CREATING POSSIBILITIES: MEANINGFUL LEARNING IN HISTORY EDUCATION
SAMANTHA CUTRARA
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN EDUCATION YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO
September 2012
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This project was interested in understanding the relationships in a history classroom that supported or curtailed the possibilities for meaningful learning. Specifically, meaningful learning in history is learning that has significance to students' lives now and in the future, both inside and outside of school, and with interpretations of the past that align with their own sense of familial or community history in and for the wider-world. Based in education psychology and critical theories of education, specifically the work of Novak, hooks, and Freire, this work attempts to understand if a poststructural approach to history education would support students' meaningful learning in history class.
Using a design-based research methodology - a synergy of participatory action research, ethnography, and grounded theory geared specifically toward classroom-research -1 worked in four high-school history classes over the course of one unit, talking to and collaborating with teachers and students on a poststructural approach to history education that I have been developing since 2005. In a classroom environment, it was hypothesized that this approach,
Historic Space, could be a framework that could provide more meaningful learning opportunities for students in their history class.
This research demonstrated that while the Historic Space strategy provided opportunities to negotiate meaning of historical narratives, an element needed for meaningful learning, an emotional climate based on positive classroom relationships is needed for students to commit to learning in history and to do so in ways that have significance for their lives both inside and outside of school. While students expressed great desire to learn history, students also found many of their learning opportunities prohibitive for a deep connection with historical narratives.
While interested in wanting to provide meaningful learning opportunities for their students, teachers often enacted "curricular roles" between teacher and student that lessened the
ii opportunities available for meaningful learning. This finding suggests that greater attention needs to be paid to the emotional environment for teaching and learning and the ways in which teachers can support students' more significant connections to history.
111 Dedication To students like Misty and Tarek: May you both be more, and less, than what is expected
In memory of Dr. Roger Simon A genealogy of influence
iv Acknowledgements
First, I would like to thank my phenomenal supervisor, Dr. Susan Dion. Without her support I would not be where I am and appreciate her drive to complete this research at the same pace as myself. I also would like to thank the four teachers who opened up their classes to me. Learning with and from such dedicated professionals was an incredibly valuable experience and I appreciate the learning we shared together. Also, gratitude to the students I met and worked with. I hope that this work speaks to the experiences they want in education and I appreciate their trust in sharing these hopes with me.
I would also like to express gratitude to the faculty at York University, especially my committee members Dr. Sandra Schecter and Dr. Lisa Farley. Their comments and suggestions allowed me to re-vision the project in a much stronger and clearer light than when I began. I would also like to thank Dr. Mario Di Paolantonio, and Dr. Aparna Mishra Tare for their feedback on earlier incarnations of this work. Dr. Alison Griffith, Dr. Celia Haig-Brown, Dr. Carl James, and Dr. Alice Pitt have also been incredibly supportive over the last four years. Along with the funding I've received from York University, I am grateful for the funding provided by Ontario Graduate Studies and The History Education Network (THEN/HiER).
Like any large project, this time has not been spent in vacuum. Thanks to my family and friends for encouragement and support during the busy times, the meditative times, and, of course, the fun times. In particular, thanks to my mother and sister - All the love in, and around, the world! Members of the Toronto-Area Women's History Group for sharing their stories of the PhD journey, especially Dr. Tarah Brookfield and Dr. Susana Miranda. New College Alum Liz Majic and Emma Lind for reminding me of the theory that began this journey. The fantastic graduate students I have met and worked with both at York University and through my work with The History Education Network.
Lastly, Mike: I don't know what this journey would have been without you. Thank you.
v TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Background 1.2 Research Questions 1.3 Rationale for Study and Contributions to the Field 1.4 Outline of Chapters
Chapter 2: Literature Review 2.1 Poststructuralism and Historic Space 2.1.1 Postmodern history 16 2.1.2 Deconstructing postmodern history 19 2.1.3 Historic Space as a deconstructive project for history education 21 2.2 Meaningful Learning and Concept Learning 2.2.1 Concept learning 24 2.2.2 Meaningful learning 28 2.2.2.1 Prior knowledge 2.2.2.2 Meaningful material 2.2.2.3 Choice 2.2.3 Historic Space: Meaningful Learning, Concept Learning 34 2.3 Classroom 2.3.1 Teachers and their approaches to teaching 37 2.3.2 Respect, dialogue, and love 39 2.3.3 Ethics of care 43 2.4 Conclusion
Chapter 3: Methodology 3.1 Design-Based Research 3.2 Recruitment 3.3 Data Collection 3.3.1 Phase one: Observation 52 3.3.1.1 Teachers: Surveys and interviewing 3.3.1.2 Students: Questionnaires and group interviews 53 3.3.1.3 Planning 55 3.3.2 Phase two: Intervention 55 3.3.2.1 Participant observation, field notes, and video recording 56 3.3.2.2 Journaling 57 3.3.3 Phase three: Wrap-up 58 3.3.3.1 Teachers' and students' questionnaires and interviews 59 3.4 Analysis 59 3.5 Research Sample 61 3.5.1 Bestway Alternative: Renee 62 3.5.2 Caledonia Collegiate 63 3.5.2.1 Erin 64 3.5.2.2 Veronica 66 3.5.3 Three Bells: Zoe 67 3.6 Ethical Considerations and Research Limitations 68
Chapter 4: Students' Desires to Learn History 71 4.1 Instruction 72 4.2 Connected Content 81 4.3 Positive Place 92 4.4 Conclusion 96
Chapter 5: Conditions for the Negotiation of Meaning 97 5.1 Historic Space as Strategy to Negotiate Meaning 109 5.1.1 Mapping 100 5.1.2 Expanding 106 5.1.3 Challenging 110 5.2 Teachers' Relationships with Content 115 5.3 Conclusion 125
Chapter 6: Conditions for a Positive Emotional Climate 126 6.1 Curricular Roles 127
vii 6.2 Teaching For More Than Just "Success" 131 6.3 Teaching Through "We" 139 6.4 Opportunity for Research 148 6.5 Conclusion 156
Chapter 7: Conclusion 158 7.1 Research Question 161 7.1.1 Student/Content 161 7.1.2 Teacher/Content 163 7.1.3 Teacher/Student 164 7.1.4 Student/Teacher 166 7.1.5 Student/Student 167 7.2 Implications and Significance 168 7.3 Recommendations 171 7.4 Directions for Future Research 172 7.5 Final Thoughts 174
References 176
Appendices 210 Appendix A: Historic Space Information Package 210 Appendix B: Research Design and Data Collection 218 Appendix C: Information & Invitation Letter for Principal 219 Appendix D: Statement of Informed Consent for Teachers 222 Appendix E: Statement of Informed Consent for Parents 225 Appendix F: Statement of Informed Assent for Students 230 Appendix G: Teacher Preparation Survey 235 Appendix H: Teacher Preparation Interview 238 Appendix I: Student Preparation Questionnaire 239 Appendix J: Student Preparation Group Interview 243 Appendix K: Student Journal Prompts 244
viii Appendix L: Teacher Wrap-Up Survey 245 Appendix M: Teacher Wrap-Up Interview 247 Appendix N: Student Wrap Up Questionnaire 249 Appendix O: Student Wrap Up Group Interview 252
ix Chapter 1: Introduction
I embarked on a research project that sought to understand how an innovation in teaching and learning history, an innovation called Historic Space that I have been developing since 2005
(Cutrara, 2005,2007,2010), would work in history classrooms once I let it go and had teachers apply it to their practice. The innovation I was proposing was intended to change the frame for understanding history so that learning history could be more relevant to students' lives, provide more space for interpretation and ultimately lead to more meaningful learning opportunities.
More than just testing the feasibility of this innovation, however, I was also interested in observing the history classroom as a site of teaching and learning and wanted to come to understand the ways in which the relationship in the history classroom - relationships between teachers and students, students and students, teachers and content, and students and content - could support or curtail opportunities for meaningful learning with historical narratives.
When I talk about meaningful learning, I am referencing a type of learning discussed by
Joseph Novak (1998,2010) and David Ausubel (1962). Novak (2010) defines meaningful learning as the "constructive integration of thinking, feeling, and acting leading to empowerment for commitment and responsibility" (p. 18), which requires prior knowledge, meaningful material, and the assent of the learner (Ausubel, Novak, & Hanesian, 1978; Novak, 2010). While learning is based in individual acts of cognition, Novak's theory of learning is meant to speak to all learning as a way of courting a student's sense of "I'm OK" (p. 134). Drawn from this theory of learning, learning meaningfully would result in students gaining a sense of commitment and responsibility to themselves as learners, to their peers in the class community, and to the broader context of learning (Novak, 2010, p. 132). While coming from an educational psychology background (See Ausubel, Novak, & Hanesian, 1978), elements of this definition can be found in
1 the works of critical and radical educators interested in transforming schooling into emancipatory sites of education. Paulo Freire (2006), for example, writes that an emancipatory approach to education, a "pedagogy of the oppressed," involves a problem posing approach that places people and their histories as the starting point for engaging in learning, bell hooks (2010) also identifies that an "engaged pedagogy" involves a mutual and interactive relationship between teacher and student, with ongoing dialogue based in trust, confidence, and a belief in democracy.
These theoretical elements stress the importance of the learner, what they already know, what they need to know to move forward in a healthful and secure manner, and importance of material that can be discussed and actively explored when doing so. This approach to teaching and learning decenters a canon and decentres the ego of the teacher in favour of the student and their needs for the present and future.
Drawn from these works, I define meaningful learning in history as learning that has significance to students' lives now and in the future, both inside and outside of school, and with interpretations of the past that align with their own sense of familial or community history in and for the wider-world. More specifically, meaningful learning in history means that students understand history as being as much about them as it is about others. According to Freire (2004), students can be taught a fatalist understanding of history as a series of immoveable facts in a trajectory, or they can be taught to recognize history as a never-ending cycle of chance and power: to know "oneself to be an object of history, while also becoming its subject" (p. 15-16).
Novak draws on Harris (1969) to say education needs to develop students' sense of "I'm OK," in that their personal sense of self and personal commitments are not negatively infringed by learning the history they are presented with. While many of these ideas developed from educators and theorists thinking about marginalized communities, meaningful learning for history is a relevant idea for all. By collaboratively exploring interpretations of the past, one can
2 come to know one's self and others in ways that could potentially breakdown barriers to equality and lead to a richer understanding of the multiple voices and perspectives of the past and present.
These ideas of meaningful learning in history evolved over my time working in traditional sites of heritage education while learning critical, transnational feminist theories. The combination of these experiences lead me to develop Historic Space, a poststructural approach to history that emphasizes the constructed nature of time periods and popular perceptions of historical actors and events in order to invite the learner to explore and challenge these interpretations of history with stories that are less often told. Using concept learning strategies
(Bennett & Rolheiser, 2001; Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 1967; Taba, 1966), I found that one- on-one, students responded well to the Historic Space approach to history and that it allowed them to develop more personal interpretations of the material and better challenge how they came to know the material in ways they stated they had not in their previous history class
(Cutrara, 2007). With the positive findings of this previous research, I was interested in understanding if Historic Space could be an innovation in classroom teaching and learning that would result in more meaningful learning opportunities for students.
As a non-classroom teacher, I wanted to approach the practical application of this innovation in a language that teachers worked with and understood. For this research, I again interpreted the Historic Space with concept learning strategies and proposed content and instruction to execute the theory the innovation was interested in understanding. While the innovation had both successes and failures, intervening in normal classroom practice did expose relationships in history classrooms in ways that may not have been exposed without an overt change in classroom practice. Thus, this research becomes more about the exploration of teaching and learning history and what it takes to teach and learn meaningfully, safely, and ethically with the stories and themes that inform our understanding of the past and present, rather
3 than a review of one particular innovation. In particular, I found that that while the Historic
Space strategy provided opportunities to negotiate meaning of historical narratives, an element needed for meaningful learning according to Novak (1998,2010), an emotional climate based on positive classroom relationships is fundamentally needed for students to commit to learning in history and to do so in ways that have significance for their lives both inside and outside of school.
1.1 Background History has a reputation for being a boring school subject. Rote memorization of names and dates seem to mark what people remember and associate with history education even if teachers attempt to bring more innovative teaching methods into the classroom. However, history itself is not boring because history can be a powerful tool for self-awareness and community building. It can provide people with a sense of attachment to and detachment from current realities, functioning as a shield from those who wish to do harm (Osborne, 2006).
History is fundamentally about stories, and "oppressed groups have known instinctively that stories are an essential tool to their own survival and liberation" because they provide "a means of psychic self-preservation" and "a means of lessening their own subordination" (Delgado,
1989, p. 2436). Indigenous author Thomas King (2003) stated in his CBC Massey lecture that
"the truth about stories is that that's all we are" (p. 2).
History, the telling and sharing of stories about the past to contextualize the present, can be powerful and foundational for one's sense of self and connection to others, yet history education seems to continuously miss this vital dimension of history, leaving students without the understanding of how all kinds of history, including traditional national history, can inform their understanding of themselves, others, and their connection in the world. What is happening
4 in the space of history education that curtails the possibility for history to be as critically transformative as it could be?
Poststructural theorist Cleo Cherryholmes (1988) draws on Gail McCutcheon (1988) to define curriculum as what is available, and by extension not available, for students to learn.
Cherryholmes writes that "curriculum, in part, is a study of what is valued and given priority and what is disvalued and excluded" (p. 133). In history class students have the opportunity to learn the official grand narrative that defines who and what is important to the nation-state giving very little thought to what is excluded from these stories. Narratives in the form of stock stories
(Delgado, 1989), myths (Francis, 1997), or mythhistories (Letourneau, 2006) tell the story of the nation, inventing and imaging a historical destiny in which the powerful were always powerful and the disenfranchised have not worked hard enough (Anderson, 2003; Hobsbawn, 1992).
These narratives are repeated, expanded, and strengthened in the walk and talk of everyday life, public sites of memory, national celebrations, and formal school curricula, becoming a body of conventions for understanding the origins and place of self and others in the nation.
Although national unity is perceived as a "deep, horizontal comradeship" (Anderson,
2003, p. 7), national myths are fundamentally inequitable, owned and controlled by elites who use them to reinforce status quo and maintain their own privilege (Francis, 1997). A narrative that is meant to celebrate and strengthen the nation-state designates as unimportant the histories, people, and experiences that get in the way of the cohesive and celebratory story, such as histories of First Nations people, racialized minorities, labourers, undocumented workers, refugees, women and queer people, and stories about people who cross political borders. These histories can sometimes be seen in a side panel of a textbook or a brief scene in a documentary, but are always secondary to the larger story of naturalized white supremacy in a practically flawless liberal democracy. In developing and circulating national myths, whole domains of
5 knowledge have to be erased and denied in order for the narrative to seem complete and secure.
Stories that fold into this narrative are included, where experiences and histories that challenge or undermine this narrative are framed as illogical, fleeting, or irrelevant.
Mythhistories work on both societal and individual levels, helping define reality by suggesting the limitations of what is possible. Because stories become, a "pattern of perception" that frames how members of the collective see, "tempting us to believe that the way things are is inevitable" (Delgado, 1989), dominant narratives naturalize power structures and support the rule of those at the top. Conversely, silenced stories support the exclusion and isolation of marginalized people in the present, making their marginalization seem inevitable and predestined. This exclusion is not an accidental or innocent result of narrative constraints, but a purposeful tactic to build a close-knit and pure national or cultural identity (Anderson, 2003;
Francis, 1997; Stasiulis & Jhappan, 1995; Stoler, 1997). The most striking illustration of this in
Canada is the disavowal and erasure of Canadian First Nations history from popular Canadian mythhistories. Indigenous scholar Bonita Lawrence (2002) stresses that "in order for Canada to have a viable national identity, the histories of Indigenous nations, in all their diversity and longevity, must be erased" (p. 23). Thomas King (2003) writes that this erasure leaves Native people with an unusable and fictionalized past, a time-warp with no present or future (p. 106).
In a history classroom, this exclusion means that the individuals sitting in class, the minutia of their lives, the breadth of their histories, the legitimacy of their experiences, their hopes and expectations for the future become less important than the broader narrative of the nation that they are being taught is supreme. Research shows that students who do not see their experiences reflected in history have a limited understanding of their self and a sense of disconnectedness with the nation and their peers (Dei, 1997; T. Epstein, 1998; Letourneau, 2004;
Levstik, 2000). In drawing on his experiences teaching American history to underprivileged and
6 low achieving students, Schaun Wheeler (2007) reflected that "because the United States history textbooks talk about an entity that bears little resemblance to anything that is important to them, students feel no need to learn about [American history]" (p. 22). Similarly, in his study of Black
Canadian students' disengagement from school, George Dei (1997) found that the absence of
Black people in the Canadian narrative contributes "to Black students' sense of invisibility and lack of status as Canadians," which has a direct correlation to the choices they make to continue or not continue their schooling. One of Dei's research participants, "Darren," said that in history class "It's like you're learning about somebody else's history ... It started to take a toll on me after a while" (p. 138). At an American university, Tony Waters (2005) found that his students repeatedly stated that the history they learnt in their undergraduate history course was "real" because it discussed conflict and struggle, while the history they learnt in high school was "fake" because it was overly patriotic and positive. Waters' experience indicated that students felt that they had to choose between these two narratives at the expense of the other: they were either with or against the national story - they could not be both.
Rather than compete with these two perspective, other students, like the students in
Gerald Lazare's (2005) study of history education at a Toronto school, approach history with a type of objective mastery found most often in math or science education: memorize the right answer and repeat it on the test. In my Masters' research (2007), I too talked to students who understood history as a subject to master and not one that had an effect on their lives. These findings suggest that even if some students felt the same way about the history as "Darren" did above, history education could be viewed as a medium for serving the interests of their GPA rather than being important for their identity development. This is similar to European researcher James Wertsch's (2000) findings that while ethnic Estonians could give all the right names and dates about joining the Soviet Union in 1940, they held another vernacular version
7 close to their hearts. This dichotomy between knowing and believing conflicting versions of the past led Wertsch to question whether you could teach mastery as well as appropriation in history education. In other words, could you teach so that students knew history and also believed it to be their own?
Narratives, especially grand narratives, help set the parameters for how and what is possible by defining the terms of what and who exist. By acting as a grammar for understanding experience and self, narrative habits become the "patterns of seeing, [shaping] what we see and that to which we aspire" (Delgado, 1989, pp. 2416-2417). Thus the problem is not just that history curriculum is boring or that teaching methods are antiquated, the problem is that national history is a celebration of structural predictability and logic imposed on the past and the reproduction of these narratives in history classes denies and isolates all who cannot, and should not, fit into this structure. Dominant narratives and their reproduction in history curricula, remove any opportunity for students to see and feel beyond the prescribed structure of the nation, meaning students are denied knowing and imagining a country that has room for their hopes and needs for who they could be in the future. More often than not, history is marked as a dreaded school subject because students cannot connect to what is being taught. The fundamental frame of history education ensures there is no room for any intense and emotional connection to the content, nor opportunity to challenge and question the structure of how and what they are supposed to know; no space to test the limits of possibility and no chance to see beyond the fixity of structure.
In order to create new narrative possibilities about the stories that can and should be told about the past, present, and future (Letourneau & Moisan, 2004, p. 121), history education must intervene in the narrative structures that encode and decode any information as relevant, logical, and important to history, the nation, and self (Barab, Dodge, Thomas, Jackson, & Tuzun, 2007; Freire, 2006; Giroux, 2001). This would involve examining the narrative, but also how we have come to be hosts of the narrative and its oppressive limitations (Freire, 2006). It would involve witnessing the deconstruction of the narrative in order to get to the reconstruction of hope
(Biesta, 2009b; Derrida, 1978). It would involve learning history with a critical eye/I (Segall,
2008). It would involve the civic courage to teach as if democracy mattered (Giroux, 2001). It would involve teaching and learning in a community of ethical and passionate collaboration committed to and interested in freedom and equality (hooks, 2010). It would most importantly involve taking seriously the voices, experiences, decisions, actions, and histories of a diverse group of young learners and teachers who will be crafting what the future of the nation will look like.
Drawing on my experience as a museum educator, I developed an understanding of history called Historic Space that reimagines the standard national narrative often taught in school, as maps of concepts free from narrative fixity and linear progression. Whereas in traditional history education, events and people are bound by the logic of a linear narrative, in
Historic Space these people and events are taught without the hegemonic logic that implicitly defines what and who are meaningful and relevant to Canada. This approach is different than traditional history education in that it encourages subjective encounters with historical narratives and stresses the construction of the narrative as a site of power rather than a place of discipline
(Segall, 2006b). In this way it is a poststructural approach for learning history: a theoretical approach that could have transformative potential for thinking about the relationships between history and power (see for example Foucault, 1980). With a focus on the power and parameters of history, students are invited to question who they are in the narrative, where their histories belong, and where their futures can go. In other words, by rearticulating historical periods as
9 historic spaces, a different reading of what history is and can do can open doors for students to explore different ways of understanding and being in the world.
Using Hilda Taba's Concept Formation strategy as a guide (Bennett & Rolheiser, 2001;
Taba, 1966), I piloted Historic Space as an educational strategy in 2007 to understand if Historic
Space corresponded to the ways students learnt and understood history and if this interpretation of history would allow them to think about the production of meanings in the narrative and the implications of these meanings in the present. In this pilot test, eleven students from different
Toronto communities and schools, all who had previously taken grade 10 Canadian history, completed the three step Concept Formation strategy (Taba, 1966) about a historical period they had covered in grade 10. Students generated, organized, and spatially mapped the relationships between the main concepts from this historical period, and then reconciled histories into their maps that were not normally represented in the history textbooks, challenging the narrative of
Canada as a happy and fair country.
The results of this research indicated that learning history through Historic Space allowed students to learn more about the period than they had previously known; prioritize and expand on this knowledge based on their own interests and histories; connect with the material in active ways; and confront and address controversial histories in ways they had not done before
(Cutrara, 2007,2010). In a general sense, in this research, I found students were able to develop a more meaningful and inclusive understanding of Canadian history while covering the same curriculum and using the same textbook as their previous expression history education. With their maps of the historic spaces, the students were able to take control of the historic narrative, their learning, and the meanings they determined from past events.
With these promising results, I questioned what this strategy would look like in a classroom. Studies have found that despite learning how to teach history in specific ways, many teachers teach according to their own understanding of why students should learn history and forego that which they had learned in their teachers' education program (van Hover & Yeager,
2007). Even if they know alternative histories, teachers tend to shy away from material that could be considered controversial. In fact, teachers often encourage the retention of problematic narratives because keeping these narratives intact is easier and less professionally contentious then challenging them (Letourneau & Moisan, 2004). In Dion's (2009) research, for example, she found that the discourse of teaching did not allow space for the teachers she worked with to listen to counterstories that could influence how and what we know. Although the teachers in her research felt extraordinarily satisfied with what and how they taught, Dion found that, fundamentally, "introducing difficult knowledge upsets the order of things" and that this is not often easy to do in the classroom (p. 101). Other researchers have found that while teachers tend to shy away from "difficult" historical material, this is exactly the content that students are interested in (Levstik, 2000).
Thus, there is a tension between what is possible in history and what is actually being done. In 2005, a British report found that one of the weaknesses in history teaching is the dependence on a narrow range of teaching techniques (Harris & Haydn, 2006, p. 317). The fear of an unruly or unmanageable class is a constant threat for many teachers, a threat they try to control by curtailing tension and disagreement (McNeil, 1988). Harris and Haydn (2006) found that "trainee teachers will often settle for 'defensive' teaching approaches in response to classroom management concerns, rather than adopting tactics like role play which is seen as
'high risk'" (p. 330). Passive, rote teaching methods like reading and answering questions, lectures, essay writing, note-taking, and copying form the board predominate a history teachers' repertoire even though students explicitly identify these as ones they do not enjoy (Adey &
Biddulph, 2001, p. 444; Biddulph & Adey, 2003, p. 298; Harris & Haydn, 2006, p. 323). Thus,
11 in an atmosphere in which the control of content and bodies is privileged over the unpredictability and excitement of historical discovery and exploration, how would an approach intended to challenge how and what we know be received, interpreted, and applied? What are the relationships in a history classroom that can support this discussion and what are the relationships that curtail it?
1.2 Research Questions If research has shown that students who feel disconnected from history are also disconnected from the present, and Historic Space can be a framework to bring students closer to history by stressing the construction of, and the challenge to, the standard grand narrative, then could Historic Space work as a full classroom strategy when the standard way of approaching history has been through rote memorization, skills-based objectivity, and/or the psychic preservation of the teacher? One way to explore this question is to better understand history education practice and identify the possibilities, as well as pitfalls, for enacting an approach to history teaching and learning that places students' meaningful learning - learning with significance to their lives - at the centre of history education.
With the focus on history education practice, rather than one particular innovation, this research becomes about the interconnected ways that teaching, learning, and knowing work when the frame for engaging the material is designed to challenge how and what we come to know as possible, potentially leading to meaningful learning opportunities in history education.
In this research I am interested in exploring the relationship between history education practice and meaningful learning to question what is available in standard educational practice that supports or curtails radical and critical innovations in the ways we come to leam and use historical knowledge. While I have used Historic Space as an example of a critical innovation in
12 history education, this work has significance beyond the feasibility of one innovation.
Ultimately, the question driving this research is: What are the relationships in a history classroom - student/content, teacher/content, teacher/student, student/teacher, student/student - that support or curtail the possibilities for meaningful learning in a history classroom?
1.3 Rationale for Study and Contributions to the Field This study has multiple areas of significance. On the most straightforward level, this study speaks to the practices in history classrooms that can support meaningful learning with historical narratives. It provides evidence for students' interest and willingness to learn, but also demonstrates how students identify that they feel that it is often an unsafe, unsupportive learning environment that turns them off from wanting to learn history. It also demonstrates ways in which history teachers interpret curriculum and interpret students' needs in relation to that curriculum in ways that may be more beneficial to a grand, national story and teachers' self- preservation than students' lives and realities outside the classroom. When focusing on the history education frame for this work, this study provides evidence and best practices for engaging in meaningful learning in history and the relationships and conditions that can support this work.
On a broader level, however, this work speaks to the practice of teaching, the desire for learning, and the affective relations that must be in place for this to happen. In this sense, while this work focused on history, the findings derived from it can speak to the conditions of learning in any classroom. Students and teachers both spoke about learning experiences beyond their experiences of history classes to express their hopes and needs from education that had little to do with the subject of history itself. Thus, this thesis reaches beyond the borders of history
13 education and contributes to the broader work on teaching and learning and what it takes to do so meaningfully.
1.4 Outline of Chapters Drawing on Novak (1998,2010), I support the finding that meaningful learning is the constructive integration of thinking, feeling, and acting that requires prior knowledge, meaningful material, and the choice of the learner. In this research I found that students have a desire to leam meaningfully, and that Historic Space can be a strategy that provides more opportunities for the negotiation of meaning needed for meaningful learning. However, I also found that a positive emotional climate in which the students and their learning are put first is foundational for any attempt at meaningful learning, regardless of what instruction is used or content is taught.
In chapter 2,1 outline the literature that supports this work, namely, the intersection of poststructuralism and history, concept learning and meaningful learning, and classroom practice and possibilities that all position Historic Space as an intervention and myself as an educator. I follow in chapter 3 with an outline of my research and analysis methodologies, my data collection methods, and also introduce the four sites of research.
In chapters 4 through 6,1 explore my argument by demonstrating what meaningful learning could look like in history classrooms and how opportunities to negotiate meaning in a positive emotional climate are needed for history education to be meaningful. Specifically, in chapter 4,1 use the voices of students to define what meaningful history learning could look like.
This chapter uses data collected from students before, during, and after the intervention to explore the themes of instruction, content, and classroom environment. I found students' desires
14 to learn meaningfully a foremost component in conducting the research and this chapter discusses students' ideal conceptions of a history classroom.
In chapters 5 and 6,1 provide discussion and analysis about the attempt at meaningful learning during the intervention. Joseph Novak writes that meaningful learning needs two conditions to occur: opportunities for students to negotiate meaning and a positive emotional climate in which to do so. While the Historic Space intervention provided greater opportunities to negotiate meaning, the role of a positive emotional climate for meaningful learning cannot be underestimated. Thus, I break down the discussion of these two conditions across two chapters: in chapter 5,1 outline how the Historic Space intervention worked in each classroom in creating the greater opportunities for students to negotiate meaning; in chapter 6,1 focus more closely on the role that a positive emotional climate had on possibilities to learn meaningfully. Together, these chapters speak to the relationships in a history classroom that supported or curtailed the possibilities for the meaningful learning that students desire and that the Historic Space intervention was proposing.
I conclude this dissertation in chapter 7, by summarizing the finding and offering recommendations and direction for future research.
15 Chapter 2: Literature Review
There are three theoretical components to this project: The first component is the framework to history education that I am proposing, namely, the Historic Space strategy that is influenced by poststructural, feminist, and transnational theories. The second component is the instructional strategy that interprets this framework, specifically, conceptual learning strategies and the meaningful learning theory of education. The third component of this work is derived from critical theory, critical ethics of care, and the possibilities they invite in history education.
In the following literature review, I outline the theory that informs my approach to these three areas: poststructuralism and history; meaningful learning and concept learning; and classroom practice.
2.1 Poststructuralism and Historic Space 2.1.1 Postmodern history Theorists have shown that memories of the past are visceral and personal experiences informing people's lives (Burke, 1989; P. H. Collins, 2001). However, when structured as a history, the past loses the visceral qualities of memory can become progressive, inevitable, and impersonal. While there are different ways to approach history, my concern is with the primary way people are exposed to a sanctioned, "official" history, which is the national history that students are exposed to in schools. This version of history has been shown to be a mythic account of national heroics, rather than a complex set of understandings about the past.
When I use 'myth' I borrow from Peter Burke's (1989) use of myth, used "in the richer, more positive sense of a story with a symbolic meaning, made up of stereotyped incidents and involving characters who are larger than life" (p. 103). In these myths, people from history become presented as "simplistic, one-dimensional, and truncated portraits" of themselves, rather
16 than complex actors situated within specific contexts (Alridge, 2006, p. 663). Similarly, events in history become reduced to "their essential traits, their final meaning or their initial and final value" and presented as prophetic, rather than ordinary (Foucault, 1980, p. 89). Pierre Nora
(1989) refers to the compartmentalizing of historical memory as the lieux de memoire. He writes that "the most fundamental purpose of the lieux de memoire is to... capture a maximum of meaning in the fewest signs," that "exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications" (p. 19).
These ideas are most prominent in postmodern or poststructural approaches to the past.
As a theoretical perspective, "post-discourses"1 are fundamentally about the disbelief in metanarratives and the structures they support and that, in turn, support them (Lyotard, 1997).
Working with these theories presents a "new way of analyzing constructions of meaning and relationships of power that called unitary, universal categories into question and historicized concepts otherwise treated as natural... or absolute" (Scott, 1997, p. 258). Post-discursive theorists have demonstrated that history is not a canonical narrative of the past, but rather a medium for constantly refashioning, remolding, and retelling what happened in the past (see, for example, Foucault, 1980; Jenkins, 1997; Scott, 2001). Using the work of Ferdinand de Saussure
(1915), a linguist who developed the study of signs, or semiotics, and whose work greatly influenced poststructural theorist Jacques Derrida, one could argue that like language, history too is a system in which all elements fit together. The past in and of itself is an indistinct mass that does not naturally embody meaning. It is by arbitrarily designating significance and highlighting the difference and progression one significant person or event has from another, that the past becomes a system we call history (deSaussure, 2008, p. 146). History, in this sense, is the
1 Segall, Heilman, &Cherryholmes (2006) use "post-discourses" to refer to the similarities between postmodernism and poststructuralism.
17 socially constructed scaffolding for the past to be laid (deSaussure, 2008, p. 25). Drawing on de
Saussure's semiology, Barthes (1981) writes, "the historian is not so much a collector of facts as a collector and relater of signifiers; that is to say, [s/he] organizes them with the purpose of establishing positive meaning and filling the vacuum of pure, meaningless series" (p. 16).
Just as Barthes (1981) writes that history is an "ideological" even "imaginary" elaboration (p. 16), feminist historian Joan Scott (2001) calls history a "fantasy echo," a
"fantasized narrative that imposes sequential order on otherwise chaotic and contingent occurrences" (p. 290). Iain Chambers (1997) writes that history is a "re-presentation, a simulation of what has been lost to it. History comes to us not as raw, bleeding facts but in textual production, in narratives woven by desire (for truth) and a will (for power)" (p. 80). In this way, Harvey Wallace summarizes, "All history is a production - a deliberate selection, ordering, and evaluation of past events, experiences and processes" (quoted in Kaye, 1991, p.
71). With postmodern theory exposing the logic of narrative, we begin to see that history provides a lens on "the problems of its own times more fully even than those of the era about which it is supposed to be concerned" (Ferro, 2003, p. xi).
Foucault (1980) stresses that in writing history, historians should strive for a messy
"effective" history; a history that denies rational cause and a simple narrative. He stresses that
"the world we know is not this ultimately simple configuration where events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, or their initial and final value" and history should not be reproduced in this way either (p. 89). While history attempts to reduce the complexity of ideas and processes to a linear utility, Foucault proposed "genealogy" as a method of narrating history. Genealogy is intended to explore the complexities of the past by being a method that explores the power ebbing and flowing through one "event" over the course of time
(p. 76).
18 However, students are not introduced to these complexities in their average history class.
For most students, the history they learn in school is this simplified past: a collection of national myths, fashioned by political whims and presentist desires. Rather than learn about power and privilege in their history classes, students learn a hollow grand narrative filled with names and dates pulled from the past, deemed important for (re)telling, and situated within mythical narrative structures. These national myths purposely blur the lines of then and now to present a story of what can/should be rather than what was. There is a destiny and a certainty underlying histories taught in school, and it is by denying these points of beginning, these points of origin,, we can provide more openings for that which is Other in history education (Foucault, 1980, p.
80).
2.1.2 Deconstructing postmodern history Jacques Derrida emphasizes that there is no stable, transcendental centre to meaning.
Instead, meaning is caught in a play of references dispersed and deferred through language. Like de Saussure, Derrida (1997) understands meaning as being negatively constituted by what it is not. Texts have many voices that represent what is both written and acknowledged and what is excluded and disavowed. Derrida (1978) emphasizes that because transcendental signifiers are never as fixed and stable as they are presented, structures eventually turn on themselves and deconstruct in the cracks where order is shown to be disorder, logic as illogical. Deconstruction is not critique, because "critique supposes a judgment... or a choice between two terms... it attaches a certain negativity" (Derrida & Ewald, 2001, p. 68); instead deconstruction is a way of acknowledging that "the function of this [imaginary] centre was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure... but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure" (Derrida, 1978, p. 278).
Deconstruction is a play of the structure beyond what merely the structure can hold to understand the absence of the centre and what can be witnessed without the belief in it. For history, it is a way of understanding the logic implied in the narratives, challenging this logic as absolute or central.
Gert Biesta (2001) has interpreted Derrida's concept of deconstruction for educational theory. He has emphasized that deconstruction is not "a form of critical analysis which aims at tearing apart everything it finds in its way," it is a way of reading beyond the negativity of critique and toward a positive reconstruction of taken-for-granted knowledge (p. 32). Instead, deconstruction is interested in seeking the politics of meaning behind that which is implied and acknowledging an "Other" consciously absent from the power within language (p. 33).
Deconstruction is not an apolitical critical analysis (Egea-Kuehne & Biesta, 2001) but an affirmative ethico-political attitude that concerns itself with the other, an openness for the other, an openness for the unforseeable coming of the other (Biesta, 2001; Biesta, 2009b).
Deconstruction is an affirmation of what is excluded and forgotten, what is other, wholly other, and thus unforeseeable in the present (Biesta, 2001; Biesta & Stams, 2001). This concern for the other is what Derrida refers to as justice, and it is this concern, or responsibility, that strengthens deconstruction's right to be critical (Biesta, 2001; Biesta, 2009b), or "to be more precise, its right to reveal deconstruction" (Biesta & Stams, 2001, p. 68). Deconstruction, in Biesta's estimation, is not interested in destruction but affirmation of what is excluded and forgotten - an affirmation of the other as other. This will open space for justice by preparing for its coming, giving "voice to what has been systematically silenced" (Crowley, 1989, p. 9).
A deconstructive approach to history invites teaching and learning to be conducted with a
"critical eye/I." A critical eye/I does not just add content from different perspectives, but interrogates what is produced and silenced through the operation of history as a discipline of study (Segall, 2008, p. 123). Segall (2008) stresses that new ways of viewing the past are not necessarily the result of new findings, but rather new ways of interpreting and exploring what is already available (p. 119). Learning with a critical eye/I, invites students to question and evaluate the knowledge they receive and in the process think about who they are within this knowledge.
This in turn provides students with the ability to choose how they are going to read and engage with the material and each other (p. 126).
2.1.3 Historic Space as a deconstructive project for history education According to Paulo Freire (2004) history should be taught "as possibility and not as predetermination" (pp. 59-60), so that students come to realize, paraphrasing David Lowenthal
(2000), that they are not only embedded in time, but are destined to shape it (p. 79). In this sense, as a site where official history is instilled in the minds of up-and-coming generations, history education can be an ideal place to challenge popular (representations of the past and to explore what kinds of possibilities are being (reproduced for the future. The key for transformative history education, drawing on Foucault (1980), is to reinvent the mythic attributes of popular history as strength rather than weakness to give students space to recognize and reinvent its rules
(p. 89).
By providing a "new way of analyzing constructions of meaning and relationships of power that called unitary, universal categories into question and historicized concepts otherwise treated as natural... or absolute" (Scott, 1997, p. 258) post-discourses can contribute to our understanding of who we are in and in relation to the nation. As "a critical, reflexive engagement with existing disciplinary discourses and practices," post-discourses emphasize the fallibility of narrative borders and encourage students to push beyond them (Segall, 2006a, p.
248). As an overarching approach, post-discourses can provide the theoretical tools for students to deconstruct the narrative and understand themselves as subjects, rather than objects of history
(Freire, 2004).
