Chapter 2: A Modest Proposal for Change in Canadian History Education

Since early 2006, a Canadian partnership between a university-based research center and a private, nonprofit foundation has promoted the development of historical thinking as a foundational element of history curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. This paper places the initiative within the context of history education debates in Canada, examines the development and conceptualization of the project, and then traces its reception and prospects among education officials, textbook publishers, and teachers. What is perhaps startling and unexpected is the broad acceptance of the reform effort, emerging out of a period when English Canada went through a milder version of what the United States and Australia confronted as “history wars,” in a jurisdictional arena where history—more than any other school subject—is jealously guarded by the provinces. This paper advances several hypotheses to explain the acceptance of this reform among education stakeholders. There exists a broad consensus among history education researchers and university-based educators (in Canada and internationally) that historical thinking should have a central place in the shaping of history curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Nevertheless, at the classroom level, the number of Canadian teachers who have the tools to embed a well framed conception of historical thinking into their teaching is still very small. Since early 2006, a Canadian initiative, based outside the provincial ministries of education, has worked to address that disjunction.