Opinion: There is no battle between change and history

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Historians study change. We write about change over time. And we analyze how people effected that change.

The other day, I was troubled to read Edmonton Journal columnist David Staples’ premature proclamation that Alberta’s NDP government’s curriculum update was an “educational travesty” for its focus on “change” at the expense of “history.”

To be aghast that “change” was mentioned in the government’s Scope and Sequence document 24 times is disingenuous and gets much wrong about what history is, what historians do, and how history — or social studies — is taught in schools and university classrooms in Alberta and across Canada. And this is to say nothing about the rigour of control-F, the computer’s search function, as an analytical tool.

But let’s be fair to control-F for a moment.

Six of the allegedly inappropriate 24 “changes” in the new social studies curriculum are actually references to climate or environmental change, not historical or social change. And the sole lamentable reference to “history” — which we are told means that history has become a dirty word — is actually about teaching the “history of residential schools and their legacy” in Alberta classrooms.

Surely Canada’s history of residential schooling is a prime example of “Change Gone Wrong” — to use Staples’ phrase — and one that we all need to better understand whether we are a student or a senator.

But I too can use control-F. And while “history” appears once — the word “historical” appears 45 times. For those keeping track, that is more than two times the number of references to “change.” And each of those 45 times “historical” is employed in a manner that fosters what what historians and social studies teachers know as “historical thinking.”

Yet Staples boldly claims that “the concept of teaching history is out of style” — a statement that could not be further from the truth.

Over the past decade, the Canadian Historical Association, the governing body of the historical profession in Canada, has devoted increased attention to the teaching of history, and two years ago my colleagues at Mount Royal University organized a workshop that brought together social studies teachers and historians to address the teaching of history.

Universities across the country are also investing time and resources in research on the scholarship of teaching and learning. And just this week, University Affairs reported on the innovative history teaching being done by my colleagues at the University of British Columbia.

That the NDP government’s Scope and Sequence document takes professional historians’ research commitment to innovative pedagogy seriously is a good thing for Alberta students.

So when students in Grade 2 are asked to consider, “Why have communities changed over time?” or others in Grade 10 asked, “Whose narratives, historical and contemporary, have shaped Canada and why?” they are being asked to engage with leading practices in the teaching of history and social studies. They are being asked to think historically. And that is important.

But what about change and history?

The “implicit ideology in the curriculum documents is that ‘change’ is a societal good in itself,” writes Staples, and is equated with “particular issues of the modern social justice movement.” But history teaches us otherwise. History also teaches us that without people living their lives — no social activism necessary — there would be no history. There would be no change to teach in schools.

In other words, when Grade 3 students are being asked, “How can we create change?” or fourth-graders, “In what ways have individuals and groups in what is now Canada taken action to effect change?” they are being asked to do precisely what it is that we historians do: they are identifying and explaining the role people play, have played, and will continue to play in the making of history.

Dr. Jarett Henderson is an associate professor of history at Mount Royal University, where he teaches Canadian and colonial history in the department of humanities.