21 As an educational strategy, Historic Space draws on this theory to focus on re- conceptualizing the simplistic, one-dimensional grand narrative popularly taught in schools as maps of historical concepts. Harnessing this simplicity introduces students to the constructed nature of historical narratives, inviting them to play with the construction and reinvent possibilities. Historic Space is about presenting a way to deconstruct knowledge so that it can be understood as a site of power and then provide space for students to reconstruct knowledge and re-imagine power in sustainable, equitable, and personal ways. This involves a deconstruction of the national narrative, but also its individual components. It means understanding history as defined through its parts and understanding the parts as dictated or shaped by power relations.
By deconstructing history, students become invited to predict the pattern of dominant representation, explain the unfamiliarity of certain historical accounts, and assess the absence or inclusion of certain histories over others.
Thinking of history through Historic Space would give students the opportunity to organize historical data, pull it apart, and reorganize it to search for new ideas; in other words construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the historical narrative in ways that make sense to them.
Historic Space provides an opportunity for national history to be a backdrop for discussing internalized judgments dictated by hegemonic understanding and practices and give students space to explore how and why these judgments are made. This strategy implicitly encourages students to think about the connection between what we know and what disciplines this knowledge (Foucault) as well as how insecure a seemingly secure narrative actually is (Derrida)
(see Cherryholmes, 1988 for an exploration of Foucault and Derrida's work interpreted for education). By re-imagining grand, national narratives as historic spaces, a different reading of what history is and can do could open doors for students to explore different ways of understanding and being in the world. In this way, Historic Space is a way of understanding history as a choice between "following prescriptions or having choices" about the past, present, and future (Freire, 2006, p. 48).
Historic Space is a unique concept because conceptualizing history as space provides the space to build and rebuild the narrative of history. Doing this requires a different conceptualization of history than the typical and predictable structure of the grand narrative often signified by the logical and predicable chronological narrative. It requires a metaphoric shift away from the imposed logic of the grand narrative and toward a rearticulation of what history can do and say when not bound to the exaltation of fact. "There is a deep and dangerous purpose in narrating the past" and while, for example, a graphic novel or a play can tell the same story as a novel, how the story is narrated changes the messages that can be learnt (Marker, 2011, p. 98).
Beyond the symbolic links between history and geography to create borders that keep "us" from
"them" (Lawrence, 2002; McEachern, 1998; McKittrick, 2006; Razack, 1995), space insinuates an openness and possibility to chart new ways of reading history and reading the world. Space is social relations "spread out" (Massey, 1994, p. 2) and thinking of history as space allows students to understand the social relations that are structured through the narrative and then be able to (re)create the types of social relations they see. Combining deconstruction with history education does not simply mean placing critical histories and critical thinking onto the grand narrative. It means recognizing the grand narrative as a script for the future, a script that can and should be rewritten to reaffirm new possibilities.
A good metaphor for understanding the idea of Historic Space is to think of word magnets in a magnetic poetry kit. A book can have well-crafted sentences and concise paragraphs, but these organizations of words do not encourage a malleable interaction between the student and what she or he is reading. A student can read a book and see a traditional way of telling a story, but when rearranging magnetic words on a refrigerator, they are in control of what words they want to use, what they want to say, how they want to say it, and when they are done.
By breaking open the grand narrative, confronting omissions and inclusions, and reconstructing a narrative that speaks to the future they need, Historic Space applies these principles to the substantive concepts of history and encourages students to play with history in ways they determine as meaningful. This new purpose for history can result in a greater sense of connectedness between the student and the nation, and give them the tools to articulate a past, present, and future that includes and acknowledges them (Mitsoni, 2006; J. D. Novak, 1998).
This gives students an opportunity to speak in the language of the nation rather than having people speak it to them.
2.2 Meaningful Learning and Concept Learning 2.2.1 Concept learning Although we live our lives at the intersection of many grand narratives, neither postmodern nor poststructural theory has been widely accepted or embraced in mainstream education. For history education, these theories have been criticised as being a labyrinth with no exit, destruction with no solution, life with no opportunity, and an assault to the promise of education (Barton, 2006; Seixas, 2000). Canadian historian Desmond Morton (2000) argued that in decentring the authority of historical texts, a postmodern approach to education would prohibit the maturity that is only gained from working with the authorities in place.
However, I have found that concept learning, an educational strategy based in structuralism and developed in the 1950s, is ideally (and ironically) suited to apply poststructural thought in mainstream education. Concept learning is based on the idea that everything you see, touch, taste, and feel - the building blocks of knowledge - can be identified as concepts. While a structural, instead of a poststructural, approach to knowledge, concept learning helps students
24 make sense of large amounts of information by working with and understanding how these ideas fit together in a grand narrative. In the same way that poststructural theorists used structural ideas of language to begin to deconstruct ways of knowing (see for example the work of Derrida and his interaction with de Sassure's work on linguistics), by drafting the structure of dominant narratives, students can begin to deconstruct them and explore the relationships both in and outside the narratives. It is by making apparent the ways that knowledge is structured that students can then begin to question their own relationship to this structure and what is left out through the logic of the structure.
Concept learning developed from the advances in educational cognitive psychology during the 1950s and 1960s and centres on learning "concepts," the labels for "regularities in objects and events" (Novak, 2010, p. 42). By learning the label, or concept, our understanding of what an object or event is and how the meaning becomes created and interpreted in reference to other objects, events, or concepts deepens (Novak, 1998, p. 21). Historian Claude Belanger
(2000) explained that "we might separately learn about tables, chairs, sofas but the process of learning will be facilitated if we arrive at the concept of furniture." Andrew Hughes (2004) writes that learning through concepts is helpful because "long after we have forgotten the details of the events... there will persist a legacy in the form of the concept" (p. 239).Teaching through concept learning allows for a transmission of the facts and values related to the concepts and also a critical analysis of the way knowledge has become socially categorized and interpreted.
Although not widely used, concept learning has been advocated as a way to address central themes in social studies since the 1960s (Belanger, 2000; Taba, 1966, pp. 34-35). In order to get at the "subjective positions, social boundaries, and... power" that structure students' understanding of their historically situated lives (Gills, 1994, p. 4), concept learning can be a
25 strategy that deepens students' understanding of relationships in history, while working with what the learner knows and how they know it.
Take for example, the concept of "tree." 'Tree" is a classification under which a great number of different types of trees belong. If a teacher begins a lesson explaining the functions of a tree, to produce oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide, then they can get more specific about types of trees and the ecosystems they live in. If a teacher goes straight to talking about the difference between a birch and a maple tree without establishing their conceptual connections, students will lack the requisite base to make sense of more specific knowledge and there is a greater chance they will be lost along the way.
Jerome Bruner (1915-) is most often associated with concept learning, but Hilda Taba
(1902-1967) also made strong developments in this field. Taba's Concept Formation strategy is a three step process that involves concept attainment, interpretation, and application (Bennett &
Rolheiser, 2001; Taba, 1966). This strategy emphasizes listing and classifying previously established concepts and then testing classifications against other classifications. If an educator was trying to teach their class the different classifications of trees, Taba's strategy would have students group together trees that are similar; identify why they are similar, and by extension why they are different than other trees; and apply these principles to classify other things like flowers, animals, or weather conditions. With an emphasis on using the conceptual data to go beyond the concepts, I found Taba's strategy aptly suitable for doing the more critical work proposed by Historic Space.
Concept learning has also sparked the development of instructional organizers like mind maps and concept maps. According to mind map creator Tony Buzan, mind maps are at once note making and note taking activities, based on the premise that "Once the human brain realizes that it can associate with anything else, it will almost instantaneously find associations, especially when given the trigger of an additional stimulus" (Buzan & Buzan, 2000, p. 87). Mind maps are intended to provide this trigger by visually presenting the opportunity for stimulus.
With a guiding concept in the middle, students branch concepts outward with the intention of generating new concepts and making connections between them. Novak's (1998) concept maps on the other hand, have a guiding question at the top of the map and have the remainder of the concepts structured in a hierarchy below. Like mind maps, concept maps are based on the premise of linking concepts with one another, but unlike mind maps, concept maps refine the learner's thinking by linking concepts using words and phrases. These linking words work to define the relationships between concepts because it is at this propositional level where meaning between concepts becomes defined (p. 39). Mind maps lack this more sophisticated dimension leaving in the relationships between concepts to be somewhat undefined. Novak advocates concept mapping as a way to support students' established knowledge while exploring new and different material.
Concept learning is fundamentally about exploring meanings, assumptions, and relations between and amongst things, ideas, themes, and classification. It is about defining and laying bare the interwoven components of that which we think we know, but come to find out we know not at all. At its most political level, concept learning is a form of deconstruction - a way of coming to know what is not by understanding what we know. In her book Transforming Mind,
Gloria Gannaway (1994) makes the connection between concept learning and deconstruction when she writes:
Two of the most difficult obstacles in teaching critical cognitive activity are the students' inability to think abstractly and analytically in order to formulate a concept ... and their inability to deconstruct a concept in order to see its limitations and constitutive nature as well as the potential for destabilizing, rejecting, or replacing it. (p. 155)
27 Gannaway shows that concept learning is needed before deconstructive analysis, so that students learn "how they have formed the ideas they have, how to form new ideas, and how to think deconstructively to keep their thinking open and flexible" (p. 155). Concept learning and poststructural deconstruction share similarities because they gravitate toward three beliefs: reality is constituted by semiotic representations constructed through language and ratified by the majority; the structure of thought defines, expands, but more often, limits one's ability to communicate; and focusing on how thoughts are constructed leads to understanding and
(re)constructing the world we know. This makes an unlikely, but powerful coupling for bringing post-discursive ideas to mainstream classroom practice.
2.2.2 Meaningful learning An overarching theory framing concept learning is Joseph Novak's conception of
"meaningful learning," derived from cognitive psychology. Novak's work draws on David
Ausebel's Assimilation Learning Theory to conceptualize meaningful learning as a goal that moves away from rote learning. Ausubel's theory looks at meaningful learning as a process that involves relating new information to established frames of knowing that the learner must choose to do but which the teacher encourages (Novak, 1998, pp. 51-52). Subsuming concepts, progressive differentiation, superordinate learning, integrative reconciliation, obliterative subsumption, and advance organizers compose the six basic principles of Ausebel's theory
(1962), and although they are also foundational for Novak's meaningful learning, Novak defines meaningful learning with more explicitly transformative goals than Ausubel's theory indicates
(Ausubel, 1962,1963; Ausubel, Schpoont, & Cukier, 1957).
Novak (1998) defines meaningful learning as "the constructive integration of thinking, feeling, and acting leading to empowerment for commitment and responsibility" (p. 13) and states that it requires three things: meaningful material, relevant prior knowledge, and choice of
28 the learner (p. 19). Novak understands the goal of education is "to empower learners to take charge of their own meaning making" and with concept learning, this meaning making becomes explicit. Understanding learning as the constructive integration of thinking, feeling, and acting is an integral first step for the students' "empowerment for commitment and responsibility" in life and learning (p. 13). Novak defines meaningful learning as the opposite of rote learning, which requires no emotional commitment from the student nor connection to their established cognitive structures (p. 19). According to Novak, when students learn meaningfully, new information actively connects to their prior knowledge. However, he emphasizes that there can be no deep learning until the student chooses to associate what they already know to what they are being presented (p. 19). Education must acknowledge and expand what students already know and although students have to make the choice to learn, it is the role of the teacher to facilitate this process while being aware of the cultural, environmental, and political context in which learning takes place.
I found that this definition of meaningful learning speaks to the holistic and personal learning connections that are important for students to be making in their history classroom.
However, while Novak's conception of meaningful learning provides the overall framework to my use of meaningful learning, aspects of his theory are found in many other scholars' works, particularly scholars interested in critical and transformative education theory and reform. Novak
(1998) himself draws parallels between his work and the work of critical educator Paulo Freire in that Freire shows that "the acquisition of literacy led to both increased self-confidence and increased political power" (p. 32) and that meaningful learning has similar results because
"knowledge that we learn meaningfully, that we have constructed from a union of our actions, feelings, and conscious thought, is knowledge we control" (p. 31). In the following three subsections I will look more closely at the three requirements of meaningful learning - prior knowledge, meaningful material, and the assent of the learner - by looking at how other theorists have discussed the importance of these for education.
2.2.2.1 Prior knowledge David Ausubel begins the now classic Educational Psychology: A cognitive view by clearly stating that: "If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows" (Ausubel, et al., 1978, p. ix). Prior knowledge of content and perception has a clear place in students' expectations of learning. Ambrose and her colleagues write that students could have accurate but insufficient prior knowledge or inappropriate and inaccurate prior knowledge, but that these frameworks influence how students will receive and further scaffold new information
(Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010, pp. 15-27). Similarly, Jocelyn
Letourneau (2000,2004) has shown that Quebecois students have an established framework for thinking about the history of Quebec through a common set of cultural references or
"mythistories" that structure young people's historical consciousness (Letourneau & Moisan,
2004). Letourneau and Sabrina Moisan (2004) stressed that unless these stories were acknowledged and replaced "with another representation - equally as strong, probably just as simplistic, and more likely structured metaphorically" these initial beliefs will form the basis of what students take away (p. 119).
2.2.2.2 Meaningful material While Novak discusses many aspects of his theory of meaningful learning, what he defines as "meaningful" material is noticeably absent. While "meaning" is a relative designator for content and student, many Critical Race scholars identify that a culturally responsive curriculum is one that provides greater meaning and relevance to the lives of marginalized,
30 racialized youth; in some ways "isn't culturally responsive instruction just good teaching?" (Au,
2010; Ladson-Billings, 1995).
Culturally responsive teaching is a large body of work that centres on methods of instruction as well as content of instruction (Dlamini & Martinovic, 2007; Gay, 2010; Ladson-
Billings, 1995,1997; Milner, 2011; Roberts, 2010; Young, 2010). These scholars identify that a white, patriarchal system of education is not in the best interest of young people whose cultural and social capital are constructed as "subtractive" to the goals of education (Valenzuela, 1999).
Culturally relevant educators prioritize content that connects with students' lives and histories, stories that have been historically marginalized. African-Canadian scholar Njoki Nathani Wane
(2007) states that "separation from one's past has a direct correlation to one's ability (or inability) to relate to the present. The silence around our [African-Canadians] histories is instructive, reinforcing the message that our histories are neither relevant nor valid" (p. 134).
While these works do not overtly connect with Novak's "meaningful learning" framework, their emphasis on material that has relevance to students' cultures, ethnicities, and identities provides a strong definition for what could be considered meaningful material in history and social studies. One way to bring in this material is through countering the stories that are packaged as stock stories of truth by telling and sharing "counterstories" that challenge the dominant view of the world. These stories "can open new windows into reality, showing us that there are possibilities for life other than the ones we live" (Delgado, 1989, p. 2414).
Counterstories can provide the "necessary contextual contours to the seeming 'objectivity' of positivist perspectives" that exclude the stories of racialized young people (Ladson-Billings,
1998, p. 11) and can "shatter complacency and challenge the status quo" that race-based history was not part of the past (Delgado, 1989, p. 2414). Furthermore, "counterstories" based in an examination of race, gender, and class, can provide a greater critical awareness and "relational competency" (Gay, 2010, p. 21) for all students, providing layers of meaning not found in a standard engagement with material. Thus I have defined meaningful material as material that connects to students' life worlds in critical, and possibly, transformative, ways. Culturally responsive, meaningful material challenges standard stories of what we can know and introduce new, and perhaps more meaningful ways, of knowing.
2.2.2.3 Choice It is one thing to structure history education to make it more relevant and meaningful for students; it is another thing for relevant and meaningful content to be learnt by students. A central premise of Novak's meaningful learning conception, and of Ausubel's subsumption theory, is that students have to choose to learn in order for teaching to have any meaning for them (Ausubel, 1962; Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 1967; Novak, 1998, 2002). Students' choice or motivation to learn can be attributed to a range of factors but it comes down to the students' willingness and trust that the act of learning will not harm their projected or aspirational sense of self.
Herbert Kohl (1994) talks about the active and willed process of choosing to learn or not- learn in his long-essay "I Won't Learn From You: The role of assent in learning." He begins by sharing his initial confusion as to why a student's Spanish speaking grandfather would not take his offer of English lessons and realized that sometimes allowing yourself to know can turn you into someone you did not want to become. Kohl reflected that his own experience of choosing not to learn Hebrew was based on his choice not to isolate his mother from their extended family who only spoke Hebrew. In a similar way, the student's grandfather refused to learn English because he wanted to retain discursive roots to his language and culture outside of where he lived in the United States and wanted this for his family as well (p. 16).
32 The interconnections between power, identity, and knowledge play strongly in Kohl's respectful understanding of students who are often thought of as failures, withdrawn, or defiant.
Instead he draws a picture of these students as active, willful agents in their own self-protection in institutions where there is no "apparent middle ground" by choosing to learn information that challenges one's "personal and family loyalties, integrity, and identity." Kohl (1994) writes that students agreeing "to learn from a stranger who does not respect your integrity causes a major loss of self." For these students, "the only alternative is to not-learn and reject the strangers' world" (p. 16). Willed not-learning is not just about scoring low on an essay or failing to understand a math equation, it "involves closing off part of oneself and limiting one's experience" and can manifest by "actively refusing to pay attention, acting dumb, scrambling one's thoughts, and overriding curiosity" (Kohl, 1994, p. 13). Willed-not-learning is driven by the "conscious and chosen refusal to assent to learn" (Kohl, 1994, p. 41) and demonstrates the strength and agency of the student to maintain their integrity in the face of learning content that compromises their sense of self. The "assent to learn" that Kohl talks about is an essential component for any innovation that is intended to be more meaningful for students. While the conditions for feeling respected and trustful of the learning situation are different for people, research demonstrates how strongly interpersonal affection plays into one's assent or choice to learn.
Meaningful learning needs to connect student's prior knowledge with meaningful material, in an atmosphere in which assenting to learn would not interfere with the student's integrity or safety. While Ausubel developed the initial components of this theory, Novak strengthened them with his advocacy for concept learning and concept mapping (Ausubel, 1962;
Ausubel, et al., 1978; Ausubel, et al., 1957; Novak, 2010). However, other scholars interested in topics reaching beyond cognitive psychology have also identified that prior knowledge,
33 meaningful material, and the assent to learn are important components to learning beyond rote and toward greater meaning and relevance to students' lives. With this theoretical foundation, meaningful learning is a powerful theory for organizing one's practice.
2.2.3 Historic Space: Meaningful Learning, Concept Learning When I first conceptualized Historic Space I did not have the tools to interpret these ideas for classroom use, but I found that concept learning, and the correlating framework of meaningful learning that Dr. Barrie Bennett at OISE/UT introduced me to, were able to bring these big, theoretical ideas to a practical version of teaching and learning (Bennett & Rolheiser,
2001). In particular, I found that Hilda Taba's Concept Formation strategy, with both mind and concept mapping activities, would best align with the ideas of deconstruction I wanted to introduce.
Hilda Taba's three step process involves concept attainment, interpretation, and application (Bennett & Rolheiser, 2001; Taba, 1966). This strategy emphasizes listing and classifying previously established concepts and then testing classifications against other classifications. As discussed earlier, in my Master's research I used Taba's strategy to explore if
Historic Space corresponded to the ways students cognitively processed history (something my museum experienced gestured to (Cutrara, 2007) and other theorists have lamented (Shemilt,
2000) and if harnessing this method of understanding history produced opportunities to explore social justice issues in ways current history pedagogy did riot seem to do.
In 2007, under the supervision of historians Dr. Cecilia Morgan and Dr. Ruth Sandwell, I led five pairs of students through two interview/activity sessions in which I asked them to apply
Taba's Concept Formation strategy to the post-war period in Canada (1945-1975), a period that they should have already studied in their grade 10 history classes. I had them generate concepts about the period by going through a textbook, organizing these concept in lists, spatially mapping the relationships they saw between concepts, before reconciling histories that did not neatly fit into the grand narrative of this period.
With Taba's strategy, I found that students began to see the dominant patterns of representation in the grand narrative and to think about what is excluded at the expense of this coherent national story. This engagement was the result of applying concept learning tools to the substantive concepts of history and giving students space to own their knowledge. Whether the students knew a lot or a little about the period, they all became progressively more comfortable working with the histories through the three steps, resulting in discussions of race, gender, and class within historical representation that students said they were not currently having in their history class.
I also found the ways in which Historic Space was a strategy that aligned with Novak's concept of meaningful learning. Firstly, by brainstorming and generating concepts and by linking those concepts in a simplistic mind map, students began learning history by mapping how and what they know in relation to these historical concepts. This step of identifying students' prior frameworks is often absent in history education with teachers assuming that students know nothing about history or what they do know is inaccurate or based in myth. In my. initial research, I found that students' prior knowledges influenced how they grouped concepts, how they defined and interpreted relationships amongst concepts, and how they interpreted challenges. While there were also some missteps, these moments for revealing prior knowledge were key for students to identify what they already knew and to build their confidence for learning more.
Secondly, through concept learning, Historic Space could be a framework where students could be introduced to meaningful material or material that could be more meaningful once placed in their own frameworks. I found students began to be very protective of their mind and
35 concept maps, wanting to incorporate material I introduced to them and committed to finding the right ordering of what is significant and defining why. When I introduced material that was intended to challenge a popular concept of the map, students demonstrated a greater awareness of the exclusion (and inclusion) of some historical moments over others, making their introduction, awareness, and ultimately learning about these moments more meaningful to their overall learning.
Thirdly, when having the maps that they created as the foundation for more or expanded learning, students were provided with a greater choice to go forward and commit to building and developing one's map and one's knowledge of history. They had to activate their knowing and their learning in order to be successful with the material. By putting the control over the organization of the content in the hands of the students, I provided greater choice to learn and demonstrate the respect for the student's choice. While working with two students who seemed reluctant to lose face in front of one another, I found that they gradually assented to participate in the activities when they saw that not participating would be a greater embarrassment than choosing to participate.
Finally, Historic Space is a framework in which students' learning should predominate, so other instructional methods that could more actively bring together thinking, feeling, and acting can be used through this strategy as well, especially when students are expanding their knowledge. Bringing in movies, literature, and music, along with role play and enactments, can all be methods that encourage students to think, feel, and act with meaningful historical material, that they can connect to their prior knowledge in an atmosphere that felt safe enough to learn.
36 2.3 Relationships in the Classroom The theoretical basis for instruction is only as good as the way it is practiced. Teachers have tremendous power over content and climate of a classroom with or without the
"instructional intelligence" to support their decisions (Bennett & Rolheiser, 2001). In this section
I will review some of the tenets that frame my perception of the teaching and learning relationship, specifically approaches to history teaching, dialogue and respect, and ethics of care.
2.3.1 Teachers and their approaches to teaching My initial work on Historic Space had focused on the student and their learning; however, after reading Susan Dion's book Braiding Histories (2009) I realized that any exploration of the dynamics of Historic Space would have to also focus on teachers and their teaching. Harris and Haydn (2006) found that what students are taught, how they are taught, and by whom they are taught indicates students' enjoyment and interest in history (p. 321). In her research on history education in Canada and Australia, Anna Clark (2009) found that students were drawn to history because of its complexity and not any sense of national duty (p. 758).
While student-centred models like "emergent curriculum" are designed for younger students
(Wein, 2008), the older students get and the more they need to explore their world, the more prescriptive the curriculum becomes. Students are looking for a chance to say their opinion, especially when teachers are supportive of what they had to say (Biddulph & Adey, 2003, p. 298;
Mitsoni, 2006). Approaches such as discussion and debate, group and pair work, drama and role play are approaches that students said boosted their enjoyment of history (Adey & Biddulph,
2001; Biddulph & Adey, 2003; Harris & Haydn, 2006). But while Harris and Haydn (2006) said that these types of teaching methods figured strongly in students' articulations of what they liked to see in history class, there were no indications of how often they were used. Their research indicated that while some teachers see these tactics as "fun," students find them essential to their
37 learning. Teachers often stay away from these tactics as a way to manage the classroom and maintain control of the way the content is received, which may stifle content or activities that could challenge their control and their performance as teachers within their own classrooms
(Dion, 2009). As James Loewen (1996) writes, a teacher saying 'I don't know' "violates a norm," and in losing control of the answer a teacher is fearful of losing control of their authority in the classroom (p. 287).
Studies have found that regardless of what they learn in their teacher education program, teachers approach their classrooms with a purpose they defined before becoming a teacher
(Bullough & Pinnegar, 2009; van Hover & Yeager, 2007). In their research, van Hover and
Yeager (2007) traced one teacher who had been introduced to the historical inquiry approach to history teaching, but when she began to teach on her own, these strategies were absent from her practice. They found that the teacher's purpose of teaching the "truth" while fostering "empathy and sympathy in students" was the driving force for deciding how and what to teach regardless of what she had previously learnt (p. 278). Teachers often encourage the retention of problematic narratives over inquiry or exploration because keeping these narratives intact is easier and less professionally contentious than challenging them (Letourneau & Moisan, 2004).
Thus, it could be argued that perhaps one of the biggest limitations to bringing in new material or ways to study history lay with the teachers themselves, and their frameworks and comfort in confronting the content, the students, and the pedagogic task that may be outside what they know. Dion (2009) found that despite having resources that could have challenged how we understand Aboriginal history and our own biographies within these stories, teachers in her study would use their "expert systems of knowledge" to stress a discourse of "good teaching" and pastoral care over the critical reading of details and how they may invite us to know and see that which we could not previously see. She found that attending to the "oppressive actions of the Canadian government, as the stories required" would have exposed "cracks" in the teachers'
"scaffolding" (p. 100); thus the teachers erred on the side of safety and classroom control and stressed the care of students and building good citizenship over knowing themselves and their biographies in these stories. While the teachers were proud of their lessons, Dion argued that the
"didactic recounting of factual events and a nurturing of an empathetic response from students, limits engagement with difficult knowledge and avoids conflict," countering the new ways of attending to Aboriginal histories the stories were meant to suggest (p. 99). Similarly, history educator Linda Levstik (2000) found that "when faced with accommodating a more diverse student population, [teachers have a] tendency to celebrate relatively minor, non-threatening differences" removing any discussion of power and privilege from the discussion and
"inadvertently present[ing] students with stereotypes [that] misrepresent the past and current circumstances" (p. 297).
2.3.2 Respect, dialogue, and love How one approaches one's material is also predicated on how one understands one's students and the work of education. Many researchers, especially those who do work in urban education, stress the importance of listening to students in educational encounters and placing their needs first (Bergmark, 2008; Blady, 2011; Cornelius-White, 2007; Ferguson, Hanreddy, &
Draxton, 2011; Housee, 2010; Mitsoni, 2006; Schultz, 2011). How this can be achieved is different for all teachers, but many agree that it begins from a place of respect that can develop into the classroom being a place of, and for, dialogue that recognizes and appreciates what students have to offer (Schultz & Banks, 2011). In particular, educational theorists Paulo Freire and bell hooks both paint models for creating a classroom based in community, dialogue, and respect. These frameworks provide a basis for how I envision a classroom and the work that has to be done to achieve this.
39 Freire begins his now classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed by saying that dehumanization is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Dehumanization, or the denial of humanity by one group over another, contributes to and justifies a stratified, systematic oppression, which then seems both natural and inevitable (Freire, 2006, pp. 43-45). For Freire, the intent of education should be to restore humanity, to understand our value as separate from the oppressive reality that serves the interests of the powerful, and do so in a way that is in solidarity with others.
However, Freire stresses that this is not happening in education because the educational system is designed to maintain the stratified system of oppression. As a "ready-to-wear approach [that] serves to obviate thinking" (p. 76), schools mimic an oppressive social structure with teachers posed as omnipotent information clerks at the front of the room, with students passively and patiently listening and mechanically memorizing that which has been deemed worthy knowledge.
In the "banking system of education," a concept that may be regarded as Freire's most widespread contribution to educational theory, the role of students is to receive, file, and store the "deposits" of information and to be rewarded for their ability to do this. In this system, the world and students' lives within it are fixed as static, with the curricula emphasizing a sense of permanence isolated from the world outside the classroom. The more students work at storing the deposits, the less they develop a critical awareness to intervene and challenge the world around them. Freire emphasizes that this approach to education encourages the dehumanization of people because it begins with an understanding of students as Objects. Neither students, nor the adults they grow up to be, are understood as humanized subjects with worthy prior knowledge who can be trusted to build on what and how they know. This system of education stifles creative thought and maintains the system of oppression to the benefit of those in power
(Freire, 2006). Freire advocates that a "problem-posing approach" to education is a way of shifting from a banking system of education in that it is "based on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action" (p. 84). One of the most important elements of this approach is the continuous use of dialogue between educator and student to leam from and with each other. This is a shift between talking at students and talking with them (Schultz & Banks, 2011, p. 51), and can lead to a greater sense of empowerment over knowledge and one's oppression. Freire argues that dialogue is the essence of revolutionary action and is garnered through cooperation, unity, and cultural synthesis (pp. 167t183). Speaking, listening, and coming together is a logical consequence of a horizontal relationship of mutual trust and provides the foundation for transformation and critical thinking (p. 91). Freire counts antidialogue, talk without listening, as the tool of the oppressors that is achieved through conquest, divide-and-rule, manipulation, and cultural invasion (pp. 138-
158). On the other hand, love, humility, faith, and hope are the precursors for dialogue, making it an act of courage, freedom, and commitment. Freire emphasizes that, if nothing else, the problem-posing approach is about dialogue with and for each other about how and what we think, leading to understanding of our differences and an awareness of our similarities.
Similarly, bell hooks emphasizes the themes of love, democracy, and critical thinking as the foundation for teaching and learning in her book Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical wisdom (2010). hooks emphasizes that we learn best when there is an interactive relationship between teacher and student, where the teacher recognizes and responds to what the students need (p. 19). For hooks, teachers should court a sense of self-love in their students by leading by example and developing students' self-esteem. In her "teachings," short essays on an array of connected topics, she refers to this love in many ways - integrity, spirituality, passion - but it all comes back to the idea that a profound and emotional sense of care and commitment to the material and to each other should form the foundation for education. For hooks, love makes education fundamentally about the responsibility to serve and engage freedom and democracy, hooks defines love as the interdependent combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, and she emphasizes that teaching with love allows teachers to get to know students for who they are and to lead them in the passionate pursuit of knowledge (p.
159).
hooks argues that central to the fulfillment of education as a practice of freedom and democracy, is building a community of learners where collaboration, dialogue, conversation, and the sharing and telling of stories form the basis for learning, hooks counts collaboration as the most effective form of dialogue, leading to "a new language of community and mutual partnerships" (p. 41). Like Freire, hooks writes that the future of education lies in the cultivation of dialogue, or learning though a model of conversation and storytelling, hooks understands conversation as a form of giving, a cooperative enterprise that exchanges knowledge and power, and is nurtured through active listening and sharing. Although institutional power prohibits equal ground for teachers and students to stand on, hooks stresses that teachers' hierarchical positions do not have to result in domination (hooks, 2010, p. 114), even as this power dynamic has traditionally worked to silence and objectify youth (T. M. Brown & Galeas, 2011). By encouraging critical thinking, teachers can fulfill the role of leader who nurtures dialogue and collaboration, and provides "the appetizer before the main meal" (hooks, 2010, p. 63 & 68). hooks stresses that while critical thinking is needed to break through constraints of an oppressive system of education that does not nurture critical thinking or democracy, a community of learners led by a loving and passionate teacher can provide the mindful space to explore the
(im)possible in a classroom. This vision of education breaks with the tradition of learning as private, individualistic, and competitive and stresses the importance of teachers for courting a passion for knowing and learning. For hooks, critical thinking becomes a form of engaged pedagogy that restores students' will to think and respond to knowledge. It empowers learners and encourages them to change their mind by expanding their knowing. In other words, it is the
"intensification of mindful awareness which heightens our capacity to live fully and well" (p.
185). This is done through collaboration, respect, and care.
2.3.3 Ethics of care Nel Noddings is often cited as the godmother of the ethics of care in education, although her work can be situated in a larger history of feminist engagements with philosophy and morality in education during the 1980s (such as Gillian, 1982), as well as connected to generations of scholars before her that stressed the importance of teaching to and acknowledging the whole child in schooling (such as Dewey, 1971). Noddings (1984,2005) writes of care as a reciprocal relation between carer and cared-for that is complete when cared-for accepts the care that is being extended. She stresses that schools have an obligation to care and to "be responsive.
To listen attentively and to respond as positively as possible," which are the "very hallmarks of caring" (Noddings, 2005, p. xiv). However, schools often let down this version of care by caring about knowledge, rules, and conventions over care for the students (Noddings, 1984, pp. 21-23).
This aesthetical caring is in contrast to ari ethic of caring, which is grounded in the fundamental belief that "The living other is more important than any theory" (Noddings, 2005, p. xix emphasis in the original). As a step away from one's self to engross one in the other (Noddings,
1984, p. 16 & 17), an ethic of care is future-orientated in that it begins where "an ethic of justice often ends" (Noddings, 2005, p. 147).
While Noddings contributions to the theoretical construct of care in education cannot be underestimated, she acknowledges that some of her critics feel that she places too strong an emphasis on the recipients of care in the caring relations, a criticism I too share, especially when she describes that the caring relation may not take place because of the cared-for being
43 "stubborn, insensitive, or just plain difficult" (Noddings, 2005, p. xv). Instead, the caring relationship in a classroom is in fact "asymmetrical;" the "burden of vulnerability" is on the teacher because the "the teacher cannot control exactly how students will relate to them, interpret their actions, or understand the basis for their relationship" (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2009, p. 249).
Bullough and Pinnegar go on to state that "the student is ultimately the one who is in control, judging whether or not the teacher is loving" (p. 249).
Noddings' conception of care also lacks a contextual analysis of gender, race, and class that explores the power related to the acceptance or denial of care and the ways her conception of care is based in a white, maternal trope that does not adequately respond or reflect the needs of communities of colour (Antrop-Gonzalez & De Jesus, 2006; Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002,2005;
Pang, Rivera, & Mora, 2000; Rolon-Dow, 2005). While Noddings does not focus on culture,
"culture counts" (Gay, 2010, p. 8), and Pang, Rivera, and Mora (2000) argue that "because much of caring involves the building of relationships among teachers, students, parents, and other community members, culture must be an integral aspect of the caring framework" (p. 27). While teachers will not often overtly discuss issues of race in their conceptions of care, they use a
"strategic rhetoric" to talk around it, supported by dominant "stock narratives" of "meritocracy, individualism, objectivity, and equal opportunity" (Rol6n-Dow, 2005, p. 91 & 93).
Angela Valenzuela's work Subtractive Schooling (1999) is often paired with Noddings' ethic of care, especially by scholars interested in race and education, to expand Nodding's conception of care to be more responsive to students from communities of colour. Valenzuela begins by questioning why so many students say that "no one cares" when teachers are continuously saying how much they care. She argues that schools create a "subtractive" culture in which students' cultures, and ultimately themselves, are constructed as deficient and in need of patronizing care. Schooling as a subtractive process "divests these youth of important social and cultural resources, leaving them progressively vulnerable to academic failure" (p. 3). Central to Valenzuela's argument is an expanded view of Noddings' definition of aesthetic caring to stress questions of "otherness, difference, and power" that Noddings' work over looks. These questions are key in the ways they "reside within the assimilation process itself' and shape the landscape of possibilities for the Mexican youth Valenzuela worked with (p. 25).
One focus of Valenzuela's (1999) work is the way assimilationist school policies help shape teachers' performance of care into a patronizing, charitable, deficit discourse, where white teachers feel "sorry for" and want to "mother" students of colour (see also Jennifer Hauver
James, 2012). An attention to the alignment with race and care discourse, what some scholars refer to as a "critical care" (Antrop-Gonzalez & De Jesus, 2006; Rolon-Dow, 2005), can be more aware of the racial and class dynamics than Noddings' framework of care suggests. Studies with a focus on race indicate that students want to be cared for as students, but also as members of cultural communities (Garza, 2009). In this way care as a member of an extended family is often used as a metaphor for researchers working with Latino/a and African-American students
(Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002; Garza, 2009). Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2002) writes that "womanist" teachings, a care that comes from communities of colour, in particular by African-American female teachers, is grounded in political clarity and an ethic of risk that comes with it calling out social inequity.2 It is with trust and mutuality that care can be a political act where teachers and students "can begin critical dialogue about complex, emotional, and controversial social issues dealing with racism, gender bias, classism, and other social oppression" (Pang, et al., 2000, p.
30).
2 Beauboeuf-Lafontant also writes that a "womanist" approach to care is also based in a material tradition of African American communities. The link between maternalism and teaching is an entirely different body of literature and while I think that Beauboeuf-Lafontant provides strong evidence to support her point, a longer analysis looking at the intersection of mothering and care for/in communities of colour is needed in order to give this argument justice. See for example James (2012). Emotions are an integral aspect of education (Aultman, Williams-Johnson, & Schutz,
2009; Bullough & Pinnegar, 2009; Goldstein & Lake, 2000; Isenbargera & Zembylas, 2006), and what is understood as "care" means different things in different situations, although often pre- service teachers enter into the teaching profession with preconceived ideas about care (Bullough
& Pinnegar, 2009; Jennifer Hauver James, 2012), which are often "dream-like" (Goldstein &
Lake, 2000, p. 870). For example, Duncan-Andrade (2004) argues that a care for urban students means recognizing and respecting their popular culture; Picower (2009) writes that care can involve a truthful exploration of one's deeply held racist beliefs; and Ellerbrock and Kiefer
(2010) write about the actualization of a ninth-grade transition program as providing opportunities to care. Antrop-Gonzalez and De Jesus (2006) stress that care must involve high expectations for success, although not in the form of high-stakes testing but as "communicated through the patient investment of time and the creation of reciprocal obligations between students and facilitators as an important and active form of social capital" (p. 426).
I align with Bullough Jr. and Pinnegar (2009), who refuse to define care in a way that creates a prescripted set of behaviours and responses, which "can be easily enumerated and perhaps operationalized as rules of practice" (p. 245). Care is not "natural or effortless"
(Isenbargera & Zembylas, 2006, p. 123), although it is often perceived to be (Bullough &
Pinnegar, 2009; Goldstein & Lake, 2000). Essential aspects of care are acknowledgment and personal interest in the other and what she or he brings to the table (Aultman, et al., 2009, p.
