Our critical historiography of e-learning policy in Ontario, Canada, traces the policy's trajectory through three settlements (2006-2022) and shows how successive governments have mobilized neoliberal discourses of personalization, access, and choice to justify new arrangements with private actors, within a broader sociopolitical context that…

This article draws attention to the keyword "New Historicism" through its evolution from its antecedent "Historicism." Using the OED definition of both as a starting point, this article explains the development of New Historicism as an interpretive strategy in the study of history and literature. In keeping with the…

Using the example of the 1937 Ontario elementary school reforms, this article will make the case for considering pedagogical knowledge as a distinct object in the history of education. In this context, pedagogical knowledge refers to the conceptual and normative aspects of teaching and learning that seek to inform the decision-making of the…

In the pursuit of my doctoral research on the institutional history of the art department at Central Technical School (CTS) in Toronto, Canada, I amassed a collection of oral histories from 20 current and former CTS art instructors and students, recorded across the country. As an instructor in the CTS art department in addition to being its…

Scholars disagree about the implications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action for history educators and curriculum developers. Some scholars contend that responding to these Calls to Action requires rejecting the discipline of history and historical thinking approaches currently being implemented in history and social…

Delivered as one of the keynote addresses at the International Standing Committee on the History of Education (ISCHE) Conference held in Chicago in August 2016, this paper offers a broad review of how the body and embodiment have been incorporated into histories of education. Based on this historiography, I extend three "inspiring…

"Historical thinking" has a central role in the theory and practice of history education. At a minimum, history educators must work with a model of historical thinking if they are to formulate potential progression in students' advance through a school history curriculum, test that progression empirically, and shape instructional…

Using examples from family letters sent to the Department of Education's Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in the western Canadian province of British Columbia in the early twentieth century, this article discusses three potential problems or traps associated with concepts of agency in the history of children and youth. Following a brief…

For educational historians involved in the representation of Indigenous contexts and peoples, what is the relevance of ethnohistory as a discipline or methodology, and what is lost or gained in using it? This article reviews ethnohistorical literature, and brings it in conversation with literature by Indigenous scholars on research methodologies,…

Historians of education wanting to develop culturally responsive historiographies of Indigenous communities should move beyond a reliance on government and church policy documents--with some variegations of testimony from residential school survivors. The unique circumstances of colonisation that were forged by national/settler policies should be…

This article examines the management of the education enterprise of teaching Sisters, with reference to their transnational networking. The article suggests that orders of women religious were the first all-female transnational networks, engaged constantly in work that was characterised by "movement, ebb and circulation". The mobility of…

This paper explores major historiographic "turns" in history of education with a focus, although not exclusively, on English-speaking Canada. It addresses the transformative intellectual impact of the turn toward social history on the history of education, the impact of cultural history and the linguistic turn, the reception of Michel…

In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an?estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary…

This paper considers the use of a simple assignment, the personal narrative, in teaching students the discursive issues involved in doing academic history. Focusing on autobiography, I present the results of a survey of Canadian university students into their experiences with writing personal histories. Specifically, the survey asked students to…

The current Alberta Social Studies curriculum places a strong emphasis on recognizing the importance of multiple perspectives in the interpretation of Canada's past. The three drawings that the author has created represent the progression from the overall arching grand narrative of Canadian history to the introduction and embedding of the multiple…