Chapter 25: What Is Significant?: Grappling with Pre-service Teacher Perceptions of Historical Significance and Subject Content Knowledge

The Perceptions of Significance activity challenges teacher candidates to identify and unpack “significant” topics/events/individuals and to begin to problematize positionalities and/or stations of privilege.

The Perceptions of Significance activity is grounded in the notion that teachers operate as primary “gatekeepers” over the day-to-day instructional choices and activities for candidates (Thornton, 1991). Extending the gatekeeper analogy to include teacher candidates, the activity captures curriculum decision making in situ through the specific exploration of the second-order concept historical significance. Historical significance, broadly, assigns value to what should be researched and written about by historians and by corollary what history should be learned in schools (Seixas & Morton, 2012). Further to the point, Seixas (1997) adds, “questions of curriculum selection, textbook construction, historical interpretation—the meaning of history itself—all hinge on the question of significance” (p. 27). Perceptions of historical significance, then, bear particular impact on the preparation of social studies teachers.