637), and respectful interactions communicating the belief in students' self-worth (Pomeroy,
1999, p. 477). Care cannot be thought of "simply as an interpersonal, dyadic, and apolitical interaction" because "to see caring in such terms is to disregard its potential for communal engagement and political activism" (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 83). Instead, thinking of care as the motive and realization of acts that are "powerful to the degree they lack strategic intent, are authentic, and communicate to the other their interdependence and interrelationship"
(Bullough & Pinnegar, 2009, p. 247) is a way of realizing care-full relationships in teaching.
Caring is an "intervention" to "support, listen, value, relate, affirm, and engage students in the classroom" (Garza, Ryser, & Lee, 2009). Along these lines, Engster (2005) defines the virtues of care as attentiveness, responsiveness, and respect (pp. 54-55).
Noddings is right that care is a relation in that the approach to and perception of care is not a one-size-fits-all approach that fits regardless of the people involved in the caring. Care that is healthy and respectful for both the carer and the cared for means that the situation has to be assessed and the response determined to make it fitting for the individuals involved.
2.4 Conclusion In this chapter I have outlined the three areas of literature that inform this thesis: poststructuralism and history, meaningful learning and concept learning, and possibilities in classroom practice. Together this literature supports the concept of Historic Space as a way to think about history education that decentres the grand narrative and instead places students and their learning first. Historic Space is instructionally interpreted through concept learning, with the intent to produce meaningful learning opportunities with deconstructed and reconstructed historical narratives. Any classroom practice, however, is contingent on the teacher and how she or he constructs their role in the classroom and the purpose for studying history. With these bodies of literature in place, this research project aims to understand what is possible in a history classroom when the approach to the material is focused on meaningful learning with a poststructural approach to history.
47 Chapter 3: Methodology
To understand how Historic Space could be put into practice in the classroom, I used a
Design-Based Research methodology (DBR) to explore the application of Historic Space in four high school history classes in the Toronto District School Board over the course of one semester
(A. L. Brown, 1992; A. Collins, 1992). I was interested in collaborating with, as well as observing and interviewing, both teachers and students, along with tracking the content covered both before and during the Historic Space intervention. I used a mixed-methods approach to data collection, with a preference for qualitative research methods, in a three phase research framework for each class. In this chapter I will introduce my research design, including recruitment process, data collection methods, and analysis framework. I conclude this chapter by discussing some limitations and ethical considerations of this work.
3.1 Design-Based Research The purpose of my research was to observe and understand the ways in which relationships in a history classroom could enhance or reduce the possibilities for critical, meaningful learning when an innovation that has been shown to provide these opportunities was applied in a classroom setting. Looking at the history of educational research, I found that there were methodologies for testing an innovation, but that these instructional or resource innovations traditionally took place within the confines of a lab. Influenced by the "cognitive revolution" of the 1980s - a movement that stressed that knowing is a complex process that builds on a student's previous knowledge and that is mediated through their various subject positions
(Kreitler & Kreitler, 1976; Miller, 2003; Olson, 2007) - researchers began to conduct their research in the naturalistic setting of the classroom. This type of research, labelled design science or teaching experiments, built on the understanding that teaching and learning were
48 complex processes that were situational and never fully predictable, and that any research about them should reflect these intricacies (A. L. Brown, 1992; A. Collins, 1992).
In the early-2000s, this methodology gained a resurgence and a new wave of educational researchers began championing Design-Based Research, or DBR, as a viable and important research paradigm for collaborative, classroom research in all disciplines (Barab & Squire, 2004;
Design-Based Research Collective, 2003). Part-action research, part-ethnography, and part- grounded theory, DBR has a distinct focus on classroom research in an effort to develop theory about teaching and learning in real-life environments. DBR can be understood to be a mixed- methods "living methodology" that organizes one's research (StefFe & Thompson, 2000, p. 273)
"with the intent of producing new theories, artifacts, and practices that account for and potentially impact learning and teaching in naturalistic settings" (Barab & Squire, 2004, p. 2).
DBR has explicit parallels to participatory action research where the primary researcher and participants, or "co-researchers," collaboratively identify a problem and develop a cyclical method for planning, acting, and reflecting on a solution (Esterberg, 2002; Lewin, 1946; van den
Akker, Gravemeijer, McKenney, & Nieveen, 2006). However, also drawing on ethnography,
DBR has a focus on observing to gain an understanding of the classroom as a system (Cobb,
Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003, p. 9). DBR is also interested in developing practical theory developed within a real world context (van den Akker, et al., 2006). Thus DBR has roots in grounded theory defined within an educational context (Charmaz, 2007; Glaser &
Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1997). In other words, as a flexible research framework, DBR attempts to understand how an innovative learning and teaching strategy works within the
"buzzing, blooming confusion" of a classroom (Barab & Squire, 2004, p. 4) through observing the culture of the classroom, adapting the strategy to this culture, and developing theory about teaching and learning based on its success or failure. Informed by these three approaches, DBR can be understood to be based in a naturalistic context, interventionist, iterative, and has the duel goals of refining both theory and practice (Barab & Squire, 2004; A. Collins, Joseph, &
Bielaczyc, 2004).
I found that this explicit methodology for research in classrooms was an important framework for engaging in the research I wanted to conduct: I could observe the classroom in a cycle of testing an innovation I brought in, while working with and respecting the work of both teachers and students, all with the intent of generating theory that could be applied to a larger schooling context. While I originally was interested in working in five phases with two cycles of intervention, the time constraints meant it was better to work in a three phase framework with only one Historic Space intervention bookended by a preparatory and wrap-up period. Each phase was intended to correspond to one unit or historical period; however, in three out of the four classes, we did not have the time to make the wrap-up period a distinct unit and this phase instead consisted of collecting questionnaires and conducting interviews.
3.2 Recruitment I was initially interested in recruiting two Grade 10 Canadian History teachers who taught at mainstream secondary schools in Toronto. I wanted to work with teachers who had an interest in critical theory, student voice, and instructional innovation, rather than a teacher or class that was identified as particularly difficult or outstanding. I prepared an informational handout that I posted on my website (See Appendix A) and made a series of cold calls and emails to history departments in the city. I did peer outreach to my networks, discussing my research on a popular blog for teaching and learning history and sent out emails to people I knew who were connected to formal schooling. 1 also contacted the head of History and Social Studies for the Toronto
50 District School Board, and she endorsed the research, allowing me to use her name when calling schools and suggesting teachers and/or schools where the research might be welcome.
Despite a series of phone calls with a half a dozen mainstream teachers, it was two cold emails to alternative schools where I connected with teachers who were interested in being part of the research. While neither "Renee" at "Bestway Alternative" nor "Zoe" at "Three Bells
Alternative"3 currently taught the grade 10 history curriculum, they both taught upper level
Social Studies courses that they thought may be a good fit. In Renee's Grade 12 West and World course we decided to collaborate on the French Revolution unit, which had an average of five students attending over the course of the semester. In this class, I received a total of eight consent forms from students who were enrolled in the class. In Zoe's Politics class, we collaborated on a unit about Colonialism and Imperialism, which had an average of four students who attended the class. In this class, I received twelve consent forms.
I also had a colleague who introduced me to a friend who taught grade 10 history at a mainstream high school. "Erin" at "Caledonia Collegiate" also mentored "Veronica," a junior teacher at Caledonia, who taught another section of the same course and mirrored Erin's lead.
Both teachers were willing to participate in the research and we planned on using the Post-World
War II unit as the focus of our research intervention. In Erin's class of 22 students, I received eight consent forms and in Veronica's class of 31,1 received ten consent forms. As will be discussed in the final section on ethical considerations and limitations, the informed consent process was alienating to some students, and thus along with the official conversations of consent, the informal conversations I had with students also inform this research.
3 All names and identifying information has been changed to protect the privacy of participants. I created pseudonyms for the teachers and schools, but encouraged students to define their own pseudonyms as a way of connecting them with the research
51 3.3 Data Collection For this research I had three foci of data collection across three phases (See Apendix B for a breakdown of data collection in this research design). Focusing on the teacher, students, and content during the observation, intervention, and wrap-up periods provided a structure for data collection and a way to address the multiple elements of the research. Similar to methodologies such as ethnography, action research, and grounded theory, I was interested in gathering data that was primarily qualitative in nature and from a diverse selection of sources. As such, data collection included semi-structured interviews (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008; Spradley, 1979), group interviews (Basch, 1987; Kitzinger, 1994, 1995; Krueger & Casey, 2009; Warr, 2005), questionnaires (Galasinski & Kozlowska, 2010; Leung, 2001), participant observation (Spradley,
1980), video recording, journaling, and text collection (A. L. Brown, 1992; Squire & Barab,
2004). In this section I outline the data collected for each phase.
3.3.1 Phase one: Observation In the first preparatory phase, I attempted to understand the context of each class by being in the school, gathering information and talking with the teacher and students, and observing how regular classes are run. I wanted to understand the teacher's approach to teaching history and how the students perceived and received the content and methods. I was particularly interested in seeing if possibilities for critical social justice were currently present in the class and what the expectations were of the teacher and student for realizing these possibilities. I went into this phase questioning: Who were the teachers? Who were the students? What did they expect from history? What was possible in current classroom practice? and how could we collaboratively go forward in realizing this intervention in a way that made sense for each of the classes?
52 3.3.1.1 Teachers: Surveys and interviewing The main sources of data for this phase were surveys and interviews with both teachers and students. Questionnaires can be a valuable method to collect a large amount of comparable quantitative and qualitative data (Bauman & Adair, 1992; Galasinski & Kozlowska, 2010), and for teachers I used them to collect any demographic data that could be a starting place for our initial interview (Appendix G). I followed up the surveys with a semi-structured interview to gain an understanding of the teacher's experience and opinions related to history teaching, the theory behind Historic Space, and the research in general (Appendix H). These interviews were between 60 to 90 minutes in length, audio-recorded, and took place in a comfortable, mutually agreed on space outside of the teacher's classroom. Interviewing is a common research method that allows participants to speak about their experiences in a more focused environment (Kvale
& Brinkmann, 2008; H. Rubin & Rubin, 2005; Spradley, 1979). Indeed, interviewing turned out to be preferable for the teachers to writing responses to similar questions on their own time.
Using a model of "conversational partnership," the interview questions were open-ended and descriptive, which was intended to prompt instead of prescribe response (H. Rubin & Rubin,
2005). This form of interviewing allowed me to modify questions based on the teachers' responses and dig deeper into interesting or important topics that came up (Smith & Osborn,
2003, p. 57).
3.3.1.2 Students: Questionnaires and group interviews Participatory action research in classrooms is not new, but students have often been constructed as passive receivers of the practice or program rather than active co-researchers (T.
M. Brown & Galeas, 2011; Miskovic & Hoop, 2006). However, DBR developed in the spirit of student involvement. Brown (1992) unequivocally stated that she wanted "students to act as consultants, to be co-investigators of their own learning" in a DBR project (p. 165). Thus it was important to ensure that students' ideas were integrated in the intervention and the resulting theory. As was the case with the teachers, data collection for the students in this phase consisted of questionnaires and interviews; however, unlike the teachers, data collection with students was intended to be slightly less personal and stress both individual response and group interaction to mimic the interactive learning environment they are exposed to in class (Warr, 2005).
After introducing the research and collecting informed consent forms, I arranged for 15-
20 minutes of class time to distribute and collect questionnaires from students who had returned signed consent forms. This questionnaire had 20 questions about students' experiences learning history. The questions were opinion-based and included a mix of open- and close-ended questions in both multiple-choice and short-answer format and were not directed toward the individual teacher (Appendix I). On the final page of the questionnaire, there was a request to discuss the questions from the questionnaire in an informal, voluntary, out of class group interview. Because public school learning is both an individual and social process, focus groups can mirror the spaces in which students learn, acting as a bridge between their "personal experiences and social context" (Warr, 2005, p. 222). Focus groups rely on the interaction between participants to explore, expand, or "layer" the understanding of issues; thus the focus groups expanded on the information expressed on the questionnaires and explore issues beyond them in a format that encourages communication between participants (Kitzinger, 1994, 1995;
Krueger & Casey, 2009; Warr, 2005). Any students who indicated their interest were invited to a 45-60 minute group interview with food and drink provided. A total of 15 students across the three schools signed consent forms and participated in these initial focus groups (Appendix J).
All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed.
54 3.3.1.3 Planning This preliminary planning phase was also about planning for the upcoming intervention.
While I had wanted to run two phases of intervention - one structured with me providing the lesson plans and the other semi-structured with the teacher creating the lesson plans - the abbreviated nature of the research meant we only had one semi-structured intervention, with the teacher and me collaborating on how the steps I identified would be achieved. In this phase I worked with each teacher on how we would interpret Historic Space during the intervention phase, agreeing on topic, timeline, and approach with the knowledge that this could change at any time. The teacher was ultimately in charge of what took place in the class, with the understanding that the plan could, and did, change because of a range of factors, such as teacher or student absenteeism, school-wide events, and more time needed for the activities.
3.3.2 Phase two: Intervention The next phase of the research was the intervention phase. Historic Space was a framework that intervened in the usual approach to the content and as such was meant to change the classroom dynamic to put a greater focus on students' meaningful learning in class.
In the intervention phase, I collected data by being a participant-observer in the classroom, writing .field notes about my perceptions of how the class ran, and video-recording the majority of the classes to review at a later period. I also requested that teachers and students write journal entries throughout the intervention. The central questions for this phase were: Did
Historic Space get interpreted and/or received in the ways I expected from my previous research
(Cutrara, 2007)? What was similar or different from what I initially expected and why did I think this was? Were there any changes to teacher/student relationships or teacher/student reception of content that I observed from the preparatory period? Did teachers or students notice any changes
55 to how they approached the material or the classroom relationships? What were some similarities or differences across the four classrooms?
3.3.2.1 Participant observation, field notes, and video recording While observation and field notes were elements for the observation phase, being a participant-observer in the class and writing field notes following each class became a central feature of the data collection for this intervention phase. I had planned on being in each classroom about once a week but wound up being in the classrooms more than once a week and contacting the teachers on the days I was not there. With each teacher, and in each class I attended, I negotiated the best role to take in the classroom. I had proposed to the teacher that I would be a participant-observer in their class, but whether I participated with the students, the teachers, or I even taught the classes was essentially left up to an evolving assessment of what the teachers and students wanted and needed. Generally, I assisted the teacher in the class by walking around and helping students with their work or by providing a different perspective or instructions for assignments. The idea was to participate in the class community rather than positioning myself as outside the community, but do so following the teacher's lead with the students' best interest in mind. In this participatory role I felt that I was successful: students treated me like another teacher in the class and the teacher would sometimes defer to me in running the more technical aspects of the research.
While acting as a participant-observer, I took ethnographic field notes and wrote memos on important questions to return to in analysis (Charmaz, 2007; Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2005;
Spradley, 1980; Strauss & Corbin, 1997). These notes served an analytic purpose of working through the layers of what I was observing and doing in the class, with an eye toward the grounded theory I wanted to develop (Charmaz, 2007, p. 80). I also collected teacher's
56 pedagogical resources, such as lesson plans, hand-outs, worksheets, and PowerPoint presentations.
Another source of data was video record of the classes during the intervention period. I originally intended to video-record the classes when I would not be present; however, during the observational period I realized that so much happened in one class that it would be helpful to video-record all the classes, even the ones I attended. The video camera was set up at the back of the class out of the way of the class proceedings. Although teachers and students were aware of the camera, sometimes saying it was "weird" or "awkward," it was placed in a location that was not intended to interrupt the class. To engage students in the process of the research, on the days
I was not in class I arranged with students to set-up and dismantle the camera. This created an increased sense of interest and bond between some students and research4 and also lessened the administrative duties I asked the teacher to perform. While I was responsible for the cameras during the research, the video cameras were donated to the teacher's department at the conclusion of the research.
3.3.2.2 Journaling As a way to collect data on the experience of teachers and students during the intervention, I had wanted them to write journals to reflect on the process and product of the changes. Many teacher educators suggest that journaling can be a reflective way to expand and develop one's teaching practice (T. Ryan, 2005), and in this research I wanted teachers to journal as an opportunity to reflect and respond to the Historic Space intervention. However, being aware that reflective practices are sometimes hard for teachers to achieve, I proposed a "one- sentence journal" (G. Rubin, 2009) to make it easier for the teachers to complete. I provided a
4 This was a strategy that Dr. Jennifer Jensen used in her research although this method is not outlined in her publications.
57 generic question for teachers to reflect upon in their journals, but encouraged them to write at least one-sentence on any matter related to the class or research in their journals about three times a week. While the teachers agreed to journal, teachers often did not complete the journals after each class and instead post-dated them at the end of the intervention phase with a simple description of the class. This made the journals a less helpful source of data than I originally envisioned. Casual conversations with teachers after class became more helpful than the textual reflections, and I kept track of these conversations and questions in my field notes.
Similarly, I also wanted to collect data on student experience in weekly journals. I had hoped that each week in a pre-arranged 20 minute block of in-class writing time, I would distribute a writing prompt, giving students a chance to write about their perspectives of the way the class was running (See Appendix K for sample prompts). I had wanted to gather an average of three journals entries per student over the course of the intervention. Because of time constraints, however, I only collected one to two journal entries per student in each class. While not as many as I had hoped, they did provide a valuable source of data in regards to students' opinions. The result was that the journals for both teachers and students were used as a comparison to the other sources, but held less weight than interviews and notes.
3.3.3 Phase three: Wrap-up While the phases were intended to be distinct, the bounds of the intervention period often bled into the final wrap-up period. It is in this phase where the "clumsiness of research" was most apparent (Drake, 2010, p. 87). In the wrap-up period I repeated the questionnaires and interviews with the teachers and students, but did not get a chance to observe any classes. The school board mandates that external researchers had to be outside the classroom by June when the teachers started preparing for cumulative assignments and final exams; thus once we were done the intervention I left the schools in a research capacity. In this phase I questioned: What did the teachers and students think about the Historic Space intervention? Did teachers and students think or feel any difference between the Historic Space intervention and their standard educational practices? Were there any changes to classroom practice that could provide more opportunity for meaningful learning? Did meaningful learning opportunities happen in the classroom?
3.3.3.1 Teachers' and students' questionnaires and interviews In this phase I once again interviewed teachers in a semi-structured one-on-one interview
(Appendix M) and students in a group interview (Appendix O) and preceded these conversations with a brief questionnaire reflecting on the specific activities and content we covered
(Appendices L and N). I interviewed three out of the four teachers in June on their own time once exams were over. The less frantic pace of the school year meant that these more relaxed conversations were somewhat more reflective than any formal or informal discussions we may have had during the intervention period. Like the first interview, these interviews were approximately 60-90 minutes in length and took place in a mutually agreed upon space. For the students, the final questionnaires and interviews all took place in May before they had completed their final assignments or exams.
3.4 Analysis Drawing on DBR, I used Grounded Theory as a broad analysis methodology with the aim to generate theory from practice (Charmaz, 2007; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin,
1997). Using a constant comparison method to ensure the analysis was firmly grounded in the data, I aligned with a more constructivist approach to Grounded Theory, an approach advocated by Charmaz (2007) that stresses complexity over taxonomy when developing theory (Cresswell,
2007). To manage the multiple sources of data I collected during research, I chose to focus my
59 analysis on interviews, field notes, and surveys because of the more direct ways I felt these sources narrated the experiences of the research. Journal entries, video recordings, and instructional material became sources of reference and comparison during analysis, but were not analyzed with the same depth.
Directly after each interview, the audio files were sent for outside transcription. After receiving the completed transcripts, I listened to the audio to annotate the text based on my memory of intonation and body language. At the end of the research period all the edited transcripts were printed out and hand-annotated for interesting comments or themes. After these read-throughs, I proceeded with a mixed-methods approach to analysis. While a mixed-methods approach to analysis may seem to diverge from a scientific rigor, approaching the process of analysis with both "flexibility" and "creatively" makes it both an art and a science (Corbin &
Strauss, 2008, p. 47)
For student questionnaires and interviews I used a line-by-line coding method where I tracked utterances and themes that emerged from the data (Charmaz, 1995). I decided on this analysis approach after recognizing similar topics that emerged from the interviews and questionnaires with the 45 students across four classes.5 After an initial open-ended in vivo coding, I gradually moved to focused coding where the themes and concepts that kept emerging became the focus of my third (or fourth or fifth) read through, using Excel as an organizational tool (Meyer & Avery, 2009). This allowed me to "create and to try out categories for capturing
[my] data" figuring out the categories that spoke to the range of experiences and expression I was coming across (Charmaz, 1995, p. 40).
51 began this analysis while on a Visiting Doctoral Student Grant from THEN/HiER and was supported in this initial analysis by Dr. Carla Peck at the University of Alberta
60 While this method was effective for analysing the student transcripts, I felt stunned with this approach for the teacher transcripts. For these data sources, I felt drawn to a more interpretive approach to analysis where I could abstain, at least at first, from categorizing and measuring utterances, and more toward exploring patterns and processes in an attempt to understand the content and complexity of those patterns (Charmaz, 2007; Savenye & Robinson,
2004, p. 1060; Smith & Osborn, 2003, p. 66). For the teacher interviews I used an Interpretative
Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore how teachers made sense of their world and how I made sense of what I hear and see from them (Smith, 1996,2009; Smith & Osborn, 2003). In this sense IPA produced a "double-hermeneutic" that combined an empathetic hermeneutic with a questioning hermeneutic (Smith & Osborn, 2003, p. 53).
After an initial analysis, transcripts of the interviews were given back to the teachers along with a working thesis and a summary of themes. I asked teachers to identify any comments they might want withdrawn or clarified, and encouraged them to discuss with me any areas that they were particularly concerned with. Some teachers took the opportunity to clarify or withdraw some comments, as well as took the invitation for a further conversation about how I read and interpreted the data. However, very little was changed after these reviews and the comments I received from the teachers were helpful and encouraging.
While I tried to get in touch with students through their teachers, encouraging them to get in touch for more information, none of the students contacted me for more information or to see the transcripts.
3.5 Research Sample In February 2011,1 recruited and began working with four teachers across three schools in the Toronto District School Board. I recruited the teachers sequentially, but between March
61 and May I worked with them simultaneously in testing the Historic Space innovation in their history classes. In this section I will introduce the four teachers and the three schools.
3.5.1 Bestway Alternative: Renee The first teacher I worked with was "Renee" at "Bestway Alterative." Bestway was an alternative school housed in a small section of a larger mainstream school. Bestway had approximately 170 students enrolled but no more than 60% attending in a given term. Similar to other alternative schools in this school board, Bestway welcomed students between 16 and 21 and many of these students had attended two or three schools before coming to Bestway. I learnt from some of the students that not all the students came to Bestway from another TDSB school.
Often they came from private schools or specialized programs. Although sharing the same building, little to no interaction happened between the mainstream school and Bestway. While the larger school had a more visible multicultural population and had 28% of the students who had lived in Canada for under 5 years, Bestway's student population were mainly naturalized
Canadians with only 2% who had lived in Canada under 5 years.6
Renee was the oldest of the four teachers, although she had comparable teaching experience to the other three teachers. Renee had worked at Bestway for seven years and had just recently been promoted to a more senior role in the Social Studies department. Renee was a
White woman who had identified her upbringing as working class and had taken African-
American studies in University. She had taught Arab Studies and Genocide Studies and identified that one of the most controversial classes she had taught was on homosexuality in
African history. Renee's previous teaching experience had been in a mainstream high school in an affluent neighbourhood and she had also been an occasional teacher while completing her
6 Information about the schools were found through the TDSB school profiles found online with demographic information gathered in the spring of 2008. However, with respect to keeping the confidentiality of the research sites, full page citations will not be given.
62 Master's the year previous. Renee was fully supportive of the alternative learning opportunities that Bestway promoted. Renee stated that she was interested in participating in the research because she wanted to develop her own skills on mind and concept mapping, and also wanted to develop university contacts for her long-term plan of writing textbooks or teaching teacher candidates.
Renee responded to a cold-email I sent to her after speaking to an administrative assistant at the school. Renee was teaching grade 12 West and World that term, and we agreed to collaborate on the French Revolution unit that we would focus on after March Break. Bestway ran small classes and the West and World course was no exception. The class had ten students enrolled, but had an average class size of five throughout the term. Because all the students were over eighteen, I was able to collect consent forms from all the students I interacted with, with eight forms and five students participating in the interviews.
3.5.2 Caledonia Collegiate "Caledonia Collegiate" was a large high school with a population of over 700 students and housed three academic programs, which interacted, or were intended to interact, in common areas such as the cafeteria, library, halls, and some classrooms. At this school, I worked with two teachers, "Erin" and "Veronica," who both were teaching grade 10 history in the mainstream program. Caledonia shared many similarities with the pseudo-named school "Maple Heights" featured in Daniel Yon's book Elusive Culture: Schooling, race, and identity in global times
(2000) in that the school is constructed by many teachers as being in a state of adjustment because of the large(r) population of students of colour compared with the students from times past. Yon writes that in his site of research:
Maple Heights was grappling with change, a struggle that confronted entrenched models of what the school used to be that was often articulated in terms of an imaginary coherent school identity now
63 fragmenting under the impact of cultural pluralism and competing interests. " (p. 30)
At Caledonia, discussions about the perceived stable past compared to the present student population underlain many of the teachers' staffroom discussions about the students. One teacher rationalized that it was the students' "Caribbean culture" that resulted in a laidback approach to schooling, which caused the problems of low attendance and lack of work completion. In reality, like the school in Yon's research, the comparison between the students of the present and the past was moot at best. The majority of the students at Caledonia were students of colour and while teachers would refer to the student as immigrants, according to the 2008 figures, less than
15% of students at Caledonia had immigrated to Canada, and 60% of students' primary language was English. The numbers, as well as my observations, indicate that the majority of the students were actually first or second-generation Canadians who spoke and communicated in English; but because they were visible minorities, teachers viewed their students as immigrants with no solid
Canadian roots.
3.5.2.1 Erin I was introduced to Erin, a teacher at Caledonia Collegiate, through a mutual acquaintance. Erin had taught for six years, her whole teaching career, at Caledonia. Erin had previously been an educational bus tour guide for schools trips and this experience was foundational to her identity as a history teacher. Erin was a White woman whose family had been in Canada for generations. She had very strong ties to the traditional Canadian story and referenced her family's involvement in the two world wars and post-war suburban life as examples of history being personal. Erin was very active in the Caledonia community by leading, volunteering, or just being present for a range of extra-curricular activities such as international fiindraising, student leadership retreats, and a school reunion. Erin often worked on these
64 projects throughout lunch, afterschool, and on weekends, sometimes working 12 to 16 hour a day to fit everything in.
Erin was very proud of herself as a history teacher and described herself as the type of teacher who would stand on her head or dress up in role to drive a lesson home. She said: "I'm very dynamic and it's fun to watch. They used to compare my teaching to back to back episodes of The Simpsons because you just have to be on your toes all the time" (1TCK219). She was interested in talking about pedagogy and always strove to improve or enhance her instructional methods. Erin talked a lot about her university education and how she was particularly well suited to teaching Canadian history because of the courses she took in university and the appreciation she was able to develop about history and primary sources. She said that while many people think it is easy to teach Canadian history, in fact they often lack the experience and appreciation that she has developed for it. Her enthusiasm and commitment have also been recognized and awarded on local, provincial, and national levels.
Erin categorized her grade 10 Canadian history class of 25 students as her "crazy" class.
While this was an Academic-level class, many of the students who had been streamed into this one class were performing lower than an Academic level. Erin had been assigned this "difficult" class because of her success and enthusiasm with other classes. Students were chatty, not overly academically inclined, and harboured resentment, and thus resistance, toward education in general and history in particular. The students could often be flippant, dismissive, and rebellious in class, but when listening and watching them closely, they also seemed bored, needy, and astute. They continuously rejected the historical content Erin presented, but asked, even demanded, to learn more Black history, history that aligned with many of their ethnic heritages.
The distrust of history and of school meant that the students were not overly keen to participate
65 in the research. I received only eight content forms from the class, with three students participating in the interviews.
3.5.2.2 Veronica Erin told me that she was currently mentoring a first year teacher and that this other teacher, Veronica, would participate in the research as well. Although I was a little concerned that the teacher may not have felt she had a choice in participating in the research, in talking with her directly she said she was happy to participate although she did not know how much she would be an equal collaborator.
As a first year teacher, Veronica had a lot of enthusiasm but was overwhelmed with the professional learning curve it took to adapt to being a full-time teacher. As a White woman who grew up in a suburb outside Toronto, she commented that the school population was different than the predominantly White, culturally-homogenous neighbourhood she grew up in and that there was a learning curve in presenting history students who did not identify as being Canadian in ways she understood Canadian-ness. Although Veronica was admittedly overwhelmed and exhausted, she got on well with the other teachers in her department and often collaborated with them on lesson ideas and class management strategies. Veronica felt guilty about the amount of work she borrowed from Erin and anxious to develop her own confidence and independence in her teaching practice. Having a mentor to guide her through the year seemed very helpful for her teaching and at one point she estimated that it would take about five years for her to feel fully confident in her teaching.
While the same grade and academic level, Veronica's class was much more subdued and less rambunctious than Erin's. In comparison to Erin's class, Veronica's class was able to stay on task and work independently. Other than a few students with sporadic attendance, Veronica's students seemed less distrustful of school and the teacher, and while they also found history
66 boring, they just wanted to get their mark and move on. Veronica's class was larger, with 31 students, and despite a cold reception when I arrived, I received ten consent forms with three students participating in the interviews.
3.5.3 Three Bells: Zoe The final teacher I worked with was Zoe, whom I also contacted via a cold-email. Zoe worked at "Three Bells Alternative School" and had four years experience teaching in the
Toronto District School Board. Zoe had worked at Three Bells for two years and was fully committed to the experience of alternative schools. Three Bells was housed in a small building adjacent to a large mainstream high school and a more formal school environment than Bestway.
Three Bells had just over 100 students enrolled, and unlike Bestway with its flexible course schedule, classes ran everyday broken up into two terms, with a half day once a week for school and community planning. According to the TDSB's website, all of the students at Three Bells had been in Canada for at least five years and less than 15% of the students had a primary language other than English.
Zoe was a very passionate teacher with explicit radical politics. She was a White woman who identified that she always participated in different forms of activism spurred on by politically active family members and adult role models. In high school, Zoe found that learning history validated her anger toward the world she saw around her and empowered this anger to become passion for action. Zoe took issue with the institutional framework of teaching and questioned the motivations and responses of both the Board and the province in addressing the needs of students.
Zoe was teaching a grade 11 politics class that term and had scheduled a unit on
"colonialism and imperialism" that she had planned on starting in April. Because of the historical elements of this topic I suggested that this would be a good unit to collaborate on and I sent her a
67 stack of lesson plans and resources we could use. While Zoe was quick to respond to the email inquiry, her interest in providing research access to alternative school settings and not necessarily on kinship to the research objectives, thus it was often hard to follow up and jointly plan the unit.
As such, the research realization was the most prescribed in her class compared with the others.
I spent the least amount of time at Three Bells and as a result got to know the students the least as well. However, while my impression of the students at Bestway was that they struggled with school because of emotional or psychological issues, at Three Bells students seemed that they had struggled with mainstream schooling because of behavioural or legal reasons. For lack of a better word, the students at Three Bells seemed "rougher" in demeanor and bravado than the students at Bestway, and took a little more time letting their guard down with adults and/or authority figures. In the class of ten students, attendance varied between completely full and almost empty. All the students were over 18, and I received twelve consent forms, with four out of the twelve from students from another class who sat in on the initial interview.
3.6 Ethical Considerations and Research Limitations
This research was conducted after a full ethical review by both York University and the
Toronto District School Board. After an introductory letter to the Principal, the teachers, students, and, if they were under 18, the students' parents all had to sign a consent form to participate in the research (See Appendixes C-F for sample letters). Levels of participation were identified for the students so they could choose to participate in the interviews but, for example, not the video recording.
The consent forms, however, also limited the participation of many students who did not initially trust me, did not understand the research, or who were discouraged by paperwork. While informed consent is important, the ways that were available to inform and to receive consent
68 meant that many of the racialized urban students under the age of 18, or the majority of the students across the two classes at Caledonia, did not participate in the research in ways that I could privilege and acknowledge their unique voices and perspectives in this final work. I was told by the teachers that most of the students' parents worked full-time and it was hard to get a hold of them for academic business. Taking the time to read, question, and sign the consent forms for this research was understandably not how students imagined their parents spending their time at home. In this I, like British researchers Marion Jones and Grant Stanley (2010),
"may have privileged those children whose parents/carers possessed the 'social and cultural capital' enabling them to engage in the research process (Bourdieu, 1986) and to recognize the value of this exercise (McNeal, 1999)," with the effect of excluding "the voices of those very children we had wanted to include" (p. 157). By the end of the research I felt a greater sense of trust from the students and would have liked to have opportunities for them to be able to share, on record, their perception of history education and any changes they saw during the intervention. However, their experiences are discussed through my views of their classroom interactions in order to still acknowledge their important contributions to the class and this research.
Along with the limitation of not being able to talk with all students, another limitation to this research is the small sample size. Working in two alternative school classes and two mainstream classes meant that there were obvious points of comparison about alterative schooling and mainstream schooling, but the sample size is too small for any solid points of generalizable comparison.
Finally, it is important to emphasize that this research is a discussion of individual teachers and their classes at one particular moment. While there are teaching and learning moments that can be extrapolated from analysis, these unique moments do not tell the "truth"
69 about what happened, but instead provide one story of the teaching and learning that took place in these classes, a story that is intended to speak to larger issues of importance to students' learning of history. However, I recognize that this work is an interpretation, incomplete and subjective, based on my own history and the stories that I am drawn to (Drake, 2010, p. 86).
Nevertheless, it remains a story important to tell because of how it highlights the gaps between philosophy and practice in teachers' understanding of their own work as well as the ways in which students can fall through those gaps leaving them alienated and isolated from content they want so desperately to understand and learn from.
70 Chapter 4: Students' Desires to Learn History
With different interests, backgrounds, and experiences in school, it would be a reasonable assumption to make that students who participated in this research would have very different expectations and needs from a history class. However, across all four classes students articulated their desire to learn history in very similar ways. These finding align with other work in this field that demonstrated students' interest in learning history (Adey & Biddulph, 2001; Biddulph &
Adey, 2003; Clark, 2008,2009; T. Epstein, Mayorga, & Nelson, 2011; Harris & Haydn, 2006;
Haydn & Harris, 2010; Mitsoni, 2006), even as public opinion continues to circulate that students to not know, nor care, about history (Chalifoux & Stewart, 2009; Granatstein, 1998).
Students in this research stated that they wanted to learn history in ways that encouraged them to think, feel, and act with meaningful material, although this is not how they have experienced history education. Students' desires to learn history align with Novak's (1998, 2010) definition of meaningful learning and demonstrate the need to focus more closely on what students think and want from their history education.
In this research, in their surveys, interviews, and behaviour in class, students actively resisted an approach to history teaching that denied their ability and desire to construct meaning about the past for the present. In a similar way to students in other research, the students in this research "readily" and "boldly" (Mitsoni, 2006) discussed ways to make history teaching more meaningful, and in this they were:
not apathetic or unreflective. On the contrary, they were very thoughtful in their responses and had definite opinions about effective teaching and meaningful learning. They exhibited insightful understanding of what constitutes meaningful, rich, and active learning activities, and how those activities foster their engagement in learning. (Ares & Gorrell, 2002, p. 264)
71 Students' desires to learn and their articulation of what can help them learn should be a central voice in the "complicated conversation" of curriculum (Pinar, 2004). In this chapter I use the voices of students to outline what meaningful history education could look like for them, specifically by exploring their ideas about instruction, content, and classroom climate.
4.1 Involved Instruction Research has shown that students make a distinction between active and passive ways of learning history and repeatedly indicate their preference for active instruction (Adey & Biddulph,
2001; Ares & Gorrell, 2002; Biddulph & Adey, 2003; Harris & Haydn, 2006; Haydn & Harris,
2010). Novak (2010) writes that for learning to be meaningful the learner must be given the opportunity to think, feel, and act with material. The constructive integration of thinking, feeling, and acting leads to a sense of commitment and responsibility and is contrasted to rote learning that promotes a sense of inevitability with knowledge and learning (Freire, 2006; Novak, 2010).
However, even though active, involved instruction provides students with the opportunities to learn meaningfully, Harris and Haydn (2006) found that it is not clear how often these strategies are used in a history class. Both McNeil (1988) and Yilmaz (2008) found that while teachers were supportive of inquiry-based, learner-centered instruction, in practice their history teaching was almost always teacher-centric. Teachers have a tendency to see active instructional strategies as fun add-ons to the real work, even as students assert they are essential for their learning (Ares
& Gorrell, 2002; Harris & Haydn, 2006; Kinchin, 2004).
Students in this research repeated these results in that they too wanted more active and less passive ways of learning history. While I did not see the textbook being used in the classrooms I worked in, in all four classes students commonly earmarked textbook teaching as the type of passive instruction they were used to seeing and did not want. Students viewed the
72 textbook as "evil" (3SBW138June) because of how it suggested a linear, unimaginative, and stagnant view of history. The use of the textbook caused one student's anger because she had an
issue with textbook work that assumes that... 'this is the text and this is what happened, memorize the dates and this is how it went down' and there's no real discussion about like, 'okay, what was the other side of that?' Or like 'who wrote this textbook?' (3SBW031 &033Nicki)
Another student said that learning from a textbook made the topic "boring and dead" and that students were "not into it" (1SCX 134 Anneka).
Students identified that the textbook left them passive and alone in their learning, discouraging any invitation to process the information on their own terms. Francis, at Three
Bells, said that his past experiences in history class were "dry," because:
...it was basically 'read this passage out of the textbook, here are the questions for it.' And there was no like in-depth conversation; there was no 'can I ask you questions about it.' It was kind of just like you're fending for yourself. And it's like, how do you leam that way? Like I didn't find it useful for me at all. When I had a conversation about something I can get more out of it. (3STB 004)
Francis' desire to be asked questions about the material indicates his interest in being a participating member of the class; but he found that the use of the textbook as a dominant teaching strategy denied him the opportunity for this participation. When a teacher relies on the text for their teaching, few opportunities are available for students to negotiate meaning. Francis identified that when teachers invited him to think about the material, he gained a greater sense of mastery and interest in the topic, which he found central to his learning.
