Inside’s Out: Learning to Teach From the Dissonance at the Heart of Historical Narratives

• In Event: Teachers’ and Students’ Beliefs and Understandings About History: Toward a Critical Engagement With the Past

Abstract

A challenge confronting teacher educators is helping students identify perspectives that depart from grand narratives to derive alternative meanings of shared pasts. In this paper we examine the complexity of this challenge through a study with social studies teacher candidates. We identify several tensions involved in work with multiple perspectives that shape historical narratives: avoiding culturally reductive or stereotypical images of others, taming of historical complexity for ease of communication, and something of a fraught encounter with the dissonance that echoes at the heart of historical identifications and perspectives. We conclude that there is much to learn about teaching from engaging tensions that emerge when we re-read what and how we have been taught.

Authors

• Laurence Abbott, University of Alberta

• Kent G. Den Heyer, University of Alberta