conceptualization of the project, and raises a new series of questions that should be examined with empirical research into the attitudes and understandings of teachers and students.

Author

• Peter C. Seixas, The University of British Columbia