When using the textbook predominates as a teaching method, and students are not able to be active participants in class, students identified that they resisted the passively they expected by tuning out of class. Disengagement may seem to indicate the students' disinterest in the subject, but students linked forms of disengagement to the passive way their past history classes were being taught. Misty at Caledonia said, "If you're reading from a textbook it's just more like
73 you doodle or whatever, it's boring" (1SCX 021). Similarly, John also at Caledonia said that with the textbook work students are "just sitting there being bored and just like texting or just writing in your notebook" (1SCX 174). At Bestway, Mike said that when the textbook predominates "people are just going to fall asleep or just not pay attention or just go on their iPods or think about other stuff and they completely miss out on what happened" (1SBWm 025).
While he recognizes that this will not lead to learning, the students' comments suggest that disengagement is intended to resist instruction, but not learning itself. Knaus (2009) found that when students actively reject instruction, "their rejection comes in the extreme form of dropping out, but can also be seen in hands glued to cell phones, to stepping in and out of class, to in-class disruptions, or to simple glazed over eyes as a student 'checks out'" (p. 137). McNeil (1988) writes of a "defensive" pact between many teachers and students that if the students behave in class the teacher will not ask much of them. This pact, however, leaves students isolated from the learning process and resentful of the class.
Students' resistance to passive teaching methods indicates their interest in being active thinkers in the class and in this the students in this research are not unique. In Ares and Gorell's
(2002) research they found that "the overriding message from students is that active learning, rather than passive listening, reading, and note-taking, draws them into subjects and deepens their understanding and appreciation of what they are learning" (p. 270). An approach to teaching that prioritizes students' desires to challenge, discuss, and work through ideas is teaching that leads to learning; whereas teaching that prioritizes a one-dimensional, text-based script of memorization leads to boredom and resistance of the class and subject. Misco and
Patterson (2009) write that:
because textbooks are so often treated as the fountainhead of curriculum and content knowledge is treated as an end, not as a means, they contribute significantly to isolated and meaningless learning experiences.
74 (p. 76)
Students are perceived as hating history because their experiences with learning history have shown that there are few opportunities to engage with the content (Almarza, 2001). In this research, the prevalence and weight of students' comments about textbooks - they often lowered their voices and bodies when speaking about the textbook, as perhaps a subconscious indication of the way the textbook drags down the class - suggests that it is the way the textbook is used as a substitute for teaching that is the real root of animosity toward history education and not necessarily the subject itself.
Students at all three schools also talked about their interest in class discussion as a strategy for learning history. Hess (2010) outlined that research on discussion frequently demonstrates that teachers dominate conversation with their own opinion and ask inauthentic questions, so that the contributions of students are often unequal and lacking depth (p. 207).
However, in this research, students talked little about these problems and instead identified discussion as an important way for them to think through "the complicated discussions of a complicated world" (Hess, 2010, p. 208). Rather than being passive note-takers, students were interested in being active thinkers in the class. One student at Caledonia said that during class
"you want to be part of the discussion more often instead of just sitting there being bored"
(1SCX 174 John). One student at Three Bells recalled a class where they had a passionate discussion as "probably the most interesting for me and I know a lot of other people are more interested in that class than they were most of the other ones" (3STB 079 Francis). With discussion, learning becomes something more than a one directional flow of content; in discussion, students can play give and take with the content, each other, and their opinions, to build a contextualized understanding of history with her classmates.
75 Connected to their interest in discussion was students' desire to learn within a community: a community in which they learnt not only from the teacher but from their peers; a community where they could be both learners and knowers; a community where they could think and be accountable for their thinking. Aron at Bestway said that it was not just discussion that made class interesting, but discussion with a group of people that resulted in him getting more from a lesson. He said:
I really like discussions when it comes to history. I think it's more effective than getting students to write individually from the textbook out questions, but to give a question to a class and have an open discussion or thought period, because I think that's a lot more stimulating for where other students are coming from and other people's ideas can build on your ideas and help formulate a better perspective on the issue. (lSBWa 042)
Although Aron had an interest in university-seminar style teaching, other students who were less academically inclined also expressed an interest in having "open discussions" with others in the class. Misty, a low-achieving student at Caledonia, said that in a history class:
You get interested when people talk from their perspectives cuz it's the whole class, so then you get interested in it, and if every class is like that then even students that don't like history, as myself, they'll probably find it more interesting. (1SCX 172)
Misty's classmate Bianca agreed that the involvement of your peers made class worthwhile and interesting, and identified that in discussion students would "have more questions because we leam from each other" (1SCX252). These comments highlight the importance of being able to think and talk with others while learning history and show that these conversations can correlate to greater interest and involvement in class. Being able to work in a community of inquiry where you can get help from friends has been shown to positively affect the classroom environment (A.
M. Ryan & Patrick, 2001).
76 Instead of thinking about the learning task as independent or isolating, students at all three schools talked about the importance of situated, communal learning in which they could think and learn from their peers as well as their teachers, and where they could be acknowledged as knowers with valuable information to leave and last with the class (see also Ares & Gorrell,
2002). John at Caledonia said that when teachers do not know something they could "open up discussion so anybody that knows anything could help, and then whenever her next year class, or a class besides ours, then she would know, and then we would be able to help her help another class" (1SCX 084). Misty also talked about learning from and with other students when she gave the example of:
I'm an African-American girl sitting in the class and the girl next to me she's White or whatever. And me and her have two different histories, and maybe we can learn from each other. She could go home and ask her grandparents, her mom or somebody about their history, and I could go home and ask people in my family about my history. And we could come back and exchange information. And then we'll be more knowledgeable. (2SCX 379)
Misty identified that ways to learn about history, race, and ultimately themselves, topics that teachers often stay away from (Almarza, 2001; Epstein, 1998; Levstik, 2000), can come from sharing and listening to and with each other. It is the "exchange" of information that would get students to "be more knowledgeable," as Misty says above. This finding confirms other research in this area, which has found that "classrooms that align more with a community of learners perspective in which students actively construct their own knowledge (Sawyer, 2006), specifically through more group work and less lecture, results in greater student learning"
(McNeill, Pimentel, & Strauss, 2011, p. 27).
Novak writes that for meaningful learning to occur, students must be able to feel and act as well as think and discuss. Students echoed this finding and discussed their desire for instructional strategies that allowed them to affectively and physically connect with the material.
77 This was most prominently demonstrated by students in their discussion of role play as an instructional strategy; but it also came out in students' evocation of writing-in-role or watching movies. Students discussed these more affective learning strategies as essential to their learning because of ways they allowed them to personally interact with the content. This interaction provided opportunities for a deeper and more personal connection with the material and a way for students to emotively and actively negotiate meaning.
History is often presented as a parade of facts, but history teaching and learning can be enhanced through historical empathy or "perspective taking" (Peck & Seixas, 2008; Seixas,
2006). Davis (2001) defines historical empathy as "enriched understanding within context," which
arises or develops from the active engagement in thinking about particular people, events, and situations in their context, and from wonderment about reasonable and possible meanings within, in a time that no one can really know... It is robust, touch, and insightful even as it is imaginative, and it is always based upon available evidence. (p. 3)
The most prominent advocate for historical empathy in history was Misty at Caledonia and her interest in role play. Misty was incredibly interested in role play as an underused, yet important way to learn history. In talking about her need for variety in her history class, Misty said:
...the week after that a role play. Let's stand up and be the person, and that way you can feel it. And that way when you're writing the tests it's like 'how do you think people felt in the 1940s? How did you feel when you were standing at the top of the classroom?' (2SCX 034)
Misty's connection between role play and assessment suggest that her emphasis on feeling and acting in history provides an opportunity for her to be prepared to respond to questions in an assessment situation. Misty said she enjoyed the role play activity we did in class because "you got to read what the person was about and then tell it how it is. Like, how you would feel, like your anger and your tone. Kind of play with it a bit and you got to step out of your own
78 character" (3SCX 128). Drawing on Davis' definition (2001), Misty became actively engaged in role play, which enriched her understanding of "what the person was about." She was able to
"step out of her own character" to insightfully look at the evidence and determine how and why that person would be angry and what this would look like if she was in the situation. With an activity such as this, Misty felt that she was able to gain a better understanding of the material because she used historical empathy to think through the material. In other words, it was not the performance that held the key for Misty's learning; it was the process of imaginatively and insightfully negotiating meaning of new content that held the key to her learning.
However, it is not just dramatic presentations that could achieve the affective and fun connections that role play seemed to signify: for some students, writing-in-role and watching movies achieved the same affective connection. Jorge at Three Bells recalled that his past experiences of writing-in-role were exciting because he could "let my mind really wander." He explained that "because I'm really into war movies, seeing war movies and then being able to like put it down on paper what I think like maybe someone's experience was. I just really enjoyed being able to like let my mind wander and really get into it" (3STB 053). Students talked about movies as a way of bringing them closer to the material because the connection between seeing and feeling was a strategy that they used on their own to enhance their learning.
Students already learn history as an "image" (Moss, 2010) from TV and movies (Fink,
2004; Rukszto, 2003), so the use of TV shows and movies in history class could possibly invite a more critical reading of a period in history (Seixas, 1993b, 1994). In support of the greater use of movies, one student said that in learning about a topic "it would be good if we saw a movie about it, so we actually, like, got to see their experiences, like, hearing their quotes on the paper.
It was like you understood it, but it would be better if you saw it, so you actually knew"
(2SCX84 Anneka). Although her friend challenged her by saying that students like movies because they do not have to do work, Misty stressed that, "when the teacher comes back and asks questions of certain people that don't really participate, you'll have a little bit more hands saying
'this is what happened in the movie. I understand this'" (2SCX 110-111). Both Anneka and
Misty recognized that for their peers, and probably themselves too, being able to watch the interpretation of an experience provided an affective understanding of the content, which can result in greater engagement and understanding. Anneka said that when learning from a movie, the emotion
... grabs you and you want to pay attention. And then you develop feelings and then you would be more passionate with your answers. You would be like, 'I saw this da-da-da because' and then we'd have discussions and debates about it. (2SCX 114)
For both Misty and Anneka it is the emotion that encourages them to pay attention, think, and discuss. For these students, a movie provided the groundwork for discussion of how it made them feel, which can open up the gates for thinking and meaningful learning.
While these instructional activities are meant to evoke emotion, they are only as effective as the ways they provide opportunities for students to think for themselves. Jorge's classmate
Nicki said imagination and feeling were part of the process of learning, but that she was not always open to learning in this way. She recalled that she had an issue with the way her previous teachers presented a writing-in-role task because her teacher stressed a patriotic connection to the material that she did not support. While the teacher wanted Nicki to be affective in her learning, he did not actually want her to think, just repeat the information affectively. In the same vein,
Mark at Caledonia stressed that "if I'm watching a movie I can't just go, 'okay, can you explain it better for me?' [others laughing, in agreement] And it's not like the TV is going to be like,
'yeah, yeah, yeah.' So I can't be clear on what I'm learning" (1SCX 148). In emphasizing tests and memorization, Mark indicates that he is a student for whom emotions alone do not constitute
80 learning. Combined with Nicki's comments, these students show that it is not just the use of media or an affective strategy that results in good learning but the way it is presented and allows students to think which indicates its effectiveness.
In this section I have outlined what students have indicated they wanted from instruction in their history class. Students are clear in wanting to be taught with methods that invite them to think, feel, and act with historical material and that these active instructional strategies are essential to their learning. These findings align with other research in this area and indicate the strength of students' desires to be active participants in class. However, students also identify that they most often encounter history at school through passive instructional methods, specifically the textbook, and they resist these forms of instruction by tuning out and turning off from class. Students articulated that they wanted to learn history meaningfully by constructively integrating thinking, feeling, and acting when learning history even though this is not taking place in the history classrooms they have been in.
A correlated component of this discussion is content. Novak (2010) writes that for meaningful learning to occur students need meaningful material and that this material needs to connect to their prior knowledge (p. 23). In the following section I look more closely at what constitutes meaningful material for students and how it can connect with what students already know.
4.2 Connected Content The desire to learn content that connected to their interests and identities outside of school was a strong theme that emerged from surveys, interviews, and my observations from class. Novak draws on Ausubel's subsumption theory to state that for learning to be meaningful, the material needs to have significance and connection to students' prior knowledge (Ausubel,
81 1962; Novak, 1998,2002,2010). However, the lack of interest in content is one of the top reasons students state they dislike history. Research shows that students in the United States,
Australia, and the United Kingdom find that the history they learn in school is devoid of this meaning and connection to their lives (Almarza, 2001; Clark, 2008; Harris & Haydn, 2006).
Students in this research also stated that they wanted to learn historical content that was interesting and connected to their lives, but that this content was rarely featured in class.
What constituted "interesting" material meant different things to different students, but there was a consistency across the four classes for using the adjectives "interesting" and "boring" to describe historical content. For some students interesting historical content was linked to their interests outside of school; for others interesting meant the content was tied to current events; others labelled content interesting when it connected with their racial or gendered identities or reflected and contextualized the cultural and ethnic diversity they saw around them. With all these conceptions, the commonality was that interest was tied to content that had significance to who the students were and who they were becoming in the world. Students also had different emotional needs related to these connections: for students who wanted content to connect to their interests outside of school, it was often a way to quell boredom; but for students who looked to content to connect and validate their personal or racial identities, it was a way to build more significant connections between the material, their selves, and families.
Studies have shown that students are drawn to history because of the complexity of stories from the past and not some form of national allegiance (Clark, 2009; Levstik, 2000). Most often, however, the mandated history students cover in school transforms these complex stories into "school knowledge" devoid of "real world" context and connection to students' lives
(McNeil, 1988). Kent den Heyer (2011) writes that in Canada, the "Canadian Grand Narrative tells a story of Canada as if the story were the past itself, unencumbered by interpretation of selective amnesia" (p. 159). This "selective amnesia" is essential to school knowledge because
"school knowledge" is
an artificial set of facts and generalizations whose credibility lies no longer in its authenticity as a cultural selection but in its instrumental value in meeting the obligations teachers and students have within the institution of schooling. The potential richness of such content as historical events, and their interpretations and the conflicts inherent in economic systems, are flattened into the lists, slogans and mystifications that defensive presentations comprise. (McNeil, 1988, p. 191)
This disconnect between students' interests in learning history and the one-dimensional history taught in schools drives the apathy and resentment of history education among students, leaving students in a subtractive position for learning and being in the world (Valenzuela, 1999).
In Ontario, students are required to take one history class during high school. "Canadian
History Since World War I" fits under the Canadian and World Studies curriculum and is offered as either an academic, university stream (CHC2D) or an applied, workplace stream (CHC2P)
(Ontario Ministry of Education, 2005). Because the written curriculum identifies overall objectives teachers have to meet and not specific content, this Canadian history course can be interpreted in a variety of ways; most often, however, the course is flattened in the same way across the province. Across Ontario, the grade 10 history course is spent mostly on World War I and World War II, with a brief reprieve to cover the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, before ending someplace in the 1960s by looking at the Cold War and changing social structures.
The way the Grade 10 curriculum is popularly interpreted invites a chronology without connection to the present and isolates opportunities for students to understand the historical context of how they came to be in the present (see Clark, 2008 for a discussion of this in the
Australian context). Students cannot see themselves within a decontextualized national story; and the emphasis on this content in their history classes turns them off from learning history. Misco and Patterson (2009) write that "learning experiences which lack meaningful connection to the
83 present and reinforce student demoralization contribute to a sense of banality that is heightened when students have no clue where the information or story is heading" (p. 74).
Students at the alternative schools, Bestway and Three Bells, articulated strong connections between learning about the past to contextualize the present, but this explicit connection may have been because they were not currently taking grade 10 Canadian history.
One student at Bestway said she liked when they started talking about current events because it
"helps you relate history to your life and what's going on in the world right now" (3SBW221
June). In the surveys, many students identified that learning about current events was an important purpose for studying history. One student wrote: "I think it's important to learn about history because it informs us about current events and where the world is and how we got here"
(1 STB Survey). Another student wrote that the purpose of studying history was "to have knowledge to deal with current World Issues" (1SBW Survey). Another student articulated that,
"history explains a lot about current society and events. History allows us to view modern issues and problems in a different context by teaching us how, why and what factors are involved"
(1SBW Survey).
However, while the alternative school students were most clear about the importance of connecting history to present-day events, mainstream students at Caledonia who were taking grade 10 history expressed interest in making these connections even though this integration was not happening in their history class. Caledonia student Mark gave the example of the Rwanda genocide of the mid-1990s as a piece of modern history that he had heard about, wanted to know more, and fit the overall tone and objectives of the course. His classmate John agreed with him and they conversed:
Mark: ... so we could be learning about that because that's still fairly new- John: -new, and it was really an history related event- Mark: -Yes, it's important too. John: Its recent history, but its history (1SCX 121-125)
This connection indicates that the students have a desire for content that teaches them about the important world events but that these connections are not being made in their classes. In Grade
10 history, connections to current events have to explicitly come from the teacher because the curriculum and corresponding textbooks weight heavily on the 20th century. While there are opportunities to do so, teachers rarely take up these topics (Davis, 1995), frustrating students who wanted to learn about them (McNeil, 1988).
Connecting one's present to the past was of particular importance to racialized youth in this research whose histories were absent from the content they learned in schools. Ethnicity is a factor in how students construct and attribute significance to history (Almarza, 2001; T. Epstein,
1998, 2009; Marker, 2011; Peck, 2009, 2010; Terzian & Yeager, 2007), and when significance for racialized groups is ignored, the silence is "instructive, reinforcing the message that our histories are neither relevant not valid" (Wane, 2007, p. 134). In discussing the isolation of
Mexican-American students from their American history class, Almarza (2001) concludes that the teacher's focus on Anglo-American history "not only decreased Mexican-American students' motivation to learn and attach significance to American history, but bred resentment for the history teacher" (p. 22).
Connecting the history taught in school to one's racial identity was of particular importance to the students in Erin's class at Caledonia. The majority of the students in Erin's class were Black with familial links to the Caribbean, and although many students were born in
Canada, most did not identify themselves as "Canadian." In this way, students embodied a
"flexible citizenship" (Ong, 1999) where students perhaps felt that they were "born here, but my
7 Dr. Wane writes specifically of African Canadians
85 home is not here" (Abu El-Haj, 2007). Students often articulated aspects of their identity opposed to Canadian norms and aligned with Caribbean and African-American culture and music, in similar way as other young people in urban centres (Warikoo, 2011), even as they longed for a greater presence in the Canadian history they were taught in class.
In the answer to the survey question, "What do you think is the purpose for studying history?" one student in the class wrote: "I don't really see the point, considering the fact that I don't get to learn about my own history" (ISCK Survey). Another student wrote on her survey that she hates history, especially Canadian history, because "if it's not about my background history then I won't get involve [sic] with it" (ISCK Survey). In another survey, a student wrote that in class "they only talk about white folks and black people don't play a role in the history we learn at school" (ISCK Survey). In all the statements, although anonymously written on paper, reflected a defensive anger about the content students predominantly encounter in their history class and the recognition of their absence. On many of the surveys, students wrote large, underlined, or capped words, inscribing their anger onto the page that history had nothing to do with them. These comments confirm the findings that students ascribe historical significance the closer histories align to their ethnic identities (Epstein, 2009; Peck, 2011) and when their ethnic identities are disavowed from what they are learning, it creates a sense of anger and apathy of history and education (Almarza, 2001; Dei, 1997).
During the first interview at Caledonia one student commented that they were not learning "their" history in class. When I followed up and asked all the students if they felt they learnt their history in class, the students answered a unanimous "no" (1SCX 055). This is not surprising given other research in their area, but equally problematic (Almarza, 2001). Many of the students in the interview and in the class were clear that "their" history included an acknowledgement of the racial diversity they saw around them, a theme that will be discussed
86 next; but the Black students in particular, many of whom have family roots the Caribbean, looked for more history that talked about Black peoples' experiences in Canada. This indicates that students wanted history to connect to their lives by learning content that aligned with and informed their identities as Black Canadians. At the beginning of our first interview, Bianca said that "if there was Black history there would probably be a lot more kids wanting to come to class" (1SCX 016). Bianca did not hesitate or wait for a question about this topic to express her opinion, but she was compelled to immediately contribute the observation that content that connected to students' racial identities would encourage a greater desire to be in class and that was important to her and her classmates.
While a discussion of the Historic Space intervention will come in the next chapter, I found that students' reception of historical content in class changed once we explicitly began covering more Black history during the intervention itself. For example, while they still were not sold on history, students' behaviour indicated that they were more willing to pay more attention in the lessons. One student in the class, Serena, who was particularly vocal about hating history when I arrived in class, began to be a leader amongst her peers during the lessons on the West
Indian Domestic Scheme and Africville by calling out answers, asking for clarification, and telling her peers to be quiet. On my last day at the school, I bumped into Serena in the hall and asked what she thought of the class after the unit. She smiled and said "good, I like everything now." While we did not have a chance to talk more, her reaction corresponds to a survey answer where the respondent said that her/his opinion of history changed after this unit because "I have a more positive approach to learning about new units, cause I realized its' not boring if you can see how it relates to you" (3SCK Survey). Students in the final interview also made comments about the importance of these connections. Bianca said that her favorite part was learning "about
Africville because I'm Black and I like something about Black history. It really connected to me
87 and stuff' (3SCX 098). Bianca's classmate, Misty, chimed in and said: "the best part like Bianca was saying, [was] Africville. And how we're doing more, like, the content that you gave us today was good about Black people" (3SCX 106). Another student said she enjoyed learning about immigrant women from the West Indies because "I'm from the West Indies, it kind of, like, relates to me" (2SCX 184 Anneka).
These students not only wanted, but needed content that had more connection to their lives. They were looking for a place to "articulate their ideas about their own changing identities
(ethnic or otherwise) and the ways in which identity can influence their understandings of educational content generally, and historical content more specifically" (Peck, 2011, p. 319). But it is worth pointing out that even after a fairly successful unit in which we featured more content on Black Canadians, one student wrote in her survey that she wished that we had covered "more black history" because "I can learn more about my culture" (3SCK Survey). This comment indicates that while providing lessons on Black history is important, students want more: they want integrated, sustained attention to the historicized experiences of their lives.
To focus a little more closely on the connection between racial identity and learning history, I want to branch out the argument to state that more than just asking for Black history, students really wanted to learn history that informed their identities in the multicultural and transnational world they live in. In this, "students bring complex identity-related frameworks to their study of history" (Peck, 2011, p. 317), and not just a one-dimensional understanding of race and identity. As Misty said: "if you're going to sit and teach Black history you can't be, 'okay, well, Black people this, Black people that' - you have to get every ethnic background in the classroom involved" (1SCX 071). In today's transnational world, young people are looking for ways to historically understand their transnational identities (Abu El-Haj, 2007; Grever, Pelzer,
& Haydn, 2011; Warikoo, 2011), to learn what it is like to be both home and away, in whatever
88 ways it means to them. Drawing on Dan Yon's (2000) conception of "elusive culture," Solomon and Tare (2003) write that:
The constructions of identity which are "elusive" and defy meaning, are continually being undertaken by youth who seek to know themselves through frameworks of homeland, nation, culture, and family, but also through second and third generation, diasporic conditions of hybridity, ambivalence and resistance, as well as through popular and peer culture. (pp. 17-18)
Schooling in Toronto, a city with many people from many places with ties and stories and emotional as well as physical connections across and around the world, has to respond to these complexities in ways that align with what the students need for the future. Along with learning about Black history, students expressed that they were interested in understanding the diversity around them, diversity that included them, and not a White-dominated version of the Canadian nation. Their history class can be "instances that illustrate how subjects might be pulled in one direction by the authoritative discourses on multiculturalism and inclusivity, and pushed in the opposite direction by internally persuasive discourses and their conflicting desires and interests"
(Yon, 2000, p. 31).
In my focus group of six students, I had one young woman whose grandmother had immigrated from Grenada in the 1970s, another young woman who had an Asian-Caribbean background and identified as being Canadian, another young woman who has immigrated from the Caribbean a few years earlier and spoke with a heavier Caribbean accent the more comfortable she got, one young woman who described herself as "African-American" although she had not talked about living in the United States, a young man who identified himself as
White and did not connect with Canadian history, and finally a young man who had an Irish ancestry but whose family lived in Canada for generations. In Veronica's class there were students from the Philippians, Vietnam, and Turkey. I knew about their ethnic and cultural
89 backgrounds because talking about these backgrounds was central in the way students expressed themselves and their connection to their peers. While these students wanted to learn Canadian history in class, the Canadian history they learnt in school did not reflect the cultures and cultural practices that they were creating and facilitating in their interactions and relations with their peers (Yon, 2000, p. 44). The history they were presented with was flat, one-sided, and did not suggest the cultural complexity in which they lived their lives. This flattening of history is an issue because when students do not see their histories or the histories of their peers in the history they learn at school, it reinforces the racial hierarchies of the present as well as the past (Epstein,
1997, p. 29). Along these lines, Abu El-Haj writes (2007): "Schools play an important role in the construction of the symbolic boundaries of the nation - in constructing who is and is not a member of the nation - and in the provision of resources with which immigrant youth learn to belong to and navigate their new society" (p. 288).
During our first interview, John said that the Canadian history they were learning in class was "like generations before we ever came here, for Canadians that were here for a long time, like their parents, their grandparents and the parents before them, it's their history, it's not our history." Misty cut in forcefully and stressed: "No, it is our history because we're Canadian, so therefore what we're learning there is a purpose. But we're not learning our ethnic background history." John backed down and said "Yeah, that's what I was trying to say" (ISCX 056-059). It was unclear if that was really what John meant or if he was just backing down from a fight.
Because of the ways the other students in the group agreed and then disagreed and then agreed again with the two positions, I think that John and Misty meant very similar things, but they were articulated so differently that their responses seem antagonistic. This exchange poses a very real question for racially diverse young people in Canada: How can you be both and neither?
90 Students in the focus group struggled with how to articulate the version of Canadian history that informed these transnational identities. Ally said that they should be required to take a history class, and that
it should still be called Canadian history, but like, instead of learning about the White men that came, what makes Canada what it is now? Like the different backgrounds and all the multicultural[ism]. So about, how did the Chinese people get here? how did the West Indian people get here? and stuff. Instead of just, 'oh all the White people from back then.' (1SCX 102 Ally)
Instead of continuously learning about how the White man "created" Canada, Ally wanted to know how the Canada she sees today has been developed by multiple people with multiple backgrounds. In essence, she wanted to replace the story of European-dominated colonial development with stories that centre the roots of multiculturalism in Canada. As Ally continued:
"okay, yeah, I live in Canada, I guess I'm a Canadian but...," . .I'm not a White man," her classmate Misty interrupted; "Yeah, I'm not a white man," Ally agreed (1SCX 177-079). This conversation highlights "Canadian culture's elusiveness and the instability of its signifiers"
(Yon, 2000, p. 41). These complex considerations of what Canada is and looks like echoes the complex construction that students wanted in their history classes. Students are looking for complex understandings of national history because they have complex identities in the nation.
The simplicity of the history they learnt in school, however, wipes away these complexities and leaves students grasping for more.
In this section I have shown how students want meaningful, connected content in their history classes. Meaning was defined by a general interest in current events or a more specific desire for contextualizing one's identity. For history education to be meaningful to students, students need to be introduced to content that has significance to their lives and to have the opportunities to actively explore this content with their peers. Students, especially in grade 10
91 history, expressed a lack of this content in their history class, which isolated them from the very idea of history as a subject of significance for them.
4.3 Positive Place In the preceding two sections I have shown that students come to class wanting to learn history actively with meaningful content, but the history classes they have taken have not provided them with the active instruction or meaningful content that they desire. While students were quick to identify instruction and content that would make history more engaging, students also talked about learning history in a positive environment shaped by a teacher who listened to and cared for them and their learning. Students' desires to learn was strong, but the students I spoke to indicated that the teachers they have encountered rarely provided a "critical care" that placed students and their desire to learn first (Antrop-Gonzalez & De Jesus, 2006; Rolon-Dow,
2005). Because learning is a choice, students have to feel that the classroom is a place where their sense of self will not be comprised or eroded in order to make the choice to learn (Kohl,
1994; Novak, 2010; Valenzuela, 1999). Students in this research wanted to be treated as responsible, reliable, and important individuals when learning about the past (Mitsoni, 2006), and most often it was their teachers who were the driving forces behind a learning environment that supported and developed these attributes (Clark, 2008, p. 120; Harris & Haydn, 2006). In this final section of this chapter, I look more closely at the attributes of care students expressed they wanted in their history class. Combined with their desires for acting and connected content, this interest in care forms the foundation for meaningful learning in history.
In the interviews students talked about what they expected and wanted from "proper teachers" who communicated their enthusiasm for the class and were knowledgeable about the content. Mike at Bestway said that learning was enhanced when "the teacher [was] acting like a
92 teacher" by having "a genuine interest in the topic" (lSBWm025&037). He continued by saying that interaction between student and teacher is "better" than the teacher "reading off a textbook in a monotone voice about what happened" (lSBWm 025). Another student said that class was better when the teacher was "being active about it and excited about it and talking to you with their hands and looking at everyone in the class" (1SBW116 June). This excitement also translated into an expectation that teachers will know information and be able to speak to that information in class. Bianca simply said that the best advice for a history teacher is to be
"specific and exact and know what she's talking about" (1SCX 239). Anneka at Caledonia shared a story about her teacher teaching a lesson on genocide but that the teacher could not speak to a student's comment about the slave trade being an example of genocide. Anneka felt that with not knowing, or not following up with this comment, the teacher let down the lesson as a whole, saying: she "didn't really know so she couldn't teach us; if the teachers don't know then you can't learn" (1SCX 078).
Students relied on teachers to guide them through their learning and were aware when teachers did not live up to this promise. Bianca said that "some teachers, they don't know how to teach, they just give you work and work and expect you to know everything. They don't expand on it, they don't tell you and they don't explain properly" (1SCX041). Jorge, at Three Bells, also talked about teachers who "don't know how to teach" when he recalled:
When teachers are giving you homework and be like, 'read this overnight and then do it,' half the time I'd read it and not understand it, and I'd be so frustrated that I didn't understand it that I wouldn't be able to do the work. And then I'd get into trouble the next day and lose marks. And it's like, why do that? You're there to help, so do it in class. (3STB 176)
While a frequent comment in teachers' staff rooms is that students do not complete their work because they are lazy or uninterested, this comment indicates the opposite. Both Bianca and
93 Jorge had expectations that a teacher should lead them through learning and expressed their frustration when teachers did not. Jorge's pushback was not completing his work; this was his signal that he wanted more work and attention from his teacher, not less. McNeil (1988) found that teachers' "attempt to minimize student cynicism by simplifying content and avoiding class discussion only heightened student disbelief of school knowledge and fostered in students greater disengagement from the learning process" (p. 160). This corresponds with Duncan-Andrade's
(2004) finding that "urban students, particularly urban students of color, are misportrayed as being intellectually disengaged... rather they want classrooms that are more worth spending time in" (p. 328).
Students are often constructed as young, naive people at the whim of the teacher, but I found that students were very aware of and could identify when and how teachers made powerplays that elevated their own status as teacher at the expense of their students. This awareness of power in the classroom was most often and articulately expressed by Misty who was borderline passing many of her classes. When I asked students in one interview if they felt like they could express their opinion in class, Misty said:
When you put up your hand and you have something to say to defend what they taught, [most teachers are] going to overpower it and bring it back down to what they thought, cuz they like to know they're the teacher, they're standing at the top of the room, and they've got the university degree, so they know their stuff.... They want to feel they're right so they probably would avoid [discussion] and they would just teach the content instead of making debating. (1SCX086)
The fact that as an "unsuccessful" student teachers could (and did) overlook her opinion, Misty was acutely aware of the ways in which teachers secured their place in the classroom by limiting the boundaries of what was discussed and how. She was also aware of how these moves were prohibitive for healthy and supportive learning. Misty's status as an "unsuccessful" student,
94 contrasted to her articulate understanding of power in the classroom, provides evidence for the active resistance strategies that students may employ to push back at the dominant power in the room and set the terms for their own learning (Almarza, 2001; Giroux, 2001).
In the interviews, students across the three schools readily shared examples of teachers who they felt did not care about them or their learning. June at Bestway said in thinking back to her grade 10 history class, she wished "my teacher said to me, when was I falling asleep in history class: 'June, pay attention!' I don't know, involved me more and made things more fun"
(1SBW 086). In this statement, June did not identify particular content or instruction that she wanted, but rather a sense of acknowledgement and interest that she was in class and had something to offer. June's classmate Mike said in a separate interview that the raison d'etre of schooling was to provide students with the content knowledge they needed to go forth in the world; saying: "This is all for us, we go to school to actually learn the material for ourselves. All this is for us really. Like, yes, we do marks and all that, but the primary reason we even take these courses is because we want to learn it" (lSBWm034).
Students articulated that teachers listening to students, really listening, empowers them to be active in their learning and acknowledged in the classroom (see also Schultz, 2011). Misty said that she enjoyed participating in the research because "I feel like I have a voice, and I can talk now and preach!" (3SCX446). One of Misty's classmates said that she enjoyed being part of the research because her "voice is heard and I get a say in what's going on;" but she ended this comment with an acknowledgement that having a forum to speak at is only half of the issue; the other issue is being listened to and acting on what is heard. In referring how future students could learn history differently because of her options expressed in this research, she said "we get to change it up a little if the school actually listens''' (1SCX218 Anneka (my emphasis). On the whole, students in this research articulate that they want to learn in an environment driven by a
95 "critical care" for their selves and their learning and that "control of learning is something [they] want to share with teachers and they certainly want a voice in how and what they learn" (Ares &
Gorrell, 2002, pp. 274-275).
4.4 Conclusion In this chapter I showed that students want to learn history meaningfully. Drawing on
Novak's (1998, 2010) definition of meaningful learning, students wanted to think, feel, and act with significant material that connected to their prior knowledge and they wanted this to be framed by teachers who cared for them and their learning. However, students identify that their past experiences showed this was not happening. These findings are similar to other work in this area, and I question why more meaningful learning is not happening in an average history class.
Would an intervention specifically designed to provide meaningful learning opportunities for students achieve these aims? In the following two chapters, I look at the conditions needed for meaningful learning and the attempt to create these conditions in the history classroom.
96 Chapter 5: Conditions for the Negotiation of Meaning
Teachers cannot ensure that students learn, especially not meaningfully. Learning can be facilitated by the teacher, but ultimately it is "a tacit, invisible act" of the learner and "its progression is not facilitated by explicit public control" (Bernstein, 1975, p. 25). Teachers can, however, create the best possible conditions for meaningful learning to occur. Novak (2010) writes that it is the teacher's responsibility to invite meaningful learning by providing opportunities for students to negotiate meaning and to do so in a positive emotional climate.
These two conditions - the negotiation of meaning and a positive emotional climate - can form the basis of meaningful learning by enhancing students' cognitive structure and sense of "I'm
OK" (p. 132). Historic Space was intended to be a strategy that provided opportunities for students to learn meaningfully by giving students a greater role in negotiating meaning of historical content and do so in a way that would build their confidence and relationships with this material.
Drawn from Novak's work, but also the work of Hilda Taba and Jerome Bruner, the
Historic Space intervention was instructionally interpreted with concept learning strategies.
Developed during the "cognitive revolution" of the 1960s, concept learning invites students to lay out the structure of knowledge and then actively negotiate the meanings of that knowledge by testing it against other classifications (Bennett & Rolheiser, 2001; Buzan & Buzan, 2000; Novak,
2010; Taba, 1966). With concept learning as the instructional frame, I introduced teachers to the
Historic Space strategy as a three step process. By mapping, expanding, and challenging a historic space, or historical period, students become introduced to the concepts of the official story and, in organizing them, come to know them in ways that are meaningful for them. With these three steps, students progressively learn about the period and then challenge what is usually
97 taught about the period, giving them greater agency to negotiating meaning in history. As an active instructional method, concept learning requires students' involvement, the investment of their prior knowledges, and the leadership of an educator who is interested in putting students' learning first. In these ways, Historic Space interpreted through concept learning could fulfill elements of what students indicated they wanted in their history class.
In the Historic Space strategy, the first mapping step gives students a chance to create their own overview of a historical period by going through reference material, such as a textbook, and picking out names, dates, and ideas that students and writers flagged as important for the period. With these concepts gathered, students group and label them into themes and then organize this content in a simple mind map or a more complex concept map. Following this step, students expand the map with the facilitation of their teacher by being taught a set of lessons drawn from specific concepts on the map. This step is the most traditional out of the three steps because it requires teachers to teach the substantive content about the historical period. The difference is that the lessons are framed by concepts students drafted on their mind maps, which provides more explicit opportunities for student to make connections between and amongst the concepts. Finally, and most crucially, the third, challenge step requires students to reconcile a piece of history that is perhaps ignored, disavowed, or sidelined from the dominant narrative of this period, and bring this history into the map to form a more coherent whole. With this step, the stability of the concept map, which represents the official story, is undermined with the visualization of how the bound narrative excludes certain voices. This step can invite students to negotiate meaning of the past, present, and future is influenced by the celebration or disavowal of particular stories from the popular history narrative.
While this was the intended frame for seeing the Historic Space strategy through, the steps often did not play out as planned in the classroom. Time constraints, unfamiliar instruction,
98 and new content meant that there were too many foci in one class to develop and build on the next step in the way that was originally intended. This does not mean, however, that students did not or could not negotiate meaning with the Historic Space steps as presented or in ways outside the Historic Space strategy. With a focus in each class on the negotiation of meaning, students were able to interact with content in their history classes in ways that could invite them to build relationships with content and possibly learn meaningfully.
