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Teaching second-order concepts in Canadian history: The importance of "historical significance".

18/07/11 18:14

CANADIAN SOCIAL STUDIES VOLUME 39 NUMBER 2, WINTER 2005 www.quasar.ualberta.ca/css Special Issue: New Approaches to Teaching History

Teaching second-order concepts in Canadian history: The importance of "historical significance".
Stéphane Lévesque University of Western OntarioReturn to Articles Abstract This article addresses the second-order concept of "historical significance" and attempts to answer the question of what criteria are used to make decisions about it in history and school history. Specifically, it explores the way Francophone and Anglophone students ascribe significance to selected historical events in Canada and discusses the implications of thisstudy for history students and educators. The necessity of (re)considering how officials make decisions about historical significance in the school system is also examined.

What makes a Canadian event or character historically significant to study? How do historians, teachers, and students make their selections between the "significant" and the "trivial"? What prompts individuals and groups toidentify with certain events and figures and not with others? Traditionally, English Canadian historical monographs and school textbooks have carried the implicit message that historical significance should be ascribed to white middle- and upper-class British males in positions of power or authority. Understandably, French Canadians have had, for their part, a high suspicion of such a hegemonicdefinition of Canadian historical significance, for obvious political and cultural reasons. Historian John Dickinson (1996, 148) has summed it up as this, "Canadian historiography has never been unified, and the two linguistic traditions are as different from one another as from foreign historiographies." Nowadays, with greater recognition of the "French fact," the empowerment of previouslymarginalized groups, and a redefinition and enlargement of the field of history, answering the question of Canadian historical significance remains highly problematic. Recent studies (Barton 2001; Barton & Levstik 1998; Epstein 1998; Seixas, 1994; Yeager, Foster & Greer 2002) indicate that the concept of "historical significance" appears to be shifting and politically contested. "Standards ofsignificance," Seixas (1997, 22) contends, "apparently inhere not only in the past itself, but in the interpretative frames and values of those who study it - ourselves." Teachers, students, and people in general, no less than historians,
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Teaching second-order concepts in Canadian history: The importance of"historical significance".

18/07/11 18:14

confront the study of the past with their own mental framework of historical significance shaped by their particular cultural and linguistic heritage, family practices, popular culture influence, and last, but not least, school history experience. The school community is an official site where some forms of common history are explicitly introduced tostudents. In Canada, as in other jurisdictions, the selection of historical events and characters to study as well as the design of curricula and textbooks rely on the notion of historical significance. In one way or another, Ministries of Education do (voluntarily or not) make distinctions between what they perceive as historically significant and trivial, and between what is "approved" and"ignored." In the same way, students do not passively absorb what is mandated by the Ministry or presented by their teachers and textbooks. Rather, they filter and sift, remember and forget, add to, modify, or reconstruct their own framework of historical understanding (Wineburg 2001). Clearly, the result of this complexity has serious implications for school history. Because of the potential...