"They Fought for Our Language": Historical Narratives and National Identification Among Young French Canadians

• In Event: 44.076 - Beyond Borders in the Social Studies

Abstract

What stories of the past do young Canadians tell? What impact does identity have on their ideas and ways of thinking historically? What role does schooling play in transmitting a national narrative? In this paper, we address these questions in a large-scale national study of young French Canadians’ understanding of the collective past. Drawing on the notion of historical consciousness, we sought to investigate two complementary features of history learning: (1) students’ narratives of national history, and (2) the impact of collective identity on their historical understanding. Instead of assessing the mastery of content knowledge, our research aimed to address a more fundamental question: how do they narrate the history of their national community?

Authors

• Stephane Levesque, University of Ottawa

• Jocelyn Létourneau, Laval University