Research on the negotiation of meaning has been based largely on Varonis and Gass'
(1985) model of negotiation, used by scholars interested in early language acquisition or English language learners; but as a process of coming to know and understand, the negotiation of meaning is a central part of any learning and teaching interaction (Ausubel, 1962; Bruner, 1990;
Bruner, et al., 1967; Novak, 2010). Relationality has a central role to play in the negotiation of meaning because learning is "an interactive process in which people are learning from each other, and not just by showing and telling" (Bruner, 1997, p. 22). Negotiation of meaning is about coming to understand on an individual basis but also coming to understand with each other, the teacher's framework of understanding must recognize and be responsive to the student's framework of understanding and the student's framework has to recognize and respond to the new information being filtered through the teacher's framework of understanding. In this sense, negotiation of meaning between teacher and student is needed for discussion, debate, inquiry, exploration, and ultimately, learning. When students feel the classroom is closed off from their influence to negotiate meaning, they rebel, resist, and close down. As a relational interaction, the teacher and student have to be willing to trust and understand each other for there to be possibilities for meaningful learning to occur.
Thus, as much as Historic Space provides opportunities for students to negotiate meaning, the negotiation of meaning is a relational interaction, and Historic Space is a strategy
99 that can centre the relationships students build with the content, their teacher, and each other can be a central component of a history class. It is in building these relationships where history begins to take on significance in students' lives and results in their meaningful learning in history class. In this chapter, I will specifically focus on the relationships between students and content and teachers and content. In particular, by providing explicit opportunities to negotiate meaning,
Historic Space was a strategy where students were able to build relationships between their prior knowledge and historical content, supporting the possibilities for meaningful learning. However, teachers too, had relationships with historical content, and prioritizing their understanding of the content over students' exploration of it, curtailed the possibilities for students' long-term, meaningful learning. In this chapter, I begin with a description and analysis of how the three
Historic Space steps worked in the classrooms and the ways in which students were able to negotiate meaning and build relationships with the content using these steps. I follow by looking at examples of the ways teachers privileged their own relationships with content when teaching, curtailing the opportunities for students' meaningful learning. In the next chapter, I look more closely at the interpersonal relationships between teachers and students and the ways these influence the emotional climate needed for meaningful learning.
5.1 Historic Space as Strategy to Negotiate Meaning
5.1.1 Mapping In all four of the classes we began the Historic Space intervention with a simple mind mapping and brainstorming activity with the hope that we would be able move to the more complex concept mapping activity when the students had more knowledge of the period.
However, Historic Space is more than just concept learning strategies in practice. Historic Space is a poststructural way of understanding history that can be used in a classroom setting. It is about a greater interaction with the content and greater opportunities to bring in stories that
100 challenge what and how we come to know in history. Novak (2010) writes that for meaningful learning to occur students need meaningful material to learn from as well as the opportunity to negotiate meaning of said material (p. 136). Historic Space is a strategy that is intended to do both: provide opportunities for content with greater significance to students' lives and opportunities for students to actively think through and negotiate this content with their class, teacher, and prior knowledge, building personal relationships with historical content.
Based on the work of Derrida (1978,1997), Foucault (1980), and Scott (2001), Historic
Space is a framework for understanding history that takes it outside the role of fact and places the emphasis on constructed nature of the narrative, the power that is exercised through that narrative, and stories that can challenge how and what we know about dominant historical narratives. With these emphases, Historic Space invites students to actively deconstruct, construct, and then reconstruct historical narratives in ways most meaningful for them. With
Historic Space as a content framework, the intent is that neither the teacher nor the textbook dictates importance, but a relational interaction and negotiation of meaning by the students that creates importance. As an "emancipatory pedagogy," Historic Space can invite students to
"begin to take responsibility for what they know, what they do and how they interact with each other, historically and in the present, within and across diverse race, class and gender groups and all their multiple and overlapping internal variations" (Swartz, 1996, p. 409).
At Bestway, during our first mapping step, we worked on the "French Revolution" unit of the grade 12 West and World class and used one textbook for this activity, albeit a different one than the students were assigned. At Caledonia, Erin found a collection of grade 10 Canadian history textbooks that we used to begin the "Post-World War II" unit in both hers and Veronica's classes. Finally, at Three Bells, we began the "Colonialism and Imperialism" unit of the grade 11
Politics course by brainstorming and by going through textbooks published under colonial rule.
101 In all four classes students were encouraged to write the names, dates, or ideas they identified as impactful for the period on post-it notes. In small groups, students would then use these post-it notes to organize the concepts into themes on a black board or chart paper. Renee, the teacher at
Bestway Alternative, called this strategy "scary" because it was letting the story out at the beginning, essentially decentering the role of teacher to portion out the narrative in ways they determine as appropriate and meaningful. Erin at Caledonia Collegiate said that because it was a change from how she learnt, it would be a struggle to think about this as a way to teach.
Student reception was very positive to these activities. As predicted, generating concepts from the textbook gave students a conceptual handle on the main concepts privileged in the particular historical period they were covering. June from Bestway said that "picking terms out of the textbook and deciding what's important... I just had never done that before. And it really helped me, like, memorize things or like, know what's going on" (3SBW 024-026). At Three
Bells, one student, Francis, identified that the activity resulted in greater class involvement, increased student engagement, and more active thinking (3STB 059). His classmate, Carmen, agreed and called the activity "a mental hands on" (3STB 099).
The intent of this initial step was for students to build a connection with the content before they began their formal lessons. By building these connections, students became more knowledgeable, and thus more invested, in learning about the period as a whole. In Veronica's class at Caledonia, students worked in small groups to complete this activity. While students were shy to work with classmates, they had no problem diving into the activity and began generating concepts on post-it notes. By the time I explained the activity, gave out supplies, checked-in with Veronica, students were busy working. Some groups had desks full of post-it notes and already began sorting them into themes. Out of the four classes, Veronica's class was the most self-directed, asking her and me very few questions about instruction or content.
102 Students seemed interested in having the opportunity to generate text and make decisions about significance.
One student, Paul, created six post-it notes about different aspects of post-war atomic development; when I mentioned in passing that he did not have to take that many notes on one subject, he stressed that there were important differences between the concepts and that knowing them was important for the period. Standing corrected, I acknowledged the importance of his choices and moved on. During our initial interview, one of Paul's classmates said that during a lesson, if a teacher did not know something, they could "open up discussion so anybody that knows anything could help" (1SCX 084). This quick interchange with Paul demonstrates the importance of teachers of doing exactly what this student said: opening up the discussion so that students can provide information that can help the class along. The mapping activity provided a way of students creating and organizing content, but also a way of teachers being able to see students' prior knowledge and how this knowledge influences how they think about and organize historical content. In laying out all the content for the unit, students were able to use the map to identify areas they were interested in studying more deeply.
While the nation and the textbook may promote a particular grand narrative, so too do teachers' "schematic narrative frameworks" (Wertsch, 2004). Paul's opportunity to generate content he felt was significant provided me as an educator an opportunity to check my own understanding of the period and bring in content that was of greater interest to him and his classmates. Students rarely have this power to choose content, but beginning with the mapping strategy allowed both the teacher and the students to identify particular areas to focus on and the connections these topics have to others. In the following class on the Cold War, I pointed out the concepts students generated on their maps during the lecture, including nuclear warheads,
Atomic bomb, and Sputnik, which in turn peaked students' interest in learning about these
103 concepts more deeply. Knowing Paul's perspective allowed me to decentre what I knew as true and began to change the way the period could be presented, and thus learnt by the students, creating greater moments of significance during the history class. The map provided a tool to make this prior knowledge visual, and visualizing this knowledge was integral for integrating students' prior knowledge into the class.
Having the mind or concept map as a content organizer allowed students to negotiate meanings between the new content and their prior knowledge, even when this knowledge was not explicitly historical. During my final interview with June at Bestway I asked her if she would have been able to fit her experience at a heavy metal concert with what she had learnt about the
French Revolution. Without hesitating June identified that she would be able to add the concept of "riots" to her map as a way to connect both topics. She then talked about her experience at the concert and said that another connection could be:
like, standing up for something. Because [during the concert] you get really angry and for some reason everyone just has so much energy to, like, live. And it really does feel like you're going to die sometimes and you're just, like, pushing through and everything. So it's like fighting up against something. (3SBWJ160)
As someone who is not interested in heavy metal music or concerts, this description of the ground swell of emotion based in a desire to "live," provided me with a window to June's outside interests as well as how she may have been visualizing the French revolutionary riots. By inviting a strategy where students would connect their outside interests to new, perhaps unfamiliar, historical content, this step of the Historic Space strategy provided both teachers and students the chance to negotiate meaning of historical content in ways outside the traditional script of meaning. By making these connections on a mind or concept map, there existed greater opportunities for teachers and students to build stronger relationships with the content by inviting new interpretations of experience and with each other by getting to know each other's outside
104 interests. Thus, the mapping step was a key step where students began to think about and negotiate meaning about the historical period before they began fully learning about it.
However, it is also important to note that the positive reception was not a blanket reception. Some students, like the students in Erin's class, found this step "baby work" and boring, identifying on their surveys that it "did not help them learn." During the class we had earmarked to make their maps, Erin's students resisted at every step by refusing to look through the textbook, writing down historical concepts, or accepting our explanation that this activity would lead to a new, more meaningful way of learning history. When the groups got up to organize their concepts in mind maps on the black board, students began running around the class, putting post-it notes on classmates' backs, removing or rearranging concepts on other group's maps, and generally doing all they could to remove themselves from the learning opportunities we had set up in class.
The failure of the mind mapping lesson in Erin's class was a "puzzling" moment
(Ballenger, 2009) that prompted us to think about what students' resistance to this activity was telling us about the "invisible curricula" bound into our instruction (Bernstein, 1975, p. 24).
Upon reflection, I began to appreciate that perhaps because the students felt that they had been subjected to six months of Canadian history, which they had viewed as textbook-based even as
Erin stressed it was not, that starting this activity with the textbook was essentially asking them to validate the version of history that they felt isolated from. On top of that, the majority of those six months covered war, something these students were not interested in, and while the post-war period was covered over four chapters in their textbooks, the beginning chapter on the Cold War could have reminded them of what we had promised we were moving away from. Even when they saw pictures, read headlines, or paused on a page in the textbooks about growing
105 multiculturalism or the rise in rock n'roll, students needed encouragement to add these concepts to their maps because their previous experience indicated that these stories would be not be told.
Thus, another way to have broached this activity was to do the opposite of what Jane did above: begin with prior knowledge and then identity how it can be connected to historical material. Rather than trying to build relationships with historical content, educators can start with relationships as a way to build history. Students in this class were not opposed to learning history, they were just opposed to learning history that had nothing to do with them. In reviewing the list of concepts that did remain on their maps, the students chose concepts that spoke to the history they wanted to learn about, concepts such as stereotype, tolerance, immigration,
Caribbean, and boycotting. Interestingly, in all the textbooks students used as a reference in this activity, these concepts were only a small part of a much larger unit. While more prominent concepts such as cars, Cuban Missile Crisis, and bombs were also on students' lists, the ones listed above were unique concepts that did not feature predominantly in Veronica's class maps, for example, although the students had been covering the same material and used the same textbooks. While the students in Erin's class resisted the activity, it still provided an opportunity to recognize students' prior knowledge and the relationships they had, or were not interested in having, with historical content.
5.1.2 Expanding After the initial mapping period, the teacher and I identified three to five class periods for
"expanding" the map: broadening students' knowledge base by teaching substantive content about the period and inviting students to negotiate meaning of this new content by adding new content to their maps. Other than beginning and ending the class with the mind map as a note- taking/note-making device (Buzan & Buzan, 2000), the way the teachers taught these classes and what content they would focus on was based on my interpretation of students' feedback from the
106 interviews and surveys. The idea was to use active instructional methods to provide students with an overview of the period based largely on the concepts they identified wanting to study. In
Renee's West and World class, we spent three classes expanding students' knowledge of the
French Revolution by watching a documentary. In Erin's and Veronica's classes at Caledonia, we identified the topics of Cold War, teen culture, and suburbs as three classes were we could expand students' knowledge of the Post-World War II period. Zoe's Colonialism and
Imperialism unit of her Politics class was ordered slightly differently by having each lesson both expand and challenge ideas about colonialism by looking at the dominant view of topics such as discovery/conquest, popular culture, and decolonization, as well as postcolonial challenges to these topics. This step of the intervention was the most traditional out of all three steps but still focused on students developing a closer relationship to the content by negotiating meaning using the maps as a central organizer for new content. The difference between the expanding step and regular instruction was that in the expanding step the content would be compact and take place over a set amount of classes with teachers using the maps to tie content to each other.
As mentioned, Renee chose to show a documentary about the French Revolution as the basis for expanding the maps. Over three periods the class watched the documentary and Renee would pause the video at points to discuss one aspect more deeply or would talk over the video to point out an important person or event. She would encourage students to add content to their maps throughout the video as a way to remind them to make connections with the new material.
While Renee facilitated students' learning by flagging certain scenes, she was not "depositing" knowledge into students' heads (Freire, 2006), because students had to create meanings and connections as demonstrated on their mind maps. Because they had started the unit by going through the textbook and identifying main people, dates, events, or ideas, many students already had a familiarly with the period, which the documentary helped narrate and draw connections
107 between. In the expanding step, students began to negotiate the meanings that they inferred about the period with the increased details they were being introduced to.
In reflections following this class, students identified that the map provided them with a conceptual frame for expanding their knowledge of the period, invited them to make connections and primed them for learning. Aron, for example, one student in the class who was initially hesitant to create a mind map, began to watch the documentary only to add material to his map.
When the commentators mentioned something that Aron interpreted as important, he looked down to his map to see where it could be added in and asked Renee when he could not fit a good fit. It was after the discussion between Aron and Renee that resulted in larger class discussions about themes and concepts to add to a general class map. Despite his original reluctance, during the three classes of watching the documentary, Aron's map expanded to include over 55 concepts related to the French Revolution under seven distinct themes.
The expanding step is also meant to introduce students to the simplistic and conceptual nature of the one-dimensional history usually taught in schools. As a poststructural way of understanding history, Historic Space is meant to highlight that the stripped down simplicity that is presented as a cohesive story, is not in fact, fact, but a story created with the interests of power and privilege in mind. Emphasizing the simplicity of the story covers the mandated content as well as an overview of the period, but also provides a chance for students to identify where they want to go with the story next.
In Veronica's class, for example, I taught two out of the three topics we had identified for expanding the period in one class I called "Reds and Rock: Crises in the Post-War period." In the
70 minutes I had to cover both the Cold War and teen culture/rock n'roll, I framed my lecture around the suggestion that there were connections between the two topics and during class we would be negotiating meanings between the two. In not having much interest or extensive
108 knowledge about the Cold War, I created my Reds lecture by linking together the concepts the students identified in the first step as anchors for this section of the lecture. Whenever I began to cover a topic a student identified in the previous class as being interested in studying, students grew slightly more attentive and asked questions that challenged my own understanding of the period, such as questioning the difference between an A-bomb and an H-bomb or how communism worked in daily practice.
Knowing that the "Reds" focus would isolate some students, the second half of the lecture, "Rock," emphasized a more social and cultural perspective on the period. In this class, I was not overly concerned with covering the details of either the Cold War or teen culture during the 1950s because I was just expanding their knowledge of the period. The primary focus was on getting students familiar enough with concepts that they would be able to identify topics they were interested in studying later on and to be able to articulate how these topics connected to their prior knowledge. In understanding the outline and main themes of the period, I wanted students to start building their knowledge, confidence, and thus relationships to this new historical content so they would feel comfortable working with it in later assignments. In this way, my emphasis for the students was not on memorizing key names and dates, it was about negotiating meaning of different elements within this period.
This strategy was successful for engaging the whole class, albeit at different times, and in creating opportunities for student to negotiate meaning during the lecture itself. For example, one student, Jordan, a young Black man whose attendance in class was low, slept through the Reds lecture, but woke up and started participating when I introduced the Rock lecture with the song
"Sixty Minute Man" by The Dominos (1951): "Miss, is that a Black man singing?" he asked. "I know that is a Black man singing!". During the rest of the lecture on the appropriation of Black music by White artists during the 1950s, Jordan continued to participate by talking about the
109 music he shared with his dad and how Black folks did "it" (making music) better. He perked up, moving around in his chair, throwing out opinions and genuinely engaging in the class. As the students filed out of class, I offered high-fives and Jordan accepted my offer, declaring that I
"deserved a high-five" that day.
The expanding step was important for students to build their knowledge of the period, negotiate meanings of that knowledge, and develop relationships with the content in ways that held significance to their lives. In Veronica's class, topics such as the Cold War and teen culture/music could have been stretched out across multiple classes, but expanding their knowledge through a conceptualized frame of the period, provided enough information for students to grab hold of the topics they were interested in and negotiate meaning between these topics and the ones connected to it. Anneka, a student from this class and participant in the
Caledonia student interviews, repeatedly drew on this class to talk about how the past repeats itself and how knowing about the past provides perspective on the present. In the other class, while watching the documentary on the French Revolution, students in Renee's class already felt that they knew something about the period because of the previous mapping step and were able to watch the documentary with a mind to building their knowledge of the concepts they had identified in the first step. This strategy sparked interest, questions, and greater attentiveness that the teachers were able to build on in later classes.
5.1.3 Challenging Finally, the central piece for Historic Space is encouraging students to challenge the official narrative by bringing in or being introduced to historical "counterstories" that challenged what seems to be a neat, progressive history (Delgado, 1989). While traditional history classes may bring in perspectives that are outside the textbook version of history, teachers often reign in discussion and fail to allow the stories to fully challenge what students, and themselves, know
110 about history and the present (Dion, 2009; Epstein, 2009). As discussed in the previous chapter, students are looking for "interesting" material, which they defined as material that was outside the textbook, connected with their prior knowledge, and that acknowledge the complexities of life, now and in the past. The challenge step can explicitly provide this material by allowing students to choose challenges or have teachers choose challenges based on what they observed about students' prior knowledges. I suggested challenges to the teachers based on my observations of the classes and discussions with students, so that the challenge centred the analyses of gender and race usually missing from the grand narrative. I suggested two challenges per class, with one challenge being a one class lesson and a second, longer challenge that would form the basis of a cumulative assignment or class project. These challenges were intended to be explored using active instructional methods, such as discussion, role play presentations, and opinion-based narratives that centre students' interpretation of the content.
In Renee's class, I suggested a one-class challenge on Theroigne de Mericourt and a two- class/assignment challenge on the Haitian Revolution. Renee gravitated toward these suggestions because she felt that Theroigne de Mericourt in particular, would appeal to her students' interests in women, queer politics, and mental illness. Drawn from students' interests, these two challenges were intended to decentre the idea of the French Revolution as a movement for all and instead look at the ways that gender, class, and race shaped what equality looked like for different people, and how our contemporary interpretation of this period maintains inequity by centring a European and patriarchal version of this period as truth.
In Erin and Veronica's units on the Post-World War II period, I suggested the West
Indian Domestic Scheme as a one-day challenge and the "razing" of Africville8 as a two- day/assignment challenge. Based on students' feedback from the surveys and interviews, these
8 See for example Nelson, 2009
111 challenges were chosen to centre the experiences of people of colour as central for understanding this period. In particular, the West Indian Domestic Scheme was brought in to challenge the dominant narrative about immigration and domesticity in the postwar period and centre the stories of working women of colour, which are most often absent from grand narratives. The introduction of Africville would also call into question the implicit theme of the post-World War
II grand narrative as it being a period of progress and prosperity for all. Learning about the destruction of Africville could instead invite students to question the mechanisms for racism in the past and the present and the denial about how these policies are integral to the notion of progress. This discussion could then invite students to connect the past to the present in ways that these students said they needed for making the content meaningful.
Finally, as mentioned, in Zoe's unit on Colonialism and Imperialism, each class was intended to be a challenge in its own right because of how we would juxtapose colonial and postcolonial interpretations on the same topics. However, I suggested finishing the unit with one specific challenge looking at the role of colonialism in contemporary Canada. This challenge was intended to stress how colonialism is an ongoing and present exercise of power and privilege and cannot be thought of as existing in the past or a place far away. In thinking about colonialism in contemporary Canada, the challenge was for students to understand their own implication in colonial relations and potential action for decolonization. Because of Zoe's reputation for being politically left-wing in her classes, this challenge fit into students' expectation and interests in learning about radical perspectives and potentials for activism.
The challenges in all four classes were received positively by the students and did provide opportunities for them to negotiate meaning of content normally excluded or sidelined from the main story of this period. At Three Bells for example, students were continuously asked to challenge a dominant, naturalized view of colonialism, which gave them cause to question how
112 colonialism is present in their lives. In the final interview, one student from the class, Nicki, talked about how salient the final challenge of looking at colonialism in Canada was for her because it provided her with a view to understand herself and her world differently. In one class, students viewed a slideshow on images of colonialism, and in both her final survey and our final group interview as a class, Nicki brought up this class as a meaningful moment for her learning.
She said that while it was difficult to view these images and think about the implicit and explicit meanings behind them, she found that it was important to interpret them and talk about "where things came from" in both the past and present (3 STB 087). The ability to discuss these images, and her discomfort with them, was important to build her knowledge and connection to the lessons that was central for her to learn this content meaningfully. Making these connections between the past and present, and being able to expand and negotiate what one knew with what one was learning, forms the basis of meaningful learning.
While the alternative school students were able to articulate their connections with their learning, in the mainstream school we provided more explicit opportunities for them to do the same. In the one-day challenge on the West Indian Domestic Schemes, the students in Erin's class used a worksheet to take notes, summarize their learning, and begin to negotiate meaning.
The students were asked to write a paragraph summarizing the lesson by completing prompts about what they learnt, what they found interesting, and what they had lasting questions about.
The end result of this assignment demonstrated students' ability and willingness to connect with material they saw as connected to their lives. In these paragraphs, students wrote that they found the class interesting "because I'm Black" or because they "learned about what my ancestors went through back then" or that the class reminded them of "The days when my grandma was alive."
Students also thought the class was important because "I never knew anything about this content.
+ It's about Caribbean background that makes its interesting." They also demonstrated how they
113 were connecting affectively with the material by finding agency in the motivations of the women who participated in the Scheme, with one student writing: "[the government] probably thought the women [the Caribbean domestic workers] didn't have a plan but they worked there for a year so they could better their life & also travel." Students also linked the lesson to the present: "This was interesting because the old immigration policies appeared to be racist and today Canada is mainly composed of immigrants," even as I was critiqued for not doing this enough: "Sometimes slow down & give more examples that relate to us now in our day to day lives so we can have a better understanding of the lesson." The approaches demonstrated that whether implicit or explicit, the connection between students' prior knowledge and the historical content, and the opportunity to make these connections, provides invitation to learn meaningfully in history.
The levels of understanding and thought demonstrated in both classes indicate how interested students were in connecting with the material negotiating meaning with meaningful content and how well they can do this when given the opportunity. By building personal relationships with the content, the challenge step provided these opportunities for students to make connections between historical content and their prior knowledge and to think about stories usually sidelined from history as central and integral to their understandings of the period or historical topic. Being able to negotiate meaning of this content provided meaningful learning opportunities and a chance to understand history and their own relationships to it differently.
However, while the Historic Space steps did result in a greater negotiation of meaning and held promise as an instructional framework to keep developing, there is a danger in relying on instructional strategies to produce meaningful learning opportunities. It was, for example, hard to see the concept learning steps completely through at any of the sites because it was a new and unfamiliar way of thinking about a historical period. At different points in the research, the
Historic Space steps seemed to be viewed by both teachers and students as different instructional
114 activities rather than a framework for exploring history differently, and the challenges were no exception. For example, in both Erin's and Veronica's classes at Caledonia, students created mind maps for the Africville challenges as separate from the main mind map they created at the beginning of the unit and not part of a larger map that could reconcile the dominant narrative with the challenge. While students used the same themes to organize their maps, themes such as resources, housing, and community, as educators we had not framed the content in ways that intervened in the dominant narrative in ways that using the mind maps and concepts maps was meant to provide. But this does not mean that the negotiation of meaning did not happen in other ways with different means. Students were still able to explore difficult and excluded stories through discussion, role play, and writing tasks. Thus, while Historic Space provided opportunities for students to negotiate meaning in ways that could lead to meaningful learning, it is not the only or best way in which to do so. The opportunities to learn about and explore material that challenged a textbook narrative was an important for beginning, and building, students' relationships with content and it is these relationships that led to meaningful learning.
5.2 Teachers' Relationships with Content Just as students develop relationships with historical content, and the opportunities to negotiate meaning with these new relationships form the basis for meaningful learning, teachers too have relationships with historical content that influences learning. In fact, in this research I found that teachers' relationship with historical content could curtail the opportunities for students to negotiate meaning and build their own relationships with history. The increased malleability of information with Historic Space is intended to provide greater opportunities for meaningful learning by having each step focus on students' negotiation of meaning. This increased participation of the student with the content is intended to decenter the master narrative
115 as dictated by the textbook, curricula, or teachers' curricular meta-narratives drawn from their pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986). In every field, however, teaching is related to
"notions of legitimacy" based on "teachers' beliefs about the goals for learning in their content area, as well as about knowledge and how one comes to know" (Saye & Brush, 2004, p. 372).
Even with mandated curricula, "teachers construct their own, curriculum meta-narratives that conform to their pedagogical and content approach and reflect their individual curriculum ideology, orientation, or platform" (Shkedi, 2009, pp. 850-851). These curricular meta-narratives based in teachers' relationships with the content are often stronger than the actual curriculum and become ingrained as the appropriate structure for the class.
In history, teachers' pedagogical content knowledge is shaped by the content suggested or mandated by the curriculum but also "teachers' beliefs or philosophy about the mission of social studies and history teaching" (Saye & Brush, 2004, p. 379). History teaching is not just about sharing stories about the past but a "vehicle for teachers to express their ways of seeing the past, beliefs about the present and visions for the future" (Evans, 1989, p. 238). Even if teachers do not explicitly express these opinions, the opinions can also come out in implicit ways, such as through jokes and sarcastic comments (Niemi & Niemi, 2007). Researchers have shown that teachers' prior notions of the importance of studying history predominate in their approach to history teaching and that sometimes teachers attempt to protect their students from difficult historical knowledges or points of contention by curtailing active instruction or introduction to challenging material (Dion, 2009; Epstein, et al., 2011; J. H. James, 2008; Levstik, 2000; van
Hover & Yeager, 2007).
I, too, found that despite teachers' best intentions, their "schematic narrative template"
(Wertsch, 2004) often limited the scope of what Historic Space was trying to do. The relationships teachers held to the content meant that even with the new framework and goals for
116 the unit, there remained an "invisible pedagogy" (Bernstein, 1975, p. 24) that had implicit and explicit consequences for what will be covered and how. The invisible pedagogies defined the right content and the right ways it was meant to be received, limiting opportunities for students to be active negotiators of meaning. This was prevalent with all the teachers at different times, but in this section I will be look specifically at Renee and Erin.
Renee had overarching goals and desires for students learning history or what she called a
"lens" for looking at history. Renee wanted to give students space to develop "their own critical questions" about history and the world around them (1TBW 066) and often talked about the
"frame" or "lenses" she gave her students to look through to think critically about the "human condition" (1TBW 027). She said:
I often frame things through the lens I'm looking through and I try get them to look through different lenses. They may lead me to the lens and they may frame it and that would be ideally how I would want the students to learn through their own making. (3TBW 070)
In this statement, Renee identifies that these lenses are important for looking at history and could ideally be shaped by the students themselves. However, Renee's repeated use of the metaphor of the "lens" indicates its importance for framing her own pedagogical content knowledge and organization of her courses.
In the West and World course that I worked in, Renee's lens was "freedom." Renee was interested in her students exploring notions of freedom throughout each unit, including the
French Revolution unit that we would work on together. While my time in the class before the intervention suggested that this lens was more implicit than explicit, Renee started to get anxious midway through the French Revolution unit that freedom was no longer a prominent lens for looking at the material. From my perspective the freedom lens was as implicitly woven through the French Revolution unit as in the other unit I observed, but in one meeting after class Renee
117 began discussing elements of freedom that she needed to see covered in going forward. Because of her explicit identification of the lens that framed her approach to the material, we were better able to address her goals for the course in the following classes.
On a more implicit level, however, Renee's schematic narrative template shaped the course of discussion and limited students' opportunities to build their own understandings of the period, especially when she was harried or under stress.9 It is a common research finding that the more the teacher wants to maintain order in the classroom, the less room there is for discussion and the negotiation of meaning between teacher and student (Childs & McNicholl, 2007; for science education see Saye & Brush, 2004). When Renee felt under pressure and needed to keep the content moving, she dropped opportunities for students to negotiate meaning and maintained the prominence of her schematic narrative template regarding the content and how it should be framed. Her predetermined relationship with the content became central and students' chance to negotiate meaning on their own became sidelined. This is not a rare occurrence in a class that is discussion-based (Hess, 2010). In her research, Cunningham (2007) found it shocking how little students talked in the class discussions and how frequently the teacher maintained control of the discourse. It was only after reading the transcripts of her classroom research that Cunningham realized that "consciously or not, all of the teachers accepted or actively shaped patterns of talk during whole-class teaching that rendered deep development of empathy uncommon" (p. 613). In
Renee's class, discussion could sometimes take the shape of a guessing game for the right answer. Renee would pose a question that seemed open-ended, but was really a closed foray into her next point. Edwards and Mercer (1987) call this "cued elicitation" (pp. 142-146) and while
9 In this next chapter I will be discussing the more effective ways Renee facilitated discussions in her class in ways that produced greater negotiation of meaning. I think it is important to recognize that teachers' work is multifaceted and ever-changing, which is why I have used both examples in this discussion.
118 students would initially attempt to guess the right answer, they eventually stopped trying so that
Renee could tell them the answer she wanted.
While it is impossible to gauge what kind of conversations would have been present with more room for students to negotiate meaning, the prominence of Renee's schematic narrative template for prohibiting students' opportunities for meaningful learning was apparent during a concept map activity. During one of our challenges, students were asked to make a concept map connecting the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolution. After reading background information as a class, students were asked to make a concept map connecting the two revolutions as a way to demonstrate their understanding of one by learning about the other. The students and I began discussing how to start the concept map when Renee came back from an administrative task. June suggested that the map should begin with the word "Revolution," and
Renee responded: "But don't they have connections beyond revolution?" (BW042012). Even as a co-facilitator, I found that question perplexing and preventative for suggesting other ideas.
With this comment, Renee implicitly demonstrated the direction she wanted the students to take even without identifying the right concept to begin with. The quickness of Renee's comment indicated how "automatic" teachers' "ideas and beliefs (that is, their narratives) affect their curriculum decisions" (Shkedi, 2009, p. 846). Even though students were beginning to negotiate meaning between two historical events, Renee made a "curriculum decision" (Shkedi, 2009) about the shape this negotiation of meaning would take that prevented students from exploring meanings on their own terms.
After this interchange, June began withdrawing from the activity, slouching down in her seat and waiting for answers instead of suggesting them herself. During another class June told me how helpful concept mapping was for her learning, but when leaving class that day she told me she felt overwhelmed by this assignment and did not know how she would tackle it. The
119 difference between the two classes was that in the first class, June appreciated the map as a way to organize content she considered important, but in the second attempt she felt these opportunities were limited. While the assignment was intended to encourage greater negotiation of meaning, Renee's comment in class was a "cue" that there was a "right' answer that June had to guess in order to be successful (Edwards and Mercer, 1987). Without the opportunity to negotiate meaning, this activity lacked significance for June going forward.
In this situation both June and Renee could have been right with their ordering of the concept map, but concept mapping is meant for the individual negotiation of meaning. For it to be a successful strategy for learning, teachers have to be patient in allowing the students to process that material on their own terms. Johnson and Larsen (2012) found that it was not the knowledge the prevented a teacher from teaching effectively, but an inability to think about students' thinking that "restricted [the teacher's] ability to listen interpretively and/or generatively to her students" (p. 128). In cutting June off, Renee did not demonstrate this patience. Cunningham (2007) observed that history teachers, "in maintaining tight control over classroom events and talk, especially through their questioning, seemed to feel a need to constantly push forward with new content instead of exploring ideas in depth" (pp. 613-614).
June was not able to explore the revolutionary connections she saw between the Haitian
Revolution and the French Revolution because Renee had a specific direction she wanted the class to take. This direction was derived from Renee's own relationships to the content and the theme of freedom she defined as important.
Erin also held tight to a schematic narrative template that limited the opportunities for her students to negotiate meaning. But while Renee was tied to a theme, Erin was tied to chronology.
In a similar way to teacher candidates in Jennifer James' (2008) research, Erin's "curricular narrative" was open to the idea of historical interpretation in theory, but in practice, she saw
120 facts that needed to be covered before any creative work could be started. An emphasis on chronology left no room for students to negotiate meaning because a set grand narrative was privileged as the organizing principle of the class.
During our initial interview, Erin said that her "enduring understanding" of Canada was that it was "multicultural, multi-faceted, multi-event, multi-contribution," saying "it's not just one straight narrative. And it can't be" (1TCE 090). This interpretation of history was particularly important for the context in which she was working. She said that in her first day of school she realized that she would be teaching to a group of students who were "not Canadian"10 and thus had to change her approach to how she taught material (1TCE 042). Her solution was to
"start with themes at the end of the 20th Century," which would "bridge some gaps and some understanding about who are you and how do you fit in society and is your culture represented or not, then," she continued "we were able to go back to the First World War and move through it"
(1TCE 042). Erin was very proud of this solution and brought it up on multiple occasions.
However, by ending the comment by saying that once this approach was over, they would start at the beginning and "move through it," suggests that the after an introduction to the course, there would be a set package of content that would automatically follow. Ma (1999) refers to this set content as "knowledge packages," which Cunningham (2007) defines as "discrete pieces of knowledge in terms of their related, interconnected roles - not as a sequence, but as the application of several ideas rather than just one - a package, in other words" (p. 618). While knowledge packages can demonstrate a teachers' "expert pedagogical content knowledge"
(Shulman, 1987), they can also limit the opportunities for meaningful learning by denying the
10 Erin's conception of her students as "not Canadian" was based more on the assumption of race than on students' actual place of birth. Because this was an issue that came up most strikingly in only this one class, it is beyond the frame of this work to work through the tensions between the perception of "appropriate Canadian-ness" and teaching Canadian history. However, I have begun to work through aspects of this argument in other places (Cutrara, 2012) and touch upon the implications of these assumptions in the conclusion.
121 opportunities for students to negotiate meaning in ways that are different than the expected response.
Erin recognized that her students needed something different than her usual approach to
Canadian history and drew on Jack Granatstein's (1998) book Who Killed Canadian History?n to state:
So Granatstein says whose story do you tell? I would say that for, if we're looking at engagement and if we're looking at the Canadian mosaic, then I would argue that you can teach to tell the stories of the students that you're with. I think that using chronology you can provide some sense of that which is linear, but that you can look at opportunities for comparing and contrasting experiences coast to coast, north to south, urban/rural, poor/rich, and everything in between. (3TCE 037)
While she acknowledges that teaching to the students in the class would be the best approach to teaching history she also states that chronology can provide of sense of something "linear" that a
"mosaic" cannot provide. According to this approach, it is with the solidity of chronology as a guide, that one could then engage in comparative history teaching between the solid history and that which is Other. In this approach, the distinction between real and Other decentres the possibilities for students to engage in negotiation of meaning because of her perception that a linear narrative cannot be modified or negotiated. With this distinction, Erin positions herself in the role of knower with little opportunity for the students to negotiate meaning and challenge this knowledge.
While Erin acknowledged difficulties finding content, she had a clear "knowledge package" (Ma, 1999) of the post-war unit, even as she agreed with the alterative content
"Granatstein's book along with Michael Bliss' 1991-92 article "Privatizing the Mind: The sundering of Canadian history, the sundering of Canada" caused an uproar in the Canadian history community in the 1990s. Both authors lamented the "killing" or "sundering" of Canadian history on behalf of "politically correct" multicultural and gendered-focused histories and called for a return for a straightforward, unquestionable history. It was unclear if Erin appreciated or even knew about the use Granatstein's book for conservative pundits looking to have a rational explanation for racism and sexism in the grand narrative, but my feeling is that she did not. She said that she read the book when she began teaching and said that she did not think that even Granatstein knew "whose histories should you teach." When I challenged her that indeed he did know and that was the thesis of his book, she agreed he did know, but she did not know, and that is was her challenge as a 21st century teacher.
122 selections I was suggesting. Although she was critical of teachers who taught from a binder, Erin was similarly bound to her approach in that she too had a binder that provided "a gamut" of possibilities (1TCE 154). Based on her own relationships and understandings of the content, there were things that were a must, even as she agreed to shake up content and the way it is presented. In both our first interview and our mid-point interview, Erin gave a list of historical moments (or "concepts" using Historic Space-speak) that provided context for the period to her, including: the Don Mills suburb, Toronto getting a subway, Hurricane Hazel, Marilyn Bell swimming from across Lake Ontario, the CBC, the Allen Expressway, and the development of
Regent Park and Lawrence Heights (1TCE 006). The frequency in which she used these content examples demonstrates the extent that they were naturalized as content that would undeniably be covered before we moved on to other things. This list became a "text," that while not printed on a page, was "personal curriculum, infused with [her] different values" (Gudmundsdottir, 1990, p.
48).
While Historic Space is about acknowledging the narrative to challenge it, it is also about highlighting the flexibility of the narrative to show how it "shakes on the inside" and decenters the idea of an absolute origin (Biesta, 2001; 2009a). This aspect of teaching the grand narrative to challenge the grand narrative had difficulties working in this class because of the ways Erin was tied to making sure that the Canadian history was told, understood, and appreciated before a challenge could take place. In an expanding class on the Cold War for example, my perception was that the class she led was indistinguishable from a lecture without the Historic Space intervention. With the Historic Space intervention as the content organizer, I had envisioned that the lecture would begin with the teacher pointing out "Cold War" on the mind map and emphasising that the day's class would expand the knowledge of this one concept. The overarching question for this class could have been: what does the Cold War tell us about this
123 period and how can we link it to other concepts from the period? However, this preparation was lacking and Erin handed out a photocopied mind map, stated that the class would cover the Cold
War, and immediately launched into the lesson. Any opportunity for the students to use the map as a vehicle for negotiating meaning before the class began was absent. Students took the maps and placed them in their binders or left them on their desks. Erin gave her lesson on the Cold
War, which lacked any opportunities for students to negotiate meaning with their map, and students half listened, played on their phones, or talked to their friends. Students were not presented with the information differently and thus I saw no opportunities for them to engage with the material differently either.
This class gave me the opportunity to identify what the difference was between what Erin was doing and what I hoped we could achieve through Historic Space. I wrote in my field notes that "The difference is true versus conceptual" (CE042708A) in that in a standard history lecture facts are presented, and even questioned, but still considered true. In this research, I was interested in seeing if Historic Space could work in classrooms in the same way students had worked with it in my previous research. In my Masters' research, I found that if students were allowed to think of history as a created concept, then there was more room for them to negotiate meaning and think about what the history means to them (Cutrara, 2007). While I was prepared for Historic Space to work differently in a classroom than my past research with individual students indicated, how it was not working allowed me to understand how important an individual's connection with the subject was for opening up space for change. Thus, in understanding the tension between how I understood what Historic Space could do and how Erin presented history, version of Canadian history as a factual chronology made it difficult to re present the historical information in a way that encouraged students' negotiation of meaning.
When Erin brought out the map and told students to add information to it, it was used as yet
124 another handout rather than a conceptual frame for engaging the material. In this sense we had failed before we began. By not inviting students to take up their understanding of history differently, we were not able to have them negotiate meaning differently either.
5.3 Conclusion In this research, I used Historic Space as both an instructional strategy and content organizer to provide more opportunities for students to negotiate meaning. The results of the intervention demonstrated that Historic Space does provide more opportunities for students to negotiate meaning when learning history but that students must be supported by their teachers in this endeavour. For students to learn meaningfully they must be able to build personal connections to the material and in mapping, expanding, and challenging their understanding of the historical period, students were able to build their cognitive structures and develop a sense of confidence in their learning, which supports the opportunities for meaningful learning. However, teachers also had relationships with the content, and their staying too tied to these prior relationships curtailed the opportunities for students to negotiate meaning on their own and have the possibility to learn meaningfully. While Historic Space provided opportunities for active instruction and connected content, themes that students said are needed for meaningful learning, interpersonal relationships between teachers and students also are key to students' meaningful learning in history. In the next chapter, I look more closely at the interplay of interpersonal relationships for creating the conditions for meaningful learning.
125 Chapter 6: Conditions for a Positive Emotional Climate
As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, students need opportunities to build relationships with historical content by negotiating meaning of historical narratives if they are to learn history meaningfully. However, I found the number one factor for supporting or curtailing the possibilities for meaningful learning was the teachers themselves and the relationships they built with their students. When relationships between teachers and students followed a predictable pattern of interaction, it curtailed the opportunities for students to be open enough to negotiate meaning in a way that would make the historical content significant to who they are and the lives they live outside school. But when teachers viewed and trusted their students as complex individuals needing different things in time and place, then the classroom was more supportive of meaningful learning, or "a positive emotional climate," as Novak (2010) refers to it
(p. 132). Formal curriculum is only half of education, "the other half, which cannot be taught directly, is affected through the personality of the teacher" (Main, 2012, p. 82).
While this interpersonal, "other half' of education (Main, 2012) is a central component for meaningful learning, the institutional climate of schooling is not always primed for teachers and students to build relationships that would allow meaningful learning to be central in the classroom. Institutionalized schooling influences how individuals interact with content, disciplining their interactions with the content and each other into predictable and measureable chucks to be evaluated. This system of discipline has an influence on the potential for meaningful learning in history education by prescribing teachers and students' interactions into curricular roles that they are expected to place. In this chapter, I look more closely at the concept of curricular roles, and the ways that the enactment of these roles curtailed meaningful
126 learning and the ways the exercise of interactions beyond these roles supported possibilities for meaningful learning.
6.1 Curricular Roles Foucault's (1995) work on surveillance and discipline uses schools, as well as prisons, hospitals, and factories, to illustrate how sites of discipline subjugates bodies into manageable objects in service of the institution. Through hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and ritualized examination, discipline makes individuals as "both objects and as instruments of its exercise" (p. 170). In schools, the classroom then becomes a space not to exchange ideas, but a place where a teacher can:
... observe the [student's presence and application, and the quality of his work; to compare [students] with one another, to classify them according to skill and speed; to follow the successive stages of the production process. (Foucault, 1995, p. 145)
In this state of surveillance and discipline, experiences of teaching and learning become "muted, decentred and subjected to a variety of complex power relations that demand a certain set of responses from the student" (Thompson & Bell, 2005, p. 11). The school becomes a place of hierarchical supervision of both teachers and students where teachers are disciplined into performing "good teacher" in ways that also disciplines students to the benefit of the whole
(Dion, 2009; Popkewitz, 1998; Toshalis, 2009). The "normalizing context" of a school becomes
"a principle of coercion" (Foucault, 1995, p. 184) that shapes individual teachers' interactions with students and content, as well as students' interactions with teachers and content. This context of education limits the experiences of education for teachers and students by shaping their interactions, understandings of each other, and expected parts to play, limiting opportunities for teachers and students to come to know each other and build relationships as complex subjects.
127 I call these prescribed interactions, understandings, and expectations between teacher and student12 curricular roles and argue that in formal, school environments these curricular roles shape the context of education and in doing so, limit the possibilities for deep, meaningful learning. The concept of curricular roles references the ways that there are expected ways of being in the "complicated conversation" of curriculum (Pinar, 2004), whether that curriculum is explicit, hidden (Apple, 1982), or a feature of the teachers' own personal "text" (Bernstein, 1975;
Shkedi, 2009). Curricular roles are imagined and enacted in an attempt to make teaching familiar and manageable encounter, an encounter which is in fact always in flux and contingent on the people in the room. It is the uncertainty of learning, especially in history, that can "lift the veil on some of the illusions that drive teaching: illusions of self-mastery, or perfect authority, or enlightenment" (Farley, 2009, p. 542).
In an institutional atmosphere that does not encourage relationships based on critical care and discovery, it behoves teachers to view students, and their own complex work, as one- dimensional and predictable so that they can efficiently move through their day without needing to pause to reflect, regroup, and research (McNeil, 1988). History education apprentices students in a type of "studied amnesia" (Haig-Brown, 2008, p. 18) in which there is little impetus to understand the power and privilege that works within stories and their own relationships to these stories. History becomes a form of "productive knowledge" or knowledge that can be "measured and quantified," rather than "emancipatory knowledge" that "helps us understand how social relationships are distorted and manipulated by relations of power and privilege" (McLaren, 2003, p. 73). With this focus, individuality is erased in the process of learning history and "docile bodies" become points of comparison between and amongst each other when correctly repeating
12 This metaphor can be expanded to include administrative personnel as well, but the area of administrative leadership and its effect on student learning is beyond the scope of this research.
128 the acceptable historical information in a predetermined way. Classroom practice becomes about the discreet and indiscreet surveillance, judgement, and examination of the docile body and their deviation from the norm through an "integrated" system of subjection and discipline (Foucault,
1995, p. 176 & 177), rather than the negotiation of meaning between teacher, student, and historical content needed for people to make sense of their world.
At its most basic level, the curricular role of teacher is to deposit information into students' heads and evaluate the student on appropriate repetition of said material. For students, their curricular role as receiver/repeater means that they come to the classes as blank slates ready to take in information and repeat it on a test. In this definition I draw on Paulo Freire's (2006) conception of the "banking model" of education where teachers become a depositor of content, narrating material "detached from reality" and where the students become "passively, listening objects," only able to respond in institutionally acceptable ways (p. 71). When viewed in this way, possibilities for meaningful learning exist the further the teacher performs outside their curricular role as normalized in the system.
When teachers see themselves as a depositor of the right information taught in the right ways to students who are devoid of context, then regardless of how new the content is or how fun the instruction is, there cannot be any opportunity for the student, or the teacher, to build relationships needed for long-term meaningful learning. However, the further the teacher moves away from their curricular role, the more students are encouraged to move away from theirs, and in doing so form relationships that create the conditions needed to think, feel, and act in ways that would support meaning learning.
With teaching becomes viewed as "an interactive relationship between student and teacher" where teachers "discover what the students know and what they need to know," and demonstrate a "willingness" to "engage students beyond a surface level" a humanizing, engaged pedagogy can emerge in the classroom (hooks, 2010, p. 19). Teachers have to take the lead in building these relationships because there are very few institutionally accepted ways that students can communicate their frustrations with the system and their roles within it (T. M.
Brown & Galeas, 2011; T. M. Brown & Rodriguez, 2008; Dei, 1997; Thompson & Bell, 2005).
Regardless of how deep a student's desire is to learn, it is the teacher-driven relationships that have the potential to move both teacher and student, and their interactions in the class, away from their standard curricular roles and toward meaningful learning for both student and teacher.
I found moments of rote teacher/student interaction in each classroom I worked in and with each teacher (including myself) that I worked with. However, I also saw the possibilities that existed when students were able to move out of their curricular role as receiver/repeater and had opportunities to process and build knowledge in meaningful ways. In particular, while the small sample size of this research means that a definitive comparison between alternative and mainstream schooling cannot be made, at the alternative schools, schools which were intended to create alternative environments for students to learn, there were greater opportunities to teachers and students to build relationships that could result in meaningful learning because teachers and students did not have to play the role of object in a disciplinary system in the same way that teachers and students did at the mainstream school. At Bestway and Three Bells, there were more opportunities for meaningful learning because the schools were already environments where teachers and students interacted outside of standard curricular roles. These schools created learning environments designed to counter students' previous experiences at schools that could not, or would not, provide them with the support they needed. The possibilities that were available in these different learning environments indicate that attention needs to be paid to the ways that both the structure of schooling and a teacher's interaction with such a structure influences the relationships they are able to build with their students. In the following three
130 sections I look at how the enactment (or disavowal) of auricular roles was demonstrated in the classes in which I conducted this research and the impact this had on possibilities for meaningful learning.
6.2 Teaching For More Than Just "Success" Many researchers have shown that when students like their class and their teacher, and feel cared for and recognized in the classroom environment, students will have a greater regard for the subject and for school, which results in greater academic achievement and retention
(Bosworth, 1995; Cornelius-White, 2007; Gholami, 2011; P. C. King & Chan, 2011; Noddings,
1984; Vogt, 2002). However, this sense of care is not without its caveats. An "aesthetic"
(Noddings, 1984,2005; Valenzuela, 1999) or "rhetorical" (Toshalis, 2012) care can be patronizing and work within a deficit discourse that protects students from challenging content or students' own perceived shortfalls. A "critical care," on the other hand, recognizes the power within a teaching/learning relationship and is open to using these relationships for critical examinations of power and privilege in class (Antrop-Gonzalez & De Jesus, 2006; Dion, 2009;
Goldstein & Lake, 2000; Jennifer Hauver James, 2012; Rolon-Dow, 2005; Toshalis, 2012). As
Toshalis (2012) writes, "At issue, then, is not whether teachers care, but how their care functions" (p. 6). When teachers had an affective regard for their students as whole beings who are in need of knowledge to go forward in life, then these relationships between teachers and students can form the basis for meaningful learning in a class. However, when care was solely bound up in the successful achievement of a curricular role where students needed to properly receive and repeat the right information, then classes lacked the relationships for long-term, sustained meaningful learning. In this research, I found that when practice reaffirmed the
131 curricular roles of student and teacher, it prevented any other relationships between student and teacher to be formed, curtailing an emotional climate supportive of meaningful learning.
The importance of relationship building for meaningful learning was shown most strikingly in Erin's class at Caledonia. In the final surveys given out the end of the intervention, students were asked to rate the Historic Space unit on categories such as interesting, boring, meaningful, or relevant (See Appendix N for a sample student questionnaire). Rating the categories out of three with 3 being yes, 2 somewhat, and 1 no, Erin's students rated different aspects of the intervention the lowest out of all four classes with an average numerical response of 1.4: a definite 'no,' not even halfway to 'somewhat.' In the surveys I gave out before the intervention (See Appendix I), Erin's class also rated history the lowest in terms of engagement and expectations than the other three classes; but in this class, Erin and I specifically worked on attending to the needs of the students when choosing content and instruction. Erin and I brainstormed activities that would align with students' learning styles and past experiences in class and chose historical content that we felt would have a connection to students' lives and hold more meaning for them. We also provided opportunities for students to steer the direction of the class by voting on content they wanted to study, creating mind maps to organize their knowledge, and being given assignments based on their points of view.
While I saw hints of meaningful learning in any given class, these hints did not result in a positive change amongst students when they were surveyed about their experience with the history class. The low survey results indicate that there was an element in the class as a whole that was missing for the classroom to be viewed as a place for meaningful learning. I posit that in this class, the element that was missing was an affective relationship between teacher and students that would create an "unconditional" atmosphere for learning (Kohn, 2005). In an unconditional environment, students could be themselves and not feel as if learning would be
132 "subtractive" to their culture and sense of self (Valenzuela, 1999). While Erin had a care for her students and wanted to build relationship with them, Erin's expression of care was on work completion and academic success, a perspective that bound students to a curricular role of receiver/repeater and left little room to build relationships outside of these roles. Erin's "rhetoric of care" (Toshalis, 2012) stressed the importance of work completion, meaning that students could only be fully appreciated if they performed their curricular role of receiver/repeater. As
Toshalis (2012) writes:
Caring only for students' test scores, attendance records, tardiness, worksheet completion, adherence to the dress code, and capacity to obey the rules can dramatically undermine students' investment in academic achievement and the relationships that will most promote their resilience. (p. 5)
Like other well-meaning teachers before her, Erin's version of care actually worked to create a
"social distancing of teacher from student" (Toshalis, 2012, p. 28) and did not result in relationships or class environment contusive for meaningful learning.
During our interviews together, Erin talked about the importance of teachers building relationships with their students by saying hello to the students in the halls or asking students about their extracurricular interests; but in practice, I rarely saw Erin talk casually with a student from the class. The majority of the conversation between Erin and her students was based on marks or assignments, resulting in teacher/student relationships based on grades. Erin made announcements before, during, and after class about outstanding assignments and continuously stressed the importance of handing in assignments even if they were late. She told the students that if they failed the course "I guarantee you won't get a teacher who cares as much as me in summer school." With this emphasis at the forefront, when Erin talked to her students, it was not in quiet moments of interaction that creates connection and trust between people, it was in constant reminders that their work had not yet been completed. During one class, I wrote in my
133 field notes that: "She is friendly but not warm with the students. She jokes a little, but has no real connection or deep connection with the students as individuals" (CEPS0424). In other words, during my observations in class, I saw no "consistent behaviour framework" (Purkey & Novak,
1984, p. 44) that invited students out of their curricular role to be more than just their failing marks.
While teachers may effectively communicate to the whole class, individual interaction is key (Garza, et al., 2009). Small acts "go a long way toward promoting caring and need not detract from the pursuit of academic goals" (Bosworth, 1995, p. 693). It is this affect that can invite students to become "more teachable" (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2009, p. 248) or allow them to make the choice to learn (Kohl, 1994). While teachers define care according to their own image of caring (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2009; Goldstein & Lake, 2000; J. H. James, 2012) and care may mean for Erin the importance of work completion, creating a positive emotional climate is "not only achieving certain aims but also doing so in a caring manner" (Engster, 2005, p. 55). Studies show that receiving nothing but negative messages from a teacher decreases students' "perception of a positive classroom environment and relationship with their teacher" leading to low retention rates (Bennett, 2002, p. 13).
I found that these points of interaction were important to my own growing relationships with the students because "rapport is often built and maintained in the small daily school acts"
(Aultman, et al., 2009, p. 640). At each site, I attempted to engage students both in and out of classroom by smiling in the halls, making conversation, and expressing interest in their progress.
Generally, I found that these attempts at building relationships were received positively by students and often had an influence on what we would be able to complete during the lessons.
One such example is my interactions with Janelle, a student in Erin's class at Caledonia. My first impression of Janelle was that she was bright and inquisitive, but more concerned with being popular than with learning. In a few classes I taught, Janelle talked through the lesson and encouraged other students to do the same. While she was not directly rude to me, she made it known through her behaviour that what happened in the class was of no consequence to her.
Because of her influence on other students, and the academic potential that she had, I asked her to stay behind one day after class and asked her if she was bored in class. She said no.
I asked her if there was something she would prefer to learn besides the topics we identified or to learn using methods that she found more fun. She said no again: No, nothing was wrong; no, there was nothing we could do; no, "I won't learn from you" (Kohl, 1994). I said that that was ok, but I would appreciate more respect and less talking in the class so that students who did want to learn could without interruption. I emphasized to her, that both myself and Erin were there and willing to help her learn and that when she was ready, we would be too, and be happy to support her in her learning. She said fine and then left. I did not talk to her again, nor did my behaviour change toward her in class. Even if she did not take my invitation right away, I wanted my behavior to demonstrate that it was always there and safe to take when she was ready.
However, by the next class I found Janelle's behaviour began to change. She became less defiant, less resistant, less talkative, and much more a pleasure to have in class, even if she did not always pay attention to the lesson. She greeted me in the hallway and made more eye contact when I asked her a question outside class.
While my concern was not necessarily with her grades, soon after this talk, they too begun to change. Janelle began being more conscientious, more careful about her work, and at one time excused herself from a group activity to complete it by herself in the hall. While the end of the year made many students try a little harder, a defiant haze lifted over Janelle's head making it easier in class to help her help herself, not just pass, but authentically succeed. She made the choice to learn. She made the choice to be more present in class. She made the choice
135 that the invitation I was extending was right for her to begin to accept, and as an educator this was a choice I could build on in future lessons.
I found that this patient comportment also had a positive effect on the class as an entity when running lessons. As I've discussed, one of the steps in Historic Space is to take the outlined mind map that students created as note-making and note-taking tool (Buzan & Buzan, 2000) and transform it into a more analytical concept map with a hierarchical structure and crosslinks between concepts (Novak, 1998,2010; Novak & Caiias, 2008). Because of the level of understanding needed for this step, students cannot successfully complete the assignment without first understanding the historical period they were studying. Erin and I had earmarked a shorter class to complete this step and we agreed that I would run the class even though she would attend. Within two minutes of beginning the activity, my feeling that students had not truly learnt anything about the period and were in no position to provide the judgement needed to construct a concept map was confirmed. Instead of letting the class run as a work period, the class became a review of the unit. I began leading a discussion about key ideas from this period and prompted students to recall elements that they remembered from previous classes so that we could begin to create a larger concept map as a class.
With student-centered questioning techniques, I began drawing students into participating in the construction of the class map by asking them to look at the mind maps they had as a reference and use it to spark their memories about the previous lessons. Because I wanted students to feel comfortable, I joked with them, apologised when I got something wrong, and supported all answers even when they were "puzzling" (Ballenger, 2009). One student, Mahlik, was resistant to participating but began answering questions when asked directly. During one question on the Cold War I patiently waited for him to answer and Erin jumped and scolded him for not knowing the answer: "we did a whole class on this!" she told him. Up to this point
136 Mahlik was not overly interested in participating but he was not antagonistic either. After this comment, Mahlik gave a hostile look to his teacher and progressively tuned out so that by the end of the class he had his headphones on and his head on his desk. While I too was frustrated by the limited content knowledge the students had, I realized that students needed a relationship that provided the patience, support, and time to tap into what they knew. There had to be a positive emotional climate created by the teacher for the students to provide answers and admit what they did, and did not, know. Erin, in performing her own auricular role as depositor of knowledge, was concerned that students' limited knowledge would be detrimental to the successful completion of their final assignment and repeatedly reminded students: "Guys you need to know this. We've gone over it before. No excuses" (CE051313). This concern, while driven by a desire to have students' succeed, was neither inviting nor unconditional for students to connect with the material, especially now in ways they determined as meaningful.
Erin's reaction to Mahilk was not surprising in that she continuously expressed how upset and confused she was when the students did not put out the effort she felt mirrored the effort she was putting in. She wanted her students to succeed and could not understand how they failed to respond to her efforts at making this happen. Aultman, Williams-Johnson, and Schutz (2009) wrote about a similar situation in which the teacher they were observing "constructed] meaning in this situation by seeing the student-teacher relationship as reciprocal, with both parties putting forth effort to maximise learning." When the students did not give back the amount she was giving, the teacher in their research would get so frustrated that she would disrespect her students and close off meaning making (p. 641). Toshalis (2012) writes that blaming students is seductive because it "provides comfort for the care-giver, positions the teacher as superior, and supplies explanations that release the teacher from complicity in any perceived deficits" (p. 27). This approach to care is similar to Noddings' (1984, 2005) problematic perspective that care is
137 completed when the cared-for accepts and reciprocates the care of the carer. Noddings' rhetorical approach to care detracts from the creation of a positive emotional climate because students have to perform the way the teachers expect them to, but it can also result in a "self-righteous despair" where teachers give up trying to connect with their students (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 83).
This "incomplete, single-loop caring relationship" lacks the "mutuality" needed for a positive emotional climate that teachers and students need for building relationships outside their auricular roles (J. H. James, 2012, p. 173).
Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2002) writes that in classrooms, caring "may not result in immediate, self-congratulatory successes. In fact, because the struggle is long and social in nature, one cannot egocentrically base one's commitment on seeing instantaneous change" (p.
84). For care to be based on a relational interaction of attentiveness, responsiveness, and respect
(Engster, 2005, pp. 54-55), teachers must be attentive, responsive, and respectful of students' processes of coming to know and share a relationship with them. However, if care is expected to be reciprocated by the successful performance of a curricular role of receiver/repeater, then it leaves no room for teachers and students to build relationships with each other outside of these curricular roles or no room for students to modify these relationships to best suit their needs.
Erin's version of care aligned with her "personal standards of good teaching practices"
(Goldstein & Lake, 2000, p. 869), and because she has been recognized and rewarded for being a good teacher, she did not question what these relationships looked like, even while it did not seem to be working for these students.13 For students to learn meaningfully, students need an emotional context that democratizes relations between teacher and student and support them as full and worthy individuals interested and invested in learning (hooks, 2010). However, when the
13 While I only worked with Erin in this one class, she seemed to court very positive relationships with students from other classes and extracurricular activities. Thus it is important to note the unpredictability of teaching and learning and how it is contingent on the individuals in a specific place or time. focus is on student's academic success as it is institutionally defined, the relationships that get formed are ones in which the individual is cast aside for curricular role they are expected to play and is preventative for meaningful learning to occur.
6.3 Teaching Through "We" William Purkey and John Novak14 (1984) write of a theory of practice they call
"invitational education," which is "anchored in attitudes of respect, care, and civility" to
"promote positive relationships and encourage human potential" (p. 2). They argue that schools need to be inviting places for students to learn, which include multiple verbal and non-verbal messages that invite them into the learning process by stressing that they are valuable, able, and responsible individuals. In my research I found that relationships based on mutuality formed the foundation for invitational class environment. These elements were more present in the alternative school classes and to a lesser extent in Veronica's class as well, resulting in greater opportunities for students to move out of their curricular role as receiver and repeater and toward meaningful learning of, and with, history.
Relationships between teachers and students developed into a positive force in the classroom when the teacher understood herself as being in-relation with the students. In traditional curricular roles, teacher and student do not share any common ground. Teacher is there to teach. Student is there to learn. A relational stance of give and take, teach and learn, is absent from that relationship, impossible even, since the student is viewed as an empty vessel with nothing to give (Freire, 2006). However, with an understanding of self-in-relation, the enactment of the traditional curricular roles that works to segment and isolate one from the other begins to disappear and the teacher presents herself as being one with the students, able to learn
14 No relation to Joseph D. Novak from them and with them "in the ethos of mutual presence, trust, responsibility and appreciation"
(Haijunen, 2012, p. 148). By inviting students out of their auricular roles, positive relationships between teachers and students can grow, providing ground for meaningful learning.
bell hooks (2010) writes that while a teaching relationship is a hierarchy, that hierarchy does not necessarily have to result in damaging power relations. An appreciation of mutuality between teacher and student can produce a partnership with "affection and friendship at the same time [of] deserved respect for the role of the teacher" (p. 114). The teacher can be a facilitator of learning and help guide students to their own understandings of the content as well as be open to what the student can contribute to the class. Seller (2012) suggests that thinking of teaching as a
"friendship" means that teachers do not always have to know the answers, that they can be open to being challenged or questioned by the students and that this "loss of self-assurance might open the way for creative thinking and learning with others" in ways beneficial to both teacher and student (p. 72). The teacher leads these relationships because "the teacher's way of being opens understandings for the student that are beyond what is officially prescribed" (Giles, 2011, p. 63).
However, within the structure of institutionalized schooling, teaching is not intended to be a democratized relation. Foucault (1995) writes that "a relation of surveillance, defined and regulated" is inscribed "at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as additional or adjacent, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency" (p. 176). With this in mind, I found that on site-based level - walking in the halls, using the public spaces, sitting in the classrooms - there were greater invitations to learn meaningfully in the alternative schools than in the mainstream school. While working in these spaces, I found that there was an institutional context greater than the teacher herself that structured and maintained an emotional climate that was supportive of meaningful learning. When I speak of institutional context I am not referencing one person or entity. In a disciplined system, power "becomes more anonymous
140 and more functional" so that fault lies not with one person, but the 'powers that be' who discipline a "norm" (Foucault, 1995, p. 193). McNeil has found that "many of the smartest, best- educated of these teachers felt that 'really to teach' would be going against expectations at their school, not fulfilling them" (1988, p. 157). Teachers work within this system and come to know what is expected and what is outside the norm for appropriate behavior and comportment in class
(Giles, 2011). In this sense, "the school culture, in terms of the work culture that teachers perceive for themselves, relates directly to instructional approaches and indirectly to classroom goals at both the elementary and middle levels of schooling" (Deemer, 2004, p. 85), so in history classrooms for example, the culture of the school effects the ability of teachers to engage in learner-centrered teaching (Yilmaz, 2008). At Bestway and Three Bells, there were more opportunities for meaningful learning because the schools were already environments where teachers and students interacted outside of standard curricular roles. At Caledonia, however, auricular roles were a normal way of interacting between teachers and students and any deviations from this interaction were the result of a teacher being, or attempting to be, an outsider to the system. Working in learning environments designed to counter students' previous experiences with schools, the alternative school teachers translated the outsider status in mainstream schooling to positive classroom relationships at the alternative schools.
When we first began planning, Renee at Bestway was hesitant to commit to a long-term instructional plan because the equilibrium had yet to be set in the class. She said they were "in the building stage now" where she was "getting a bit more trust, but you know, some of the students are new, I'm new for them and they're trying to figure me out - suss me out - and I understand that, I do that with teachers too." She said that she was trying to "build the confidence" with the students so that they could get to a place where a commitment and investment in a student-led seminar discussion would work (1TBW 099). Renee's hesitation to
141 commit to me was vested in her interest in her students' progressive comfort with her and the class. She recognized that students need to build a relationship with the teacher and that this was an important component for meaningful classroom practice. While Renee did not question herself as an authority figure in the class, she identified that students had to build a relationship with her on their own terms in order for there to be a comfortable environment in which students felt invited outside their curricular roles to engage with her in safe and ethical ways.
In the interviews, Renee's students identified that it was these qualities that drew them to the class, calling her a "fantastic" teacher and using her teaching style as an example of the teaching style they wanted to see more of in their classroom experiences. In her classes, Renee often asked provocative, overarching questions that were intended to get students thinking about and connecting to the material. She would let students take tangents, especially when they showed they were thinking and engaged in the discussion, but also reined them back in when the topics began circulating "conspiracy theories" or other, not as academic topics. In one class prefacing the Historic Space intervention, Renee led a discussion on the question: Is a revolution ongoing or a single movement? Encouraging students' answers through her body language and positive responses to their comments, she began creating a typology of social activism that built on the comments students were contributing (BW032103). In bringing the discussion together in this way, she validated the students' perspectives by allowing them to shape the lesson and created a positive emotional climate to negotiate meaning. In her class, students were not expected to sit and take notes, nor was she expecting to dominate the class; instead she invited students to engage the material with her, and allowed this engagement to shape what was to come.
Zoe at Three Bells was clear about her understanding of the relational role she had with her students as well. In our first interview Zoe said that "we're collaborating, but I'm also
142 collaborating with the students, and they let you know when something isn't working" (1TTB
152). This statement explicitly prioritized the relationship she had with her students over the relationship she was going to have with me. Her students were the ones who primarily needed to be recognized and listened to when planning the class. In this way, both Renee and Zoe recognized and appreciated that they were "embedded in a network of connections" that they are not simply in but "constituted from the changing networks of relationships in which they are embodied" (Sellar, 2012, p. 69). These relationships with their students were key relationships that reminded them that their work was in-relation and in-responsibility to the students in their classes.
However, teaching as self-in-relation is only valuable if the teacher recognizes the complexity of the person, of the student, they are in relation to. In other words, appreciating the mutuality of a relation with student does not do enough if the student is viewed in a one- dimensional way; this still pigeon-holes students in the curricular role of being an empty vessel ready for learning. McCaughtry (2005) argues that teachers not only need pedagogical content knowledge but also knowledge about their students. Feeling accepted by one's teacher is important to students' experiences of school (Andersen, Evans, & Harvey, 2012, p. 218) and has direct results to academic achievement and retention (Gehlbach, Brinkworth, & Harris, 2011;
Giles, 2011). Teachers have to be open to inviting the complexity of students into the classroom, not stripped of their culture and sense of self (Valenzuela, 1999), to encourage students outside a curricular role that does not recognize, let alone value, this complexity.
Zoe was the most vocal about recognizing students' complexity and she took issue with how this complexity was often stripped away from students in the institutional discourse about student success. When I first arrived to observe Zoe's class, I noticed that her interactions with her students were based on a vision she had of them as full people. During one of my visits to Three Bells, I watched her spend the majority of the period working through an assignment with a student who was not understanding any aspect of a task. Zoe tried a few different ways of explaining the assignment, but it was not until she began complimenting the student's song writing skills and framing the assignment as a song, that the student began articulating the components of the assignment that would be needed for completion. Zoe never outwardly expressed frustration with the student or the speed he was working; she was more interested in having the student work through the assignment at her own pace and being validated in the unique skills he did have.
In our interviews, Zoe expressed anger about the prevalent educational discourse where teachers could just "rise above" students' lives to grant everyone the same education, every time, in every class (1TTB 086). She said that this "artificial" emphasis is frustrating because it circumvents real issues and the understanding of one's students. She says this focus is
.. .not real, cuz you know what, these are people, and as much as you tell us we have to do diagnostics and see where the students are at, blah, blah, blah, you don't care where the student are at because you think I should be able to meet every single one of them where they're at and that's not possible. (1TTB141)
Zoe was keen for her students to be introduced to critical ideas that pushed their understanding of the world. She did not just want her students outside the curricular role of receiver/repeater in school, but outside their role of receiver/repeater in life as well. She did this by introducing counterstories to the class that provided perspectives outside the dominant framework of understanding, encouraging students to think about their lives and world in more critical ways. She recognized that this understanding does not happen overnight, but by introducing content and instruction that invited students to constantly negotiate meaning, she hoped that it would become a greater component of their lives.
144 Renee also crafted her lessons based on topics that she thought would be beneficial to her students. As "the adult in the room," Renee felt a responsibility to recognize and identify themes that affected students' lives outside school and bring them to their lives within school. At out last interview, Renee expressed that she "failed" at covering material that had more resonance to students' lives because we had spent so much time on the French Revolution. She said,
I wish I had started the course with Modern Anxiety and Dilemma because all of the students in the course seemed to be dealing with a modernist anxiety, whether it's psychological disorder, anxiety disorder. And I think it would have been really interesting for them to have seen a broader context, that it's a universal or at least a Western notion. And that, you know, the way maybe they themselves have been pathologized is something that is a social, malady, not just about them.... I was able to draw in some of the revolutions going on in Egypt, Libya, you know, but not enough, not enough connections. So I do feel that that failed. (3TBW 002)
This sense of "failure" in not being able to foresee the way that she could have restructured the course for these students, is an insight only gained from knowing both the students and the material well enough to find matches that best spoke to what the students needed. However, despite not making these explicit connections in this class to her satisfaction, the observations about the students demonstrates how she thinks about her work, her students, and how one is central for the understanding of the other.
In both Zoe and Renee's classes, the teachers taught for a greater sense of student self.
Students were not docile bodies performing curricular roles, but were complex, growing individuals who needed the guidance and support of adults in their lives to transform their learning into something that held significance and application to their lives. Furthermore, these teachers' perspective on teaching and learning in their classes went above and beyond Historic
Space as an intervention. In fact, many of the meaningful opportunities in these classes were outside the Historic Space intervention, not because of it. Zoe said that while she felt her students
145 gained a greater sense of concept with the Historic Space strategy, she felt that her students were
"fatigued" by the end of the unit and that they would have preferred to be told a story than to construct a story. As I discussed above, Renee also felt points where she would have liked to have more freedom to change the course of the class so that she could explore themes with greater relevance to students. Neither Zoe, Renee, nor their students expressed that the intervention was preventative for learning; but rather, they felt a constraint that the intervention was not in line with the relationships that they were developing in class. In both Zoe and Renee's classes, it was the level of affection and regard amongst each other that resulted in a positive emotional climate, a climate that provided meaningful learning opportunities for students and a respect for each other.
Veronica also talked about a mutuality between teacher and student, but unlike Renee and
Zoe, Veronica's description of this mutuality revolved around her nervousness of being a new teacher, and not necessarily an overall ethos of practice. While Veronica worked within a mainstream school environment, she did not yet feel that she belonged. She expressed exhaustion and fear that she did not have the pedagogical content knowledge that would make her the teacher she wanted to be and continuously reaffirmed that as a younger teacher she was able to connect with her students in ways that went beyond the traditional teacher/student relationship.
Veronica criticized the teacher/student relationships she saw as dominant in school saying that the relationship between teacher and students is "like any relationship; you need to get to know each other" to create a mutually beneficial connection (1TCV 295). However, she observed that in most classes, there is a divide between Teacher and Student and not "a learning community classroom where we're all in it together" (1TCV 298). She finds this strict divide "a real struggle, because [the students are] not going to trust you, they're not going to believe you, they think you're out to get them, and that's not good. And it's hard for them to learn" (1TCV 298).
146 However, while Veronica created points of connection with her students they were often outside her lessons and not through her lessons. She built friendly relationships with students in the halls and before and after class, but those relationships were not translated into a full class environment supportive of meaningful learning. On my final day in Veronica's class, I asked the students what comments I could make about their class. One student, whom I saw only few times over the course of the month, put her hand up and pointed at a group of usually talkative young men and said "you can say that they [pointing], sorry I don't know your names, but they can ask more questions now." This was a significant comment because it demonstrated that although
Veronica's class was an enjoyable class to be in, she got along with her students and she tried to build connections with them, these relationships were not foundational to a community that invited all students to know each other and "ask more questions."
While Veronica tried to break out of her curricular role to build a 'we' between her and her students, it was not a 'we' that created a positive emotional climate where students understood their learning together. Veronica was surprised when I asked her about this students' comment in our final interview. She had not realized that there were students who did not know each other's names, but admitted that there were distinct groups in the class that she had not worked to break up. While Veronica identified that the most memorable part of the year for her had been the relationships she built with students, she did say that the class community had not really grown in the ways she would have wanted. As a result of the lack of the community,
Veronica said that she stayed away from controversial subject matter because she did not feel that there was trust in the class to broach it. Staying closer to safe material meant there were fewer opportunities for students to explore historical content in unpredictable ways, ways that may have held greater significance to them.
147 If "who we are is central to relational connectedness in education" then "how a teacher comes to the teacher-student relationships is important" (Giles, 2011, p. 61). In all three of these cases the teacher came to the teacher-student relationship with an understanding of themselves as one in the class of a whole. They came into class respecting their students and the relationships that they were going to build with those students, relationships that would hopefully result in beneficial learning opportunities for their students. With this sense of mutuality beyond predicable auricular roles, "a student and a teacher could be seen as a pair, one unit, working in partnership: both, in their being, fulfil an indispensable role in the completion of one task"
(Main, 2012, p. 88). However, for meaningful learning to occur this 'we' must be central to opportunities to negotiate meaning and invite students out of their auricular roles.
6.4 Opportunity for Research The maintenance of a positive emotional climate is only as successful as the ways teachers are supported in this work. Schools shape teachers into auricular roles in the same way teachers shape students into auricular roles. A positive emotional climate where students are invited out of their auricular role to negotiate meaning in the classroom is only successful when teachers feel safe enough to move out of their auricular role to be more than just a depositor of the right information. This invitation needs to be available in a wider institutional context by having the time, resources, and opportunities for teachers to research, reflect, and regroup in their work to want to build relationships outside their daily course of administrative work. Novak
(2010) writes that in early educational research little role was paid to the emotional needs of teachers but it is important to pay attention to the "exceedingly important role that teachers' ego needs to play in how they organize the context for learning and how they operate in it" because
148 of the effect teachers' emotional state impacts what and how they will teach and the atmosphere in which they teach (pp. 156-157).
For teachers to create history classrooms where students move out of their curricular roles as receivers/repeaters of pre-packaged content to negotiate meaningful material connected to prior knowledge, teachers need time to move out of their curricular role as depositor to find, synthesize, and develop more meaningful content for their classes. Without the professional scaffolding needed for discovery, teachers become comfortable in the stability of their
"knowledge packages" (Ma, 1999) and adopt the curricular role of depositor of pre-packaged content without room to negotiate meaning in different, unique, and meaningful ways (McNeil,
1988); the result is an emotional climate more concerned with meeting content outlines than with learning along with their students.
In my research it became clear that teachers needed and wanted time to find and develop historical information into meaningful lessons for their students, but that this time was not available in the daily course of their work. The frantic pace of the year, with few spares and loads of marking, meant there were no sustained opportunities for teachers to research and develop new, perhaps more meaningful, content for their classes. Without these innovations, content gets set and curricular roles become maintained with teachers, even those with complex ideas about history, seeing the work of challenging these stories outside the capacity of what they will teach (McNeil, 1988).
I had envisioned and presented Historic Space as an innovation that would provide more opportunities for meaningful learning by inviting teachers and students to look at the material they already had in different ways, thus limiting the need for teachers to engage in research for identifying challenges to the grand narrative. However I began to realize that teachers still need the time to shift their thinking, visualize their lessons, and feel competent to lead students on this
149 new discovery for any challenge to the material to take place, time that was unavailable to them in the daily course of their day. Without this time, teachers just become depositors. Even with the best intentions, a professional climate that leaves no place for the discovery or the negotiation of meaning, suggests an institutional norm satisfied with teaching and learning as the depositing and repeating of predetermined content and not personal meaningful learning.
All the teachers I worked with commented on how important it was to stay current with one's historical research but that they had difficulties finding the time to find appropriate resources for classroom use: a common complaint amongst history teachers (Cunningham, 2007, p. 609). Early on, Renee said one constraint in her teaching was finding "age-appropriate" resources to scaffold her teaching. She said that it was a "reality" that the search for resources could take the whole summer and that she could see why "15 years into it" teachers may stop looking for new resources. However, she backtracked and stressed how important it was for history teachers, no matter what stage they are at their teaching career, to continuously find new elements to bring into class because "there's always new resources and new documentaries and revision in history. Whether it's good or bad, it's still a perspective" (1TBW 084-087).
While Renee suggests that it could be the older teachers who get into a state where they no longer feel the need to do research, Veronica, as a first-year teacher, estimated that it would take about five years to get to a place where she could bring her own perspective and new research into a classroom. She said that she had an interest in, and saw the need for developing,
"local curriculums" in her history class, but that there was no time for her to do this at this early stage of her career. She said that developing new content would "maybe be something I'd think about in five years, after teaching for five years. And actually understanding more of the content better and starting to do my own research beyond" (1TCV 136). In Veronica's estimation, she would need more time in her career to push beyond the prescribed story and bring her own
150 research into her teaching. In the meantime, she expressed guilt about using Erin's lesson plans and realized she had few memories of teaching the class based all on her own material (3TCV
031).
The perspectives from both Renee and Veronica suggest that it would be the mid-career teachers who would be in the best position to enrich their practice through research and development. However, a mid-career teacher such as Erin, a teacher keen on history and historical investigation, still found barriers for engaging in such discovery. For Erin, "history was object" about "fragments left behind" and "solving mysteries." For her, it was important to bring primary resources into the class to explore history with her students, but she stated that while she could bring in new ideas, "it's one thing to make reference to it, [but] it's another thing to have resources to back it" (2TCE 159). This was of particular interest to her because she wanted to bring in more culturally relevant material to her classes but said it was "a resource question ultimately" (2TCE 061), "where do I find this stuff?" (2TCE 014). Even as Erin was committed and interested in research, she admitted that in attempting to
...tap into, like, the Ontario Archives and the City Archives. I've ne rve only been in there once, right? Partly because I think it's some kind of ivory tower that has too many passwords and too many... I walked in the [education library at the university] really briefly as I was coming over here and I thought, 'my God, there are some old books in here.' There doesn't appear to be a lot of new stuff, which to me says they're either digitizing things or all the good stuff is out of the library. (3TCE 109)
In this statement, Erin identifies that she feels intimidated to enter the archives to find the raw materials that she could build new lessons but also critical of the lessons that are available because she found them unsuitable for her classes. This comment echoes a problem I have seen in other work I have done with history teachers: while teachers want material and resources to grow their practice, they want them digestible enough so they do not have to spend time looking
151 for or making them ready for classroom use, but not too digestible so that they can still determine how the resources would be used. This element of supportive agency is an integral part of teaching in a context that predicts and prescribes so much of what teachers are supposed to do, but without the right balance of support and/or agency, often what gets taught in class are the prepackaged knowledge packages.
Finding time to research was less of an issue in this research project because I came to the teachers with content and resource suggestions for each class; but the lack of opportunity to reflect on new material influenced how much the challenge actually challenged each class.
Research has shown that primary sources meant to complicate the understanding of a singular narrative are often used as a prop to support the narrative already in place because teachers are not equipped to teach history as outside a bound narrative (VanSledright, 2008, p. 118). My research found a similar result: The scaffolding of the lessons did not prepare students to think of the challenges as anything more than additional information for learning about the period.
Without time to explore and reflect on how to teach material, teachers did not have the opportunity to explore how new material could expand and challenge their frameworks of knowing and how students could begin negotiate new meanings of a historical period. At our final interview, for example, Renee apologised that she had not done any extra research for the two challenges I suggested, challenges that came from a different chapter of the textbook. She said that the lessons could have been richer if she had done outside research on these topics and folded them into the overall themes and goals for the course. While I did not feel that these lessons suffered, she reflected that, "I just felt like I ran out of time to not only research, but, I don't know, embrace" (3TBW 003).
This concept of "embracing" the content, to make it one's own, to bring it into one's framework is key for consistently integrating content into lessons and moving teachers away
152 from the one-dimensional role of depositing information. Erin said that she was excited when I suggested Africville as a challenge because she already knew about this history and my suggestion gave her the incentive to research more about it. She said:
As soon as you said Africville I was pumped... because it's the real history stuff. It's like what's left behind that has not been fully resolved that made me, like, made me read. Like, who has time to read when you're a teacher unless you're reading for teaching, right? (2TCE 273)
Erin knew about this history, and was interested in the lasting effects this history had in the present, but she had not previously found time to bring this topic into her teaching because, she insinuates, recreation reading, or reading without a specific direction, was something teachers have no time for. As a feature of embracing the content, thinking through the fit in one's class takes work. Erin recollected that:
... someone was walking down the hall and was like, 'What's wrong with you? You're kind of down today.' I was like, 'Look, I was planning some stuff for another class' and I'm one of those people that won't stop until it's done. And that's exhausting. You want to be able to shut the brain off but you can't go to bed because you're in the middle of trying to construct something that you think is going to work, and it might, but it just takes a long time to explain it. (1TCE 245)
In this quote, Erin insinuates that the act of construction, of piecing together a class, a story to tell and share with students is an ongoing process that takes time to figure out how it will be executed but that this time is not provided in the normal course of the day.
Zoe was also excited for the resources I drafted for her colonialism and imperialism unit, and admitted that she would not have had the time to find similar resources had she been left on her own. The whole unit was meant to be a challenge in its own right, but end with a specific look at the role of colonialism in Canada's present. When I sent her a package of suggested resources and plans, I purposely left the choice up to her as to how she wanted to explore the final challenge, thinking that she would be excited to personalize this final step. With time being
153 a factor, however, she did not bring anything to the fore and instead I brought up issues related to colonialism in Canada when leading the final concept mapping class. When I returned to the class for the last time, I learnt that after the concept mapping class Zoe had shown a video on
Louis Riel that invited a discussion about the role colonialism plays in the present. Zoe and I had not previously talked about the video, but she seemed familiar with it when she led students through a review of it. This demonstrated that while she did not have the time to research resources, she was able to bring in resources she already had when it became clear to her how these resources could fit into the lesson.
Thus, perhaps the issue of time is not just minutes of the day, but opportunities available for deep, meaningful thinking about content, pedagogy, and practice that supports teachers in moving away from their curricular role as depositors of set knowledge packages. It is the opportunities for thinking that teachers need for their work to be something more than just depositing knowledge in students' heads. Deemer (2004) found that:
Teachers with low levels of efficacy often expend little effort in finding materials and planning lessons that challenge students, show little persistence with students having difficulty and display little variety in their teaching strategies. Conversely, teachers with high levels of efficacy are more likely to seek out resources and develop challenging lessons, persist with students who are struggling and teach in a multitude of ways that promote student understanding. (p. 74)
It is the institutional environment and the professional efficacy that develops from it, which creates an emotional climate in which both teacher and student are invited outside their curricular roles to negotiate meaning with meaningful material.
Pinar writes about the "complicated conversation" of curriculum (2004), but stresses what is really needed for learning is individual study courted by the facilitation of the knowledge in place and person (2005). hooks (2010) also emphasizes the importance of patience and consideration in developing a deep, meaningful knowing important for both teachers and
154 students to think critically about knowledge and our position to that knowledge. The pace of the year discourages this deep thinking for teachers and is part of the "hidden curricula" that maintains the auricular roles between students and teachers preventing relationships from being form. The "structure of the school day [leaves] little space or time for interpersonal interaction"
(Bosworth, 1995, p. 689) needed for teachers and students to come together to learn meaningfully with relevant and meaningful historical content. All the teachers I worked with were open to having someone collaborate with them and suggest content and accompanying resources, but it was also about teachers having the time and support to embrace content and challenges in ways they had not previously done.
The incentive to challenge for all the teachers was tied with knowing the information well enough to be comfortable presenting it in their class, time that the teachers simply did not have without outside support. If the teacher is in the practise of researching and using new resources in their classroom, they are more likely, although not definitely, more likely to find resources that bring something new into their class and their own ways of knowing. Loewen (1996) writes that "most teachers are far too busy teaching, grading, policing, handing out announcements, advising, comforting, hall monitoring, cafeteria quieting, and then running their own households to go off and research topics they do not even know how to question" (p. 288). McEwan (2010) writes that "time seems to force instructional decisions that may or may not be best for students and that, in some circumstances, actually contradict what is known about best practices in assessment" (p. 83). However, it is difficult to support teachers' quest for their own learning if they already do not feel supported in their daily practice. This time is not built into daily practice because "teaching was never meant to be a transgressive or subversive activity for female educators or their students" (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2005, p. 436). Mike Harris' government in the 1990s cut back the teachers' preparation time across the province, and while teachers even
155 before then complained about the lack of time to complete their work, the time grew even smaller for teachers to complete administrative task during school hours (Gidney, 1999). This lack of time for administrative work leads to lack of opportunities for the intellectual work needed for research, relationship building, and ultimately, meaningful classes. Thus, if we are interested in supporting teachers' practice as being something more than the depositing of set information, then time and space has to be made to support teaching as an academic, research filled endeavour, that is not extra, but integral to one's daily practice. This commitment and support begins to move the expectation of history teaching away from the curricular role of depositor to make history learning and teaching more meaningful endeavors for both teachers and students.
6.5 Conclusion In conclusion, positive interpersonal relationships between teachers and students are needed for meaningful learning to take place in history classrooms. Schooling is an institution that disciplines docile bodies into curricular roles buffering the interaction between people into teachers and students, devoid of emotive connection to negotiate meaning with each other.
However, a classroom environment where students are not expected to perform a curricular role of receiver/repeater of pre-packaged content provides more opportunities for a classroom that is inviting for students to learn. The further teachers and students move away from these curricular roles to see the teaching task as something other than a means for getting grades, the more opportunities for meaningful learning with historical narratives exist. Teachers can be supported in moving away from curricular roles when they are able to work in an emotional climate supportive of building community of inquiry for teaching and learning, a climate that is not readily available in most schools. Thus, for meaningful learning to be a possibility in history
156 classrooms, these classes must work in institutional environment open and willing for education to hold significance for students.
In this chapter I have demonstrated that the prevalence of curricular roles as a way to teach history is not supportive of a positive emotional climate in which students can negotiate meaning and learn meaningfully. For teachers to be comfortable moving out of their role of depositor to allow students more opportunities to negotiate meaning in ways that students have said they wanted, teachers need support to think of their own work as an exploration of content with their students, not separated from them. It is with these conditions in place where meaningful learning can happen, and these conditions educators should strive to achieve.
157 Chapter 7: Conclusion
This project has had multiple layers to it. On one hand, it has been about the further instructional interpretation of a poststructural approach to history education, an approach that has evolved since I began teaching history in museums in 2001 and is an approach that is intended to challenge the traditional approach to teaching history that places the narrative before the students. On the other hand, this work is about classroom practice and how it can support or curtail potentially transformative understandings about, and relationships to, history, narrative, and power in the daily packaging and presentation of history lessons. However, underlying this work is a concern for students and the ways that we, as educators, can better recognize and be responsive to what they need and want from history, education, and the educators that can facilitate their learning.
The four classrooms I worked in were all so different and each could have been a study on its own; but together, with the Historic Space intervention acting a tie that binds, my experiences in these classes tell a story about attempts at meaningful learning in practice and the relationships in the classroom that can invite these learning possibilities to occur. I have used
Joseph Novak's work derived from David Ausubel's theory of meaningful learning as a theoretical foundation for the instruction of Historic Space and the learning possibilities I hope it can achieve. Novak's (2010) theory of learning states that meaningful learning is the
"constructive integration of thinking, feeling, and acting leading to empowerment for commitment and responsibility," which requires prior knowledge, meaningful material, and the assent of the learner (p. 18). However, Historic Space is also based in critical, feminist, and anti- racist theories of education that strive for education to be a central part of deconstructive practices leading to a more equitable world (see for example, the work of Delgado, 1989; Freire,
158 2006; hooks, 2010). These ideas work together to advocate for an approach to schooling that meets the needs of all students to learn material that has significance to their lives both now and in the future, inside and outside of school, and with interpretations of the past that align with their own personal or communal reading of history.
With the importance of seeing beyond the "pattern of perception" that gets created through grand narratives (Delgado, 1989), poststructural theory can be used to decentre the truth and ways of being that get bound into the narrative as so-called truth. With history being a
"fantasy echo" of what came before (Scott, 2010), Historic Space was intended to be a strategy that highlighted the imagined nature of historical narratives and the ways this imagination bounces through a tunnel of time, place, opportunity, and power. Historic Space developed from my experience working in museums and became refined as a way to approach history in education during my Masters' research (2007). Historic Space is about deconstructing seemingly objective historical knowledge so that students can (re)imagine and (re)arrange history as something that is open to creation, exploration, and interpretation. This model can allow national history to be a backdrop for discussing internalized judgments dictated by hegemonic understanding and give students space to explore how and why these judgments are made.
In this research, I worked with four high school history teachers in interpreting the three
Historic Space steps in one unit of their regular history class. At Bestway, Three Bells, and
Caledonia, two alternative schools and one mainstream school, I used a design-based research methodology to better understand the relationships in a history classroom that could support or curtail the possibilities for meaningful learning in a history class, learning that my past research on History Space suggested it could achieve. In three phases, I observed classroom practice, interviewed and surveyed both teachers and students, and participated in classroom business to develop a theoretically grounded understanding of the potential of meaningful learning in history education. While Historic Space was the intervention that was shared across the four classrooms, the possibilities for meaningful learning were different in each class. I found that the ability of students to negotiate meaning of historical narratives, leading to a greater personal connection and understanding of the content, was an important factor for providing meaningful learning opportunities, but it was the teachers' "comportment" in the class (Gills, 1994) that nurtured these relationships in ways that could develop students' meaningful learning.
I found, as I discussed in chapter 4, that students have a desire to learn history, and to learn it with active methods, about connected content, and facilitated by teachers who care about who they are as people. For students to learn history meaningfully, they have to be able to negotiate meaning of historical content with what they already know. Explicit frameworks that invite this negotiation, like the Historic Space strategy interpreted with concept learning, can provide more opportunities to learn history in ways that hold greater meaning for them, but if the teacher prioritize his or her own interpretations of the content over students' interpretations, as I demonstrated in chapter 5, then the opportunities to connect with the material decrease. While teachers direct the relationships between themselves and their students, these relationships are framed within an institutional context that can prescribe teachers and students into auricular roles with little room for personal connection and engagement with the content or each other. I ended chapter 6 by observing that the institutional context of schooling has to provide opportunities for teachers to understand their work outside of curricular roles, by having more opportunities to engage in the thinking work required to have a deep connection with the material, students, and their practice. These opportunities for greater engagement can also provide greater opportunities for teachers to be open to and encourage the unpredictability of personal engagements with history and, in doing so, build the relationships needed for meaningful learning. In this chapter, I will review my findings related to meaningful learning in
160 the classroom as well as discuss implications of these findings and recommendations for future research.
7.1 Research Question While my research was interested in understanding the possibilities for Historic Space as an educational strategy that could produce more meaningful learning opportunities in history education, my ultimate research question stretched beyond this one innovation to question what the relationships are in a history classroom that could support or curtail the possibilities for meaningful learning in history education. In this question I identified five relationships that I felt would impact meaningful learning: student/content, teacher/content, teacher/student, student/teacher, and student/student. In this subsection, I review my findings related to each one of these relationships and discuss the implications of each on meaningful learning as a whole.
7.1.1 Student/Content Students' relationship to content was an important factor for making the connection needed for historical material to become significant to their lives. Students articulated in the surveys and interviews that they wanted more "interesting" material in their history classes, a descriptor that was defined differently by different students. For some students, interesting material meant material that connected to their outside interests, other students articulated that material was interesting when it had explicit connections to current events, and other students saw material as interesting when it connected to an aspect of their identity, such as gender, race, or culture. Despite these differing definitions, the similarities between students' desires for interesting material were that they all wanted material that connected to their understanding of the world and the prior knowledge. This connection to prior knowledge is a key component of
161 Novak's theory of meaningful learning and is the foundation of Ausubel's (1962,1963) assimilation learning theory.
Connecting prior knowledge to new historical content can be done through negotiating meaning between new material and the knowledge the student already has. Although most of the literature on the negotiation of meaning is based on English-Language Learning research
(Varonis and Gass, 1985), the negotiation of meaning is a relational interaction between the learner, the teacher, and knowledge, and it is a central condition of meaningful learning (Novak,
2010). As a way for students to gather, organize, and map out the dominant understanding of a historical period, students were able to begin to negotiate meaning with historical information using Historic Space as an explicit strategy. Because Historic Space was a strategy that explicitly invited students to negotiate meaning of historical material, it provided opportunities for students to build relationships with content that could have led to meaningful learning. Some students were able to foreground their interest in war and atomic weapons as a priority for learning about the period; others were able to think about revolutionary riots through their experiences at music concerts; other students found that a conceptual presentation of the material could hook their experiences at home with events of the past, and other students were able to challenge their own perceptions of colonialism by thinking about the ways ideas become naturalized in dominant culture.
Because learning is "a tacit, invisible act" (Bernstein, 1975, p. 25), we have no way of knowing whether students connected to this material in meaningful ways. However, as educators, we can recognize the light-bulb moment that happens when students make a connection to material that seems to stick. Because of the ways that Historic Space, interpreted through concept learning, was able to provide these moment for students, it is fair to say that
Historic Space was able to give students the tools to negoitate meaning and in doing so, lead
162 students to build greater relationships with the content that could lead to meaningful learning.
Thus, students' realtionships with content can support the possibilities for meaningful learning if they are relationships based in the negotiation of meaning between what they know and what they are learning.
7.1.2 Teacher/Content Teachers also had relationships with content, relationships that had an influence on what would be taught in class. More than written curricula, what teachers considered important for history and history learning is often what gets privileged in the classroom; in this, I found that teachers' relationship with content was a strong factor in what was possible in the history classroom. Despite the Historic Space intervention that was meant to centre students' interpretation of historical content, teachers held a frame of reference that influenced what was covered and how. While students were encouraged to negotiate meaning of historical material, if this material was selected and presented by their history teachers who privileged their own relationships with the content over the relationships students could build with the content, then it lessened the possibilities that students could negotiate meaning outside the teachers' defined frame of reference. Teachers held strong to their "schematic narrative templates" (Wertsch,
2004) and especially when they were rushed or harried, closed down alternative interpretations that were, or could have been, brought forth by students.
While a teacher's relationship to the content is in itself not enough to curtail meaningful learning, it does play a role in what content is privileged in a history class and whether the student is able to explore their own connections between their prior knowledge and the new material. In particular, implicit expressions of a teacher's relationship with the content had a greater tendency to close off opportunities for students to negotiate meaning, then explicit understandings of how one comes to know and present material. When teachers' frameworks
163 were implicit, they were treated as a matter of fact with little room for debate or discussion during class. When they were explicit, there were greater opportunities to discuss the framework and negotiate meaning as a class. While a teacher can express an interest in interpretation and exploration in theory, in practice if their frameworks for understanding historical content are embedded in the ways they present material then no room was available for students to be able to define material differently than their teachers presented it. In fact, students closed down to learning most often when this happened, without perhaps truly understanding why. Thus, a teacher's relationship to the content can curtail the possibilities for meaningful learning in the classroom if that relationship becomes implicitly dominant as the primary framework for learning the material.
7.1.3 Teacher/Student The relationship between teachers and students is a fundamentally important relationship that affects everything from in-class behaviour to school retention (Bosworth, 1995; Cornelius-
White, 2007; Gholami, 2011; Schultz, 2011; Vogt, 2002). In this research it proved to be the most salient relationship for supporting or curtailing the possibilities of meaningful learning in history classrooms. While on one hand the answer is that simple, on the other hand it is far more complex.
A classroom works as a system with parts and personalities, both internal and external influencing and impacting the possibilities for learning, especially deep, meaningful learning.
Teachers work within this system and cannot ensure that students learn; they can only provide opportunities to facilitate learning. When teachers are interested in students as people, then teachers are able to create more opportunities to teach in ways that would have significance to students' lives. However, if teachers only see students as performing the role of receiver and repeater of the information that the teacher determined as meaningful, then a relationships
164 between teacher and student could not nourish meaningful learning in ways that have significance to students' lives outside of school.
To understand how the relationships between teacher and student work in the classroom space, I identified that the institutional climate of formal schooling creates curricular roles for teachers and students to play. Drawn from Foucault's work on the operations of power in institutions, I found that in the classrooms I worked in a "normalizing context" in formal, mainstream schooling worked as "a principle of coercion" that shaped teachers' interactions with students (Foucault, 1995, p. 184). This context also shaped teachers' and students' engagement of the material in such a way that deep learning would not only be impossible, but antithetical to the disciplining goals of schooling (Kohl, 1994; Valenzuela, 1999). It is through the enactment of curricular roles that relationships between teachers and students become flattened and curtail an emotional and significant connection to the material needed for meaningful learning in history.
With this understanding of institutional contexts, it was in the alternative schools where relationships between teachers and students seemed most supportive of students' meaningful learning. I found that in the two alternative schools I worked in, the classrooms were environments that, although still institutionalized, were intended to produce alterative experiences with teaching and learning, and as such provided learning experiences that were not as prescribed. In the alternative schools, teachers and students were less encumbered by a curricular role they were expected to play, which made their engagements with the material and each other more significant. In a mainstream context, the enactment of curricular roles between teachers and students were more the norm, with relationships between teachers and students based vision of success that had little room for students' individually, histories, and processes of negotiating meaning. When a teacher was an outsider to this system, relationships outside these
165 curricular roles could form as well, but when teachers saw their own work as being part of the system, then relationships between teachers and students remained tied to curricular roles that were preventative for meaningful learning.
In the case of this research, while we were working with history using Historic Space as an instructional organizer, content and instruction were secondary to the relationships that the teachers built in the classroom before I arrived. Many of the meaningful learning opportunities that I saw in the classroom were between teachers and their students separate from this intervention. While relationships are always in flux, the relationships between the teacher and student remained a constant, creating a classroom environment that proved to be key for supporting or curtailing meaningful learning in the classroom.
7.1.4 Student/Teacher Student/teacher relationships are connected to teacher/student relationship, but can also be understood on their own given students need trust in their teacher for meaningful learning to occur. Novak (1998, 2010) writes that the choice of the learner is required for any type of meaningful learning to occur. Kohl (1994) writes that for students to assent to learn, they must be in an environment the makes that assent positive to their sense of self. Since teachers often direct the classroom environment though their "comportment" in class (Gills, 2010), the relationship that a student has with their teacher is a key variant in students making the choice to learn, perhaps even meaningfully.
In this research, students wanted to learn history, but identified that they often encountered teachers who they felt did not care about them or their participation in class, which made them uninterested in learning. On the other hand, students talked highly about teachers who facilitated learning opportunities that respected their individual voice and point of view.
166 Students identified that they resisted and closed down possibilities for learning when they were being taught by teachers who they felt disrespected them or their learning.
During the intervention, the students who demonstrated trust and a positive relationship with their teachers were more apt to ask questions, request clarification, and participate in discussions; the teachers' response to these contributions laid the groundwork for either more or less trust and participation in class. Students who did not have a personal connection with their teachers often disengaged from the lessons by taking frequent breaks, playing on their phones, or missing class completely. In the same way that teacher's relationships with students is key for students' learning, it is the belief by the students that this relationships is genuine and can be reciprocated, that supports meaningful learning.
7.1.5 Student/Student Finally, I identified relationships between students as relationships that could have had a positive or negative experience on meaningful learning in a history classroom. As an attempt to court positive student relationships, I suggested collaborative learning methods throughout the
Historic Space intervention as a way to build students' reliance and recognition of each other in their learning (Bennett & Rolheiser, 2001). These methods, academically shown to democratize relationships between students and increase their self-efficacy in relation to certain tasks
(Haugwitz, Nesbit, & Sandmann, 2010; Lampe, Wohn, Vitak, Ellison, & Wash, 2011; van
Boxtel, van der Linden, & Kanselaar, 2000), aligned with students' comments that they were interested in learning within a community of learners where they could learn from and with their peers.
However, while these relationships were ones I tracked in my field notes, I came to realize that despite more explicit collaborative learning strategies, we were not really encouraging different relationships amongst the students. Over the course of my time in the classes, there were very few changes to how students' relationships influenced teaching or learning. Students sometimes worked with peers they may not have previously worked with or relied on others to complete an assignment, but their interactions with each other did not necessarily have an effect on what or how a student interpreted the work or history.
Classrooms have to be inviting places for students to learn, and to learn with each other, but these relationships alone are not needed for meaningful learning in history. Teachers direct the climate of the class, the interactions between the students as learners, and the ways that students understand their learning in relation to their peers. Thus, relationships between students as learners are often a by-product of the atmosphere that a teacher creates in his or her class and if he or she develops a learning community supportive of collaboration and co-learning. While students talked in the interviews about students sharing stories with each other as a way to learn, from this research, an activity such as this would only support meaningful learning if the students already felt respected as individuals and if their contributions to class were valued as part of the class' learning. However, this is an atmosphere directed by the teacher and not by the students themselves. Thus, student/student relations have little effect on the possibilities for meaningful learning in history unless these relationships are part of a larger climate of learning directed by the teacher.
7.2 Implications and Significance The implications of these research findings indicate that instead of focusing on content or instruction for learning history as a field of both research and practice, history education has to attend to the ways that teaching and learning are personal interactions that have an influence on how students (and teachers) come to know themselves, each other, their present, and their past.
Too much focus can be paid to a better content or instruction, and I recognize that this research
168 project is guilty of this as well, when attention needs to be paid to ways to better support teachers in coming to know and teach for the students in their classrooms.
Both Zoe and Renee, the teachers from the alternative schools I worked in, talked about being a participant in this research as a way to better speak to the experiences and importance of public, alternative, schooling. Both teachers were committed to the principles that framed the schools they worked in and found alternative schools better environments to work and learn in.
In this research, the implication of these teachers' experiences on the overall understanding of the possibilities of meaningful learning cannot be overlooked. Alternative schooling is a valuable site for teaching and learning for teachers and students who feel the constraints of auricular roles all too fully in mainstream environments. Funded by a public board, the alternative schools
I worked in were already creating meaningful learning environments for students and these learning opportunities were because the teachers could create personal learning relationships with students, inviting them to learn unconditionally in each class.
Rather than thinking of these schools as alternative to the norm, these schools should be viewed as models of what can happen when the learning of students who do not fit the norm is placed first. Mainstream schooling does not have the viewed as schooling that works for the majority. Mainstream schooling can be understood as a site of constraint about what is possible when the context of schooling is not questioned. Identifying the curricular roles that students were expected to play in institutional context of schooling highlights the importance of understanding the context of schooling and the way it influences the type of teacher a person can be and the type of teaching he or she is able to facilitate. It is here where possibilities exist outside the norm to engage with learning in different and potentially more meaningful ways.
Another implication of this work is that attention needs to be paid for the context of
Canadian history education in 21st century transnational urban and suburban centres. Only two of the classes in this research were learning Canadian history and as such, this dissertation did not go into depth about the particularities of teaching and learning Canadian history. However, in today's world, as the findings of this work suggested, teaching and learning Canadian history is a complicated and tension-filled endeavour. Students who represent a new face of Canadians who understand their identities as being both here and away (Abu El-Haj, 2007) are sitting in their history class wanting to be provided with historical context to the Canadian nation that they live in. Teachers, on the other hand, can feel ill prepared to tell these stories when they do not have the resources to support this history. The tension between the need for inclusivity by the students and the want for stability from the teachers, means that relationships between students and content fail to get formed in ways that could make learning Canadian history more meaningful for students. History class becomes teacher-centric or textbook-centric, with the negotiation of students' perspectives missing from daily classes.
The significance of this work is thus: if time is spent fixing history teaching, then time is not spent on thinking about history learning and what can best facilitate learning that has meaning and significance to students' lives. In the same way that I began this dissertation, I recognize that meaningful learning with national history is of particular importance for students to feel recognized and valued in the nation; but in reality, all history learning holds significance to students so that they come to connect and understand their present as a product of the past.
Meaningful learning with historical narratives is based on a relational interaction with content and the teachers and students in the room. This type of learning can be facilitated regardless of the curriculum, textbooks, or political climate because it involves the choice of both the student and the teacher to recognize the special place they share in negotiating meaning with and for each other when learning and teaching history.
170 7.3 Recommendations Based on the findings of this work, I have the following recommendations for creating meaningful learning opportunities in history education:
1. As other researchers before me, I echo the findings that history education needs to be
facilitated by active, involved, and collaborative instruction that values students'
contributions at the very core of the process (Adey & Biddulph, 2001; Ares & Gorrell,
2002; Biddulph & Adey, 2003; Harris & Haydn, 2006; Haydn & Harris, 2010; Yilmaz,
2008). Led by educators interested in providing "critical care" to their students (Antrop-
Gonzalez & De Jesus, 2006; Rol6n-Dow, 2005), this instruction must feature students'
negotiation of meaning with historical content in a patient and supportive class
environment. Concept learning may be an instructional framework in which teachers can
centre students' negotiation of meaning, but teachers must have the patience to see these
steps through. Historic Space, as it was interpreted with concept learning, can provide a
way to work through these steps so the end goal is for students to challenge the traditional
frame of the narrative, but it is not the best, or only, way to do this work.
2. Institutional structures, such as school boards and ministries of education, have to provide
more opportunities for teachers to be introduced to, research, and scaffold into their
teaching with content that aligns with students' interests and prior knowledge. While this
recommendation may seem to be antithetical to the findings of this study, one of which
was that it is relationships and not just content that holds the key to meaningful learning,
presenting content to students that relates to their interests and prior knowledge can be a
way to build and ratify the relationship between teacher and student beyond curricular
roles of depositor and repeater, potentially leading to meaningful learning. For some
171 students in this research, content was key; but these were the same students who lacked a
relationship with their teacher. Content and interpersonal interaction can work hand in
hand in building relationships with both content and people that can result in meaningful
learning. Thus, while content is not everything, it is something, and students need to be
taught material that has significance to their lives. By having opportunities to find and
explore new stories with their students, teachers revise what and how they know in
relation to the students they are working with. Students, on the other hand, can be
introduced to stories with complexity and greater connection to their lives. This
symbiotic relationship of exploring with each other can make the teaching and learning
relationship all the more rich and possibly lead to more meaningful learning opportunities
in history education.
3. Teachers must be prepared when they enter their classrooms that the unpredictability of
students' engagements with materials is not a determinant to learning, but essential to the
process of learning and teaching. Subject specific courses in teacher education
programmes must involve a discussion of interpersonal relationships in teaching and
learning so that they are viewed as part of the process of history learning, not separate
from it.
7.4 Directions for Future Research As I discussed in the above implications, there were significant points of discussion about teaching and learning Canadian history that I have not fully explored here. In particular, I have lasting questions about what ties teachers to content and how they understand this relationship in relation to the students they have in class. Yet, while I am interested in talking more with
172 teachers, a more productive direction for future research is to explore with students what relationships they want to build with content related to Canadian history. Instead of focusing on teachers' teaching, a direct focus on students' learning centres the conversation about education as being about the students and what they need from the Canadian narratives they learn in their history class.
In future research, I am interested in providing more space for students to talk about what stories they want to learn and discover in a history classroom and what stories make sense for them going forward as Canadians - hyphenated or otherwise. The intent of this research would not be to figure out ways for students to learn more Canadian history, but to question what are the ways that we, as history educators, need to conceptualize Canadian history for it to have greater significance for youth living in the transnational space of 21st century Canada? What are the stories that students want, and need, to learn and what are the ways they want to learn them?
What stories to these students want to share and how can the classroom be a place that is safe enough to share them?
Recent literature has taken up the task of investigating and understanding the experiences of immigrant and racialized youth in schools (Bigelow, 2011; Joseph & Hunter, 2011; Liu & Lu,
2011; Museus & Maramba, 2011; Warikoo, 2011), but little of this research has focused on students' relationships to specific subject matter with the aim of transforming the subject to better suit their needs. Consequently, while students can be very vocal in what they want and how they want to learn history (Clark, 2009; Grever, Pelzer, & Haydn, 2011; Harris & Haydn,
2006; Haydn & Harris, 2010; Mitsoni, 2006), the conversation with students who are not hearing their history in Canadian history classes is a missing, yet needed, piece in current research.
While I have hoped to begin that conversation in this dissertation, there is much more that can be said. My ultimate research trajectory is to understand how educators can (re)frame
173 Canadian history education in ways that better respond to the needs of a new generation of youth living in Canada and to translate these findings into theory related to classroom practice, content selection, and teacher-student relationships. The aim is to break open a binary of "us" versus
"them" and use student voices to develop a new version of "we" in the historical narratives that can move Canada into the future. This research will both expand and focus the findings of this dissertation since both projects are driven by privileging students' voices in the history classroom, but this future project can be refined to focus this discussion with immigrant and racialized youth in Canada's urban centres.
7.5 Final Thoughts There were times over the course of research and analysis that I questioned what direction this dissertation would take. The four very different research sites meant that I could look at each one in and of itself to make an argument for meaningful learning in history education; and there were moments in which I felt that looking at one over the others would make a clearer argument on its own. However, I have come to realize the strength in speaking of these four classrooms together. The four teachers, four groups of students, three schools, and one intervention highlight the diversity of teaching and learning practices and the importance of looking at them separately to understand how they work together.
As the primary educator at some point in all the classes, my most meaningful learning moments were often outside the Historic Space intervention. It was the moments where a student looked me in the eye for the first time, or when a behaviour pattern changed to highlight the performance of resistance important in some moments and not others, or when a student thanked me for asking a question or giving an answer. In other words, it was the moments where I felt that a relationship was being formed between me and a student that could potentially lead to
174 students trusting the process of education and making a commitment to learn. It is this learning, about and with students, that I hope is demonstrated in this work.
With a new curriculum coming out in Ontario in 2013, teachers will soon be encountering a new way of structuring their work that align with a different vision of the objectives and expectations of a history class. While this will undoubtedly alter what and how teachers teach, as this research has shown, it is not what you have to work with but how you work with it that determines the possibilities for meaningful learning in any given classroom. Meaningful learning must invite students to think, act, and feel with meaningful material connected to their prior knowledge and be done so by an educator who has a critical care for their learning (Novak,
2010). With the meaning from this dissertation in mind, meaningful material, an affective connection with content, and a critical patience and awareness of students' own learning journeys become central to any foray into teaching and learning. At its core, this is what this dissertation and my fixture work is about: Making students and their meaningful learning the focus of conversation about history education and insisting that their voices set the tone for what can happen in the classroom today and in the future.
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209 Appendices
Appendix A: Historic Space Information Package
What Historic Space would mean in your teaching practice A "historic space" is a fancy way of saying a historic period, but to teach through Historic Space is so much more. Historic Space is a way of framing your engagement with history so that the constructed, and conceptualized nature of popular narratives can be emphasized over a static and seemingly immobile hegemonic interpretation. Of course, everyone knows that there isn't one national story, but a dominant narrative exists that frames certain people and events as central to Canada and other people and events as sidebars, or at worse, nonexistent. Historic Space is a way of learning history that keeps the constructed nature of ^ all stories as central and encourages students to question what these stories, and the stories we hear less often, tell us about Canada, our values, and our futures.
211 By setting the parameters of what we believe to be possible or impossible, stories frame our lives. However we often take stories, especially histories, as a given, never formally questioning what the values are that implicitly or explicitly make this the story that is relevant, and who and what benefits and/or suffers because this story is told over another. Even in a fantastic history class, students are not usually asked to think about the implications of these histories on their lives. Yes, they can learn about bias, they can learn about injustice, they can learn about legacies of prejudice, but they are not often asked to think about what they understand to be true about themselvesj their peers, and their futures because of this story. Historic Space is based on critical theory that emphasizes £ these relations of power within stories and uses concept learning as a pedagogical frame to make these lessons correspond to the research on how students learn meaningfully and critically.
212 Any teacher can bring in a video on Africville or documents from the Eugenics movement to teach their students something different than the standard story. And that's great! But for students to think about how history lays the groundwork for the future, their futures, then they need to be able to think about the connection between the stories that are traditionally on the sidebar and the stories that are centralized. Historic Space is unique because conceptualizing history as space provides the space for students to build and rebuild the narratives of historic periods. Students can physically move concepts around on their maps of a historic space that represents what they've learnt about that concept and how it connects other concepts. And they can bring in new concepts that aren't traditionally taught in that historic space and make those concepts part of what they consider central to understanding the period. Rearticulating what history can do and say needs a new way of thinking about history. A graphic novel or a play can tell the same story as a novel but, borrowing from Marshall McLuhan, the message changes with the medium. What kinds of messages can we | encourage our students to explore in this new medium of understanding history? Using Concept Learning strategies, Historic Space involves students creating maps of each historic space (historic period) they study at the beginning of the unit and then adding to and refining these maps throughout the unit. In this way, students are building and refining their knowledge of history in meaningful and collaborative ways throughout the course. / V / \ / Thinking through Historic Space, people, events, and themes become conceptualized so that students can think of the construction of the narrative as much as the details of it. Let's face itj with so many curriculum objectives it is hard to think that the histories that students are learning are these deep and complex stories. Studies have shown that students already learn history in conceptualized bubbles, cut off from the details that historians love. Thus Historic Space is a way to tap into the ways students learn history, but do so in a way that will challenge them to see the values and principles that are written into our histories. This isn't about learning an abbreviated national history, but building a usable and meaningful national narrative. By attaining relevant concepts in a historic space, students begin to build and organize the dominant narrative in ways that make sense to them while expanding their knowledge of the historical period. When students build on what they know, it becomes easier for them to gain control and confidence over concepts they previously understood as irrelevant and untouchable.
214 From my research, the research on concept (earning, and research on how students learn history, Historic Space can:
• Give students greater clarity about the historic period they are studying, leading to greater and more active engagement and retention of the material • Allow them to prioritize and expand on this knowledge based on their own interests and histories • Give students greater ownership about the content and process of their learning • Give students the opportunity to collaboratively learn with their peers and communities in differentiated ways • Confront and address controversial histories in ways they had not before
215 Applying Historic Space in your teaching practice doesn't necessarily mean that you need a whole new set of resources or tons of time to research new histories that fit into the curriculum (because that is not going to happen is it?). Applying Historic Space in your teaching involves a commitment to using the resources that you have different and letting students take ownership in defining what is important for them to learn. 1. Students map the historic space at the beginning of the unitj based on a mini-lecturej their textbook, and other survey texts 2. They expand their understanding of the concepts on their maps through traditional and/or traditional learning methodSj but they most go back to their maps to revise and refine the relationships between concepts.
3. Bring in histories that may challenge a traditional map of the period and have students think about what these stories say that the traditional map cannot. Can these stories fit into the maps? Does the map have to be redrafted to incorporate these stories? By thinking about the relationships between concepts, students should question.What does this tell us about the map that couldn't be seen before?
216 Bennettj B., & Rolheiser, C. (ZOOX). Beyond Monet: The artful science of instructional integration. Canada: Bookation. Cutrara, S. (ZOOS). Historic Space: A feminist conceptualization of Canadian History. Bachelor of Arts Unpublished MPR, University of Toronto, Toronto. Cutraraj S. (Z007). Historic Space: A Transformative Model of History Education. Masters of Arts, Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Toronto. Cutraraj S. (ZOXO). "Transformative history: The possibilities of Historic Space." Canadian Social Studiesj 44(1)., 4-16.
Levstik, L. S. (ZOOO). "Articulating the Silences: Teachers' and adolescents' conceptions of historical significance/' In P. N. SteamSj P. Seixas &c S. VJineburg (Eds.)j Knowingj Teachingj and Learning History: National and international perspectives, (pp. 284-3OS). New York New York University Press.
Shemiltj P. (ZOOO). "The Caliph's Coin: The currency of narrative frameworks in history teaching," In P. N. Steams, P. Seixas More information can be found at my website: www.SamanthaCutrara.com 217 Appendix B: Research Design and Data Collection Description The first phase of this research is intended to prepare and understand the context of the intervention. - Survey - Questionnaires - Ethnographic field notes - Interview# collaborative - Group interviews - Copies of pedagogical planning session resources, such as lesson plans, handouts, and PowerPoint presentations Description The second phase is a intervention of Historic Space, with the teacher teaching historical content using Historic Space as a conceptual organizer. - Ethnographic field notes - Video recording - Copies of pedagogical - Journals resources, such as lesson plans, - Interview - Journals handouts, and PowerPoint presentations - Samples of students' creative work, such as concept maps and presentations Description The final phase of this research will review and wrap-up data collection. I Teachers Students Content - Survey - Questionnaires - Interview - Group interviews 218 Appendix C: Information & Invitation Letter for Principal Study Name: "Creating Possibility: Opportunities for critical social justice in history education" Project Lead: Samantha Cutrara PhD Candidate, Faculty of Education 135 Winters College, York University [email protected] Dear Principal, During the Winter term of the 2010-2011 school year, I am interested in collaborating with two secondary history teachers in a Participatory Action Research project that will pilot an innovative way of teaching and learning history entitled Historic Space. Historic Space is a conceptual frame for understanding history that is designed to cover the curriculum in a way that is more meaningful and personal to students. With your consent, I hope to be invited into School Name I to collaborative with teacher's name on this research. About this Research The purpose of this research is to understand the classroom practices - the interactions between teacher-student, student-student, teacher-material, and student-material - that supports or curtails the opportunities for engaged, meaningful history learning and teaching in service of social justice. I am currently a third year doctoral candidate at York University and received my Master's of Arts from Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education in 2007.1 have published on this work in peer-reviewed journals in both 2009 and 2010 and have been presenting this work at academic conferences since 2005. This research will inform my doctorate research dissertation and make a contribution to other work on teaching and learning history. I anticipate that the findings of this research will be useful for developing new ways of teaching history that are more in line with students' hopes for the future. What is Involved in this Research This research involves collaborating with one or two secondary school history teachers on a Design-Based research intervention in teaching and learning history using a conceptual organizer called Historic Space to frame their content delivery. Teachers involved in this research would be observed by me, either in-person or by video, one or two times a week and be requested to participate in approximately 6 hours of out-of-class 219 research activities between February and May of 2011 for interviews, reflective journaling, planning, and debriefing. I am also interested in how students react and respond to these interventions in teaching and learning history, and I will therefore also request that students actively participate in this research. This participation would involve approximately 2.5 hours of class time for journaling and questionnaires and up to 4 hours of voluntary, out of class time for group interviews. Risks and Benefits The risks to the participants of this research are minimal because all lessons will be collaboratively developed in accordance to the Ontario curriculum and any data collection will be temporarily or permanently called off during any unexpected disruptions to normal practice. Teachers will have a final say in terms of content taught and methods used and both students and teachers can withdraw from the study at any time. On the other hand, participation in this study will have great benefits to both teachers and students since it will provide an opportunity for teachers and students to reflect on the process of teaching and learning history in the context of 21st century Canada and thus inform practice- related theory on ways to improve history education in our changing global community. Confidentiality All information supplied during the research will be held in confidence and any identifying information about the school or class will be changed or deleted in any report or publication of the research. All research data including the journal entries, lesson plans, student work, as well as my notes, transcripts, and audio tapes, will be locked in a secure filing cabinet at my home office, and with the exception of my supervisor, Dr. Susan Dion, will not be seen by anyone. All the research material will be kept on file for no fewer than five years following the completion of the project, and then text material will be archived and audio recordings will be destroyed. Confidentiality will be provided to the fullest extent possible by law. Questions About the Research? I would be happy to discuss this research further with you either by phone at 905-505-1152 or by e-mail [email protected]. You can also contact my Graduate Supervisor, Dr. Susan Dion, by phone at 416 736-2100 Ext.88783 or by e-mail [email protected] or my Graduate Program in the Faculty of Education at 282 Winters College, York University by telephone at 416-736-5018 or by e-mail [email protected]. This research has been reviewed and approved by The External Research Review Committee of the Toronto District School Board, and the Human Participants Review Sub-Committee, York University's Ethics Review Board and conforms to the standards of the Canadian Tri-Council 220 Research Ethics guidelines. If you have any questions about this process, or about your participation in the study, please contact Ms. Alison Collins-Mrakas, Manager, Research Ethics, 5th floor York Research Tower, York University by telephone at 416-736-5914 or email [email protected]. Thank you in advance for considering this research. I look forward to working with you in the future! Sincerely, Samantha Cutrara Primary Researcher and PhD Candidate Faculty of Education, York University 221 Appendix D: Statement of Informed Consent for Teachers Study Name: "Creating Possibility: Opportunities for critical social justice in history education" Project Lead: Samantha Cutrara PhD Candidate, Faculty of Education 135 Winters College, York University [email protected] Dear Teacher, During the Winter term of the 2010-2011 school year, I am interested in collaborating with two secondary history teachers in a Participatory Action Research project that will pilot an innovative way of teaching and learning history entitled Historic Space. Historic Space is a conceptual frame for understanding history that is designed to cover the curriculum in a way that is more meaningful and personal to students. About this Research The purpose of this research is to understand the workings of a history classroom to understand how educators can conceptualize history education in a way that would be more meaningful and applicable to students' lives outside of school. This research will inform my doctorate research dissertation and make a contribution to other work on teaching and learning history. I anticipate that the findings of this research will be useful for developing new ways of teaching history that are more in line with students' hopes for the future. Your Involvement in this research This research follows a Design-Based Research methodology in which the teacher and the primary researcher collaborate in a cyclic investigation in teaching and learning practices. For this research, your involvement would involve a semester-long commitment to collaborating on two unit plans that use Historic Space as a conceptual organizer and having your class and teaching practice observed. More specifically it would involve: collaboratively developing lesson plans, consenting to class observation either by me or by video-recording, five 45-60 minute interviews over the course of the term, and weekly journal entries. The time commitment would be 10-12 hours of out-of-class time over the course of the term, or about 40 minutes a week. Your participation in this study would be completely voluntary and you can withdraw from the study at any time. Although no monetary inducement will be offered, to reduce any out-of-pocket expenses I will provide resources the class would need during this research, such as notebooks, overhead photocopies, and one video-recorder per class. At the end of the research, the video-recorder will be donated to the history department at the school as a token of appreciation for conducting 222 this research. If you choose to withdraw from the study, these incentives will still be provided for the remainder of the term. Benefits and Risks The benefits to you of participating in this research would be to contribute to a greater understanding of how social justice issues can be addressed in classrooms and thus improve theory related to history teaching and learning. You may also benefit by gaining new teaching tools or reflective insight about your teaching practice. There are no foreseeable risks to this research because all lessons will be collaboratively developed in accordance with the Ontario curriculum and any data collection will be temporarily or permanently called off during any unexpected disruptions to normal practice. Withdrawal from the Study Your participation in this research project is completely voluntary and you may choose to stop participating in the study, or an aspect of the study, at any time for any reason. Your decision to stop participating, or to refuse to answer particular questions, will not affect your relationship with the researchers, York University, or any other group associated with this project. In the event you withdraw from the study, all associated data collected will be immediately destroyed wherever possible. Confidentiality All information you supply during the research will be held in confidence and your name and the name of the school will not appear in any report or publication of the research. All research data including the journal entries, lesson plans, student work, as well as my notes, transcripts, and audio tapes, will be locked in a secure filing cabinet at my home office, and with the exception of my supervisor, Dr. Susan Dion, will not be seen by anyone. All the research material will be kept on file for no fewer than five years following the completion of the project, and then text material will be archived and audio recordings will be destroyed. Confidentiality will be provided to the fullest extent possible by law. Questions About the Research? If you have questions about the research in general or about your child's role in the study, please feel free to contact me by e-mail [email protected] or my Graduate Supervisor, Dr. Susan Dion either by telephone at 416 736-2100 Ext.88783 or by e-mail [email protected]. You may also contact my Graduate Program in the Faculty of Education at 282 Winters College, York University by telephone at 416-736-5018 or by e-mail [email protected]. 223 This research has been reviewed and approved by your school's principal principal's name>, the York Region District School Board/The External Research Review Committee of the Toronto District School Board, and the Human Participants Review Sub-Committee, York University's Ethics Review Board and conforms to the standards of the Canadian Tri-Council Research Ethics guidelines. If you have any questions about this process, or about your participation in the study, please contact Ms. Alison Collins-Mrakas, Manager, Research Ethics, 5th floor York Research Tower, York University by telephone at 416-736-5914 or email [email protected]. Legal Rights and Signatures: I consent to participate in the "Creating Possibility: Opportunities for critical social justice in history education" research project conducted by Samantha Cutrara. I have understood the nature of this project and wish to participate. I am not waiving any of my legal rights by signing this form. My signature below indicates my consent. Teacher's Signature Date Principal Investigator's Signature Date 224 Appendix E: Statement of Informed Consent for Parents Study Name: "Creating Possibility: Opportunities for critical social justice in history education" Project Lead: Samantha Cutrara PhD Candidate, Faculty of Education 135 Winters College, York University [email protected] Dear Parent, This term, About this Research The purpose of this research is to understand how history education can be more meaningful and more applicable to students' lives outside of school. Over the course of one semester Between February and May 2011, Who I am I am currently a third year doctoral student at York University and received my Master's of Arts from Ontario Institute for the Studies in Education in 2007.1 have been a history educator in Toronto museums since 2003 and have been doing research on Historic Space since 2005. Last year I was a research assistant for a research project in the Toronto District School Board, doing work like I'll be doing in this research: observing classes, taking to teachers, and listening to students. This research will inform my doctorate research dissertation and make a contribution to other work on teaching and learning history. I anticipate that the findings of this research will 225 be useful for developing new ways of teaching history that better suited for Canada's changing community. Your Child's Involvement in this Research While • Focus groups: Your child will also be asked to volunteer for four 60 minute after-school focus groups that follow up on questions from the questionnaire. Like the questionnaires, the students will be asked about their experiences learning history. These focus groups will be audio-recorded and transcribed at a later date. The focus group will involve questions such as: • This class is trying to teach and learn history differently. Do you feel that there are differences in how you expected to learn history to how you are now learning history? How? Why do you think that is? • Can you give me some details about how you felt about A SPECIFIC IN-CLASS EVENT? • Have we covered content in this class that connected to life outside of school? • Journal entries: Once a week, I will ask the class to write a non-graded 15 minute journal entry to reflect upon their experiences in the class and the connection, if all, between the class and their lives outside of school. Like the questionnaires, these journal entries will not be read by their teachers nor will the opinions impact on their grades for the course. Journal entry questions will ask for a reflection on such questions as: • Do you feel that the information we are covering in class is meaningful for you? • What do you think about the class activities we have done this term? 226 • Do you think about yourself differently because of something that you have learnt in this class? • Video Recording: Because I will not be able to attend all the classes, once a week the class will be video-recorded so that there is a record of classroom activities that day. Selections of the videos will be transcribed for data analysis but will not be shown outside the transcription process. • Data collection: A selection of the class's creative work, like concept maps and presentations, will be collected following grading to chart how students' interpreted the assignments and the content. This will not have an impact of their grade and specific consent will be asked of the students for any digital reproductions of the work. Benefits and Risks As a Participatory Action Research project, your child would benefit from taking part in this research by being an active co-researcher in vinderstanding how students in the Toronto and GTA area think about and use history. By reflecting on what and how they were learning, your child as a participant in this research would also benefit by learning more about themselves as learners, which would aid them in their future learning opportunities. However, by being part of this research there is also the risk that students might be uncomfortable reflecting on their learning or they would fear that participating in the research would take away from their class time. I assure you that these risks are minimal. Their participation in this research is completely voluntary and their responses will be kept confidential to both their teacher and their classmates. Furthermore, any time that you or your child would like to withdraw from this study you or they can do so without any consequence to their participation in the class or to their grades. Confidentiality I should assure you that your student's confidentiality is one of my main priorities in this research and that any data about their participation will be completely confidential. Their work will not be shared by with the teacher or other classmates and the student's name as well as any other identifying information about the student, the class, or the school will be deleted or changed in the research records and research publications. Students always have the option of not participating in or answering specific questions during the data collection and will not be penalized if they choose to do so. All research data including the questionnaires, journal entries, and student work, as well as my notes, transcripts, and audio tapes, will be locked in a secure filing cabinet at my home office, 227 and with the exception of my supervisor, Dr. Susan Dion, will not be seen by anyone. All the research material will be kept on file for no fewer than five years following the completion of the project, and then text material will be archived and audio and video recordings will be destroyed. Confidentiality will be provided to the fullest extent possible by law. Voluntary Participation and Withdraw from the Study Your child's participation in the study is completely voluntary and you or they may choose to stop their participation at any time. The decision not to participate in the research will not influence the student's participation in Your child can stop participating in the study at any time, for any reason, if you or they decide. If they decide to stop participating, they will still benefit from class celebration at the end of the research. Their decision to stop participating, or to refuse to answer particular questions, will not affect their relationship with the researchers, Questions About the Research? If you have questions about the research in general or about your child's role in the study, please feel free to contact me by e-mail [email protected] or my Graduate Supervisor, Dr. Susan Dion either by telephone at 416 736-2100 Ext.88783 or by e-mail [email protected]. You may also contact my Graduate Program in the Faculty of Education at 282 Winters College, York University by telephone at 416-736-5018 or by e-mail [email protected]. This research has been reviewed and approved by your school's principal principal's name>, the York Region District School Board/The External Research Review Committee of the Toronto District School Board, and the Human Participants Review Sub-Committee, York University's Ethics Review Board and conforms to the standards of the Canadian Tri-Council Research Ethics guidelines. If you have any questions about this process, or about your or your child's rights as a participant in the study, please contact Ms. Alison Collins-Mrakas, Manager, Research Ethics, 5th floor York Research Tower, York University by telephone at 416-736-5914 or email [email protected]. Legal Rights and Signatures Your signature below indicates that you have read this consent form, understand its contents, and authorize the participation of your son/daughter in this research project. Please note that your child's signature will also be required. You may withdraw your child from the project at any time by contacting me via email [email protected]. 228 Please return the signed form to your son/daughter's classroom teacher by date . • YES, I , agree to allow my child to participate in the "Creating Possibility: Opportunities for critical social justice in history education" research project conducted by Samantha Cutrara. EH I have understood the nature of this project and I consent to have my child participate in this research by: • Filling out research questionnaires • Have the option of attending audio-recorded focus groups regarding the research CD Writing journal entries about their experience with the research • Be video recorded as a class participant CD Have a selection of their pre-graded creative work collected for analysis I am not waiving any of my legal rights by signing this form. My signature below indicates my consent. Parent's Signature Date Principal Investigator's Signature Date 229 Appendix F: Statement of Informed Assent for Students Study Name: "Creating Possibility: Opportunities for social justice in history education" Project Lead: Samantha Cutrara PhD Candidate, Faculty of Education 135 Winters College, York University [email protected] Dear Student, This term, About this Research The purpose of this research is to understand how history education can be more meaningful and more applicable to students' lives outside of school. Over the course of one semester Between February and May 2011, Who I am I am currently a third year doctoral student at York University and have worked at museums in Toronto and been working on this research since 2003. This research will inform my doctorate research and make a contribution to other work on teaching and learning history. The findings of this research will be useful for developing new ways of teaching history that better suited for Canada's changing community. Your Involvement in this Research 230 While • Questionnaires: Four 15-20 minute non-graded questionnaires during class time. You will be asked about your experiences learning history and with the research. This questionnaire will involve questions such as: • Do you like history? Do you think it is important to learn history? • Of the content we have covered, what have enjoyed the least? Why? • Focus groups: If you are interested in talking about the questions that were on the questionnaires, you could also volunteer for one of the four 60 minute after-school focus groups. Like with the questionnaires, you will be asked about your experiences learning history in the class. With your consent, the focus groups will be audio- recorded and transcribed. The focus group will involve questions such as: • Can you give me some details about how you felt about AN IN-CLASS EVENT? • Have we covered content that connected to life outside of school? • Journal entries: Once a week, I will also ask you to write a non-graded 15 minute journal entry to reflect upon your experiences in the class and if there are any connections between the class and your life outside of school. Like the questionnaires, these journal entries will not be read by your teacher nor will it impact your grade in the course. Journal entry questions will ask for a reflection on such questions as: • Do you feel that the information we are covering in class is meaningful for you? • Do you think about yourself differently because of something that you have learnt in this class? • Video Recording: Because I will not be able to attend all the classes, once a week the class will be video-recorded so that there is a record of classroom activities that day. Selections of the videos will be transcribed. • Data collection: A selection of your creative work, like your concept maps and presentations, will be collected after they are graded to understand how you interpreted the assignments and the content. This will not have an impact on your and I will ask you specifically if I want to reproduce your work. Benefits and Risks 231 This is a Participatory Action Research project, which means you would benefit from taking part in this research by being an active co-researcher in understanding how students in the Toronto and GTA area think about and use history. By reflecting on what and how you learnt, you would also benefit by learning more about yourself as a learner, which would help you out in other classes. However, by being part of this research there is also the risk that you might be uncomfortable reflecting on your learning or that you would think that participating in the research would take away from your class time. But these risks are minimal. Your participation in this research is completely voluntary and your responses will be kept confidential. Plus, any time that you want to withdraw from this study you can do so without any consequence to you being in the class or your grade. Confidentiality Your confidentiality is one of my main priorities in this research. None of your questionnaires, journal entries, or opinions will shared with your teacher or your classmates. Your name and any other identifying information about you, the class, or the school will be deleted or changed in the research records and research publications. You always have the option of not participating in or answering specific questions during the data collection and you will not be penalized if you choose to do so. All research data including the questionnaires, journal entries, and student work, as well as my notes, transcripts, and audio tapes, will be locked in a secure filing cabinet at my home office, and with the exception of my supervisor, Dr. Susan Dion, will not be seen by anyone. All the research material will be kept on file for no fewer than five years following the completion of the project, and then text material will be archived and audio and video recordings will be destroyed. Confidentiality will be provided to the fullest extent possible by law. Voluntary Participation and Withdrawal from the Study You should know that whether you are an active participant in this research or not it will have NO EFFECT ON YOUR FINAL GRADE. The questionnaires and journal entries that I will collect will not be seen by your teacher and any graded work I collect will only be after the grading is complete. As a participant, you can say at any time you don't want something to be used in the final research or that you want to withdraw completely from the project and that will be totally fine and you will not face any penalty. Questions About the Research? If you have questions about the research you can talk to me in class or e-mail me at [email protected]. You can also contact my Graduate Supervisor, Dr. Susan Dion, either by telephone at 416 736-2100 Ext.88783 or by e-mail [email protected]. You may also contact 232 my Graduate Program in the Faculty of Education at 282 Winters College, York University by telephone at 416-736-5018 or by e-mail [email protected]. This research has been reviewed and approved by your school's principal principal's name>, the York Region District School Board/The External Research Review Committee of the Toronto District School Board, and the Human Participants Review Sub-Committee, York University's Ethics Review Board and conforms to the standards of the Canadian Tri-Council Research Ethics guidelines. If you have any questions about this process, or about your or your child's rights as a participant in the study, please contact Ms. Alison Collins-Mrakas, Manager, Research Ethics, 5th floor York Research Tower, York University by telephone at 416-736-5914 or email [email protected]. ca. Legal Rights and Signatures Your signature below indicates that you have read this consent form, understand its contents, and choose to participate in this research project. You may withdraw at any time by talking to me in class or contacting me via email [email protected]. Please return the signed form to your classroom teacher by date . Please return the signed form to your son/daughter's classroom teacher by date . CD YES, I , agree to participate in the "Creating Possibility: Opportunities for critical social justice in history education" research project conducted by Samantha Cutrara. • I have understood the nature of this project and I consent to participate in this research by: 0 Filling out research questionnaires CU Have the option of attending a focus group regarding the research • Having the focus group audio-recorded • Writing journal entries about their experience with the research C3 Be video recorded as a class participant 01 Have a selection of your pre-graded creative work collected for analysis I am not waiving any of my legal rights by signing this form. My signature below indicates my consent. Student's Signature Date 233 Principal Investigator's Signature Appendix G: Teacher Preparation Survey 1. How long have you been teaching? 2. How long have you been teaching history? 3. Was it one of your main teachables? Yes No 4. How did you get interested in teaching history? 5. What strategies for teaching history and/or social studies did you learn in teacher's college? 6. Do you use these strategies in your teaching practice now? Yes No Sometimes Anything specific: 7. Has your experience teaching history been what you expected? Yes No Sometimes In what ways? 8. What do you think is the purpose for studying history? 9. Does this purpose get realized in history classroom? Yes No Sometimes 10. Does this purpose get realized in your history classroom? Yes No Sometimes In what ways? 11. How do you think your students would define the purpose of history education? 12. In your experience, do you find that your students feel connected to the content covered in history curriculum? 235 Yes No Sometimes 13. Have you done anything specific to bring students close to the content? Yes No If 'yes,' what was it and what was the result? If 'no,' any reason why not? 14. Some people think that students should have freedom to guide the topics and strategies that best suits them - do you think there is a place for this in history education? Yes No Sometimes 15. In your own practice, do you provide spaces for students to express themselves? Yes No Sometimes If 'yes,' what was it and what was the result? If 'no,' any reason why not? 16. Should teachers address social justice issues in their classroom? Yes No Sometimes Any comments: 17. Do you think other teachers share this opinion? Yes No Sometimes 18. Do you think that history teachers should address social justice or controversial issues in their classrooms? Yes No Sometimes 19. Have you ever attempted to integrate a social justice focus in your history teaching experience? Yes No Sometimes If 'yes,' how was it received by students? If 'no,' any reason why not? 20. Have you ever covered topics in your classes that have been considered controversial? Yes No Sometimes 236 If 'yes,' how was it received by students? If 'no,' any reason why not? 21. What do you think the role of a teacher should be in dealing with potentially controversial topics in class? 22. Do you feel limited or constrained in your role as a teacher if or when dealing with possibly controversial issues? Yes No Sometimes In what ways? 23. How would you describe your school and your students: 24. Does this school and its students have any specific or unique strengths? 25. Does this school and its students have any specific or unique challenges? 26. Does your school have a social justice focus? Yes No Sometimes Should it? 27. Why did you choose to participate in this research? 237 Appendix H: Teacher Preparation Interview 1. What kind of history teacher are you? Do you think your approach to teaching history is common? 2. What kind of learning opportunities do you want to facilitate in your history classroom? 3. What has been your experience teaching history? What has been your experience teaching history in this school? 4. Can you describe any really outstanding learning opportunities that you have facilitated? What made it so outstanding? Have you been able to reproduce this type of learning opportunity? 5. Can you describe the grade 10 history curriculum? Do you think it reflects the most interesting or relevant history from the periods? Do you think that it encourages a personal connection to the past? Do you think that it should? 6. Based on what you have observed in your own history classes, what do you think your students think about the content in the grade 10 history curriculum? Do you think that they feel that it is relevant to their lives? 7. Do you think that at the end of the course your students have a greater personal connection to the past? Do you think they should? 8. How would you approach teaching content that may invoke emotion or controversy? Has this ever happened in the past? 9. Is there anything you have wanted to do in class that you haven't been able to do? 10. Is there anything you particularly want to observe in this research? 238 Appendix I: Student Preparation Questionnaire 1. Do you like history? Yes No Sometimes 2. Are you interested in learning history? Yes No Sometimes 3. Do you think that is it important to learn history? Yes No Sometimes 4. What do you think is the purpose for learning history? 5. There are different ways of learning history and some people find certain ways of learning history more enjoyable than other ways. Please indicate your agreement with the following statements: ! Strongly Strongly j Agree j Neutral i Disagree agree disagree j I enjoy learning history in school I enjoy learning history ~\ with my family or community sharing traditions, looking at photos, or telling j stories I enjoy learning history in public places like on street signs, community spaces, or during public holiday [ celebrations I enjoy learning history at museums or other places where I can 'see' or experience history I enjoy learning history when I read a historical novel, watch a TV show or movie that takes place in the past, UIAl* lieflli>lCII ATI fIU A IIlUMv iiUIll fIIIC nA Uddl I enjoy learning history when I play video games, read blogs, or create or watch video on YouTube 239 I enjoy learning history (FILL IN IF I'VE MISSED SOMETHING) 6. Do you think there is a difference between the history you learn at school and the history you learn in other places? Yes No Sometimes If so, what are the differences? If not, why not? 7. Do you see yourself/your family reflected in the history you learn at school? Yes No Sometimes What is an example of this? 8. Are you looking forward to taking this class? Yes No Somewhat 9. How do you expect to do in this class? Better than average Average Below average 10. What activities do vou expect to do in this class? (CHECK ALL THA TAPPLY) i Reading the textbook and answering questions i Listening to lectures and taking notes ! Role playing an event from the past i | Going on field trips ] | Learning from letters, pictures, maps, or other items from the past j ! j Solving problems/mysteries from the past | | j Drawing on family, community, or cultural history j | j Using websites or computer programs to research or explore parts of the past j j I Writing essays j | Writing letters, diary entries, or newspapers from the perspective of someone who | lived in the past j Watching movies or documentaries ; Having discussions and/or debates I j Creating art work, videos, music, poems, or stories : Other: Comments: 11. What activities would vou like to do in this class? 240 [CHECK ALL THAT APPLY) Reading the textbook and answering questions Listening to lectures and taking notes Role playing an event from the past Going on field trips Learning from letters, pictures, maps, or other items from the past Solving problems/mysteries from the past Drawing on family, community, or cultural history Using websites or computer programs to research or explore parts of the past Writing essays Writing letters, diary entries, or newspapers from the perspective of someone who lived in the past Watching movies or documentaries Having discussions and/or debates Creating art work, videos, music, poems, or stories Other: Comments: 12. If you were teaching a history class, what would you teach? 13. If you were teaching a history class, how would you teach it? 14. Is there anything you would avoid if you were teaching history? Why? 15. Do you feel that your school has an issue with discrimination? Yes No Sometimes 16. Do you feel that your school has an issue with racism? Yes No Sometimes 17. Do you feel that your school has an issue with sexism? Yes No Sometimes 18. Do you feel that your school has an issue with homophobia? Yes No Sometimes 19. Does your school have a problem with any other forms of discrimination? Like what? 20. Do you feel that your school addresses these issues? 241 Yes No Sometimes Any comments? 21. Do you feel that these types of issues should be addressed in the classroom? Yes No Sometimes Any comments? 22. Do you think that this is happening? Yes No Sometimes Any comments? 23. Do you feel that you can address issues of discrimination in history class? Yes No Sometimes If "yes " or "sometimes," how do you think this would work? If "no " or "sometimes, " why not? If you are comfortable, tell me a little more about yourself: Age: Gender: How do you identify your racial or ethnic background: Do you like school? Yes No Sometimes What do you see yourself doing in 10 years? 242 Appendix J: Student Preparation Group Interview 1. Some people say that high school students don't like history - What do you think about this? Why do you think people would say this? 2. Do you think the history you learn in school is relevant to your lives outside of school? a. Why or why not? 3. Are you looking forward to taking this class? a. Why or why not? 4. Do you think history is important to learn? a. Why or why not? 5. Do you see yourself or your world reflected in the history you learn at school? 6. Do you feel that your school has an issue with racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other form of discrimination? Do you feel that issues of discrimination should be addressed the classroom? a. Do you think that this is happening? 7. Do you think that you can address contemporary issues in a history class? a. Why or why not? 8. How would you like to see history taught? a. Content b. Strategies 9. How do you feel about participating in this research? a. Are there ways you suggest being more involved in the research process? 243 Appendix K: Student Journal Prompts Bestwav • In class this week you grouped in themes the main concepts the class identified could be important for understanding the French Revolution. This was to increase your familiarity with the main concepts of the French Revolution before you began learning the details. Studies show that this makes students more comfortable with the material and increases their interest in it over the unit. What did you think about this activity? Do you think it will help you learn about and be more comfortable with the material? How could it be better? • In class last week we watched a movie to expand your knowledge of the French Revolution. Based on the themes the class identified the previous week, you had a mind map in which to take notes. Was the mind map an effective way for you to take notes during the movie? Did having the themes you originally identified get in the way of taking notes or were they helpful for you in thinking about what was important? Did you feel like you learnt more and better while watching the movie because you had the map to take notes with? How could this have been better? • This week we talked about the notion of freedom and the "rights of man" during the French Revolution. We complicated this idea by looking at Theroigne de Mericourt and also the Haitian Revolution. What did you think about covering these topics? Did they change the way you think about the French Revolution? Do you feel that learning about these topics will make you think differently about the world around you? Is there anything we could do to make covering this material more interesting or meaningful to you? Caledonia • What did you think about last class (West Indian Scheme)? Did having a map at the beginning and end of the lecture help you understand the history more? How could we have improved the lesson? Three Bells • We began this unit doing a brainstorming activity and then the class further expanded this brainstorm by looking at definitions of "colonialism" and "imperialism." In the past, have you found that brainstorming was helpful in outlining what you would be studying in the upcoming unit? In what ways? If it wasn't helpful, do you have any suggestions for a beginning activity that would help? Did adding the definitions to pull out main ideas and concepts enhance your understanding of the topic? If you were the teacher, would you do an activity like this at the start of your unit? Why or Why not? How could it be better? 244 Appendix L: Teacher Wrap-Up Survey At the end of this research, has your understanding of history or history education changed at all? If it has, in what ways? Did you think that you were able to cover this historical information differently than you would have without Historic Space as an organizer? If so, in what ways? Do you think your students' conception of history has changed at all because of shift in focus that Historic Space was trying to achieve? Did you see any noticeable difference between your previous experience teaching history and teaching through Historic Space as related to your: Better Same ! Worse Approach to history teaching Interest in social justice issues Approach to teaching controversial or emotional issues 1 Relationships with your students J OTHER: Comments: Did you see any noticeable difference between your previous experience teaching history and teaching through Historic Space as related to your students': Better j Same Worse ! Academic achievement Connection to material Interest in material Engagement in class Interest in history Understanding of history Interest in social justice issues Relationships with you Relationships with their peers OTHER: 245 6. Do you think that there were any pedagogical strategies that we did this term that you would repeat anything next year? Yes No Any comments: 7. Do you think that there were any pedagogical strategies that we did this term that you would not repeat anything next year? Like what? Why? Yes No Any comments: 8. Can you comment on the concept generating, mind mapping, and concept mapping that we did in class. Did you think these strategies helped your students process the information more efficiently? Yes No Any comments: 9. Would these be strategies you would repeat in your teaching practice? Why or why not? 10. How do you think your students felt about participating in this research? 246 Appendix M: Teacher Wrap-Up Interview Now that the year is over, what has your experience been like teaching history to this particular class? Did you find much of a difference between your regular teaching practice and your teaching practice through Historic Space? In what ways? Originally you said that the curriculum (did/did not/partially) covered what you thought was the most important part of Canadian history - do you still think this is the most important part of Canadian history? Did this get covered this term? Why do you think this is? Can you comment on any differences you observed in your students between your previous teaching practice and teaching through Historic Space? (re: academic achievement, interest in the material, engagement in class, interest in social justice issues). Was there anything your noticed that was consistent? In the first unit we did a structured intervention, we then withdrew it, and then you planned the Intervention - what was it like moving back and forth between these different frames? What did you find most challenging about the research process? Why? What did you find most rewarding about the research process? Why? What was your favourite part of this past term? Why? What was your least favourite part of this past term? Why? Can you comment on how you think your students responded to this research process? Did you learn anything about yourself during this process? What? Why do you think this is? 247 Did you learn anything about your students during process? What? Why do you think this is? 248 Appendix N: Student Wrap Up Questionnaire This 19 question questionnaire is an important part of this research project interested in understanding if teachers can present history in a way that is more interesting, engaging, and relevant to students' lives. The questionnaire will take about 15-20 minutes to complete and will ask you about your interest in history, your expectations of history class, and whether you have any suggestions for what should be covered in history education. On the back page of this survey there is a tear away page where you will also be asked if you would want to participate in a group interview to expand on some of the questions the survey asked. There is no pressure to participate in this group interview and your answers from this survey will not be referenced during the group interview. Your participation in filling out this survey is completely voluntarily and has no connection to your grades or assignments in this class. These surveys will only be seen by me, the primary researcher, and by not your teacher or classmates. If you have any questions before, during, or after filling out the questionnaire, do not hesitate to ask. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. I am only interested in your opinion. 1. This class is trying to teach and learn history differently. Do you think what we've done in this unit is: Interesting Yes No Somewhat Boring Yes No Somewhat Meaningful Yes No Somewhat Relevant to the real world Yes No Somewhat Relevant to your life outside of school Yes No Somewhat Hard Yes No Somewhat Something you want to see more of Yes No Somewhat Different that how you expected history to be taught Yes No Somewhat Changing the way you see Canada Yes No Somewhat Changing the way you understand history Yes No Somewhat Changing the way you see your peers Yes No Somewhat ...... Changing the way you interact with your teacher Yes No Somewhat Providing you with opportunities to bring in your own history Yes No Somewhat Proving you with opportunities to express yourself Yes No Somewhat 2. This research is intended to explore the possibilities for teaching and learning history in a way that would be relevant and engaging for students in 21st century Canada. Do you feel like we've succeeded in making history relevant and engaging to your life outside of school? 249 Yes No Sometwhat Can you give me an example? How can teachers do this better? Have we've been able to provide opportunities for to express yourself in this unit? Yes No Somewhat Can you give me an example? How can teachers do this better? Of the activities that we have done so far, circle the ones you have enjoyed the most: specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ Why have you chosen the ones you have? Of the activities that we have done so far, circle the ones you have enjoyed the least: specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ specific activity_ Why have you chosen the ones you have? Of the topics that we have done so far, circle the ones you have enjoyed the most: specific topic specific topic specific topic specific topic specific topic specific topic_ specific topic_ specific topic_ Why have you chosen the ones you have? 250 7. Of the topics that we have done so far, circle the ones you have enjoyed the least: specific topic specific topic specific topic specific topic specific topic specific topic specific topic specific topic Why have you chosen the ones you have? 8. This unit _A SPECIFIC IN-CLASS EVENT OR CURRENT EVENTS TOPIC_ happened, what do you think about it? 9. Have you learnt anything about yourself as a student through this process? If so, what? 10. Has your opinion of history changed at all in this process? Yes No Somewhat Could you expand on this? 11. What is something you would like to see covered in history class that hasn't been already? 12. What is an activity that you would like to do in history class that we haven't done already? If you are comfortable, tell me a little more about yourself: Age: Gender: How do you identify your racial or ethnic background: Do you like school? Yes No Sometimes What do you see yourself doing in 10 years? 251 Appendix O: Student Wrap Up Group Interview 1. This class is trying to teach and learn history differently. Do you feel that this past unit is different than the usual way of teaching and learning history? Why? 2. What has been different? 3. What has been the same? 4. What kind of activities have you enjoyed? Why? 5. Which ones did you not enjoy? Why? 6. How do you feel about collaborating with your classmates? 7. What topics have been the most interesting? Sparked the most discussion? 8. Can you give me some details about how you felt about A SPECIFIC IN-CLASS EVENT ? 9. Do you have an example of how what we've covered in class connected with your life outside of school? 10. Do you think about yourself any differently because of what we've covered? 11. What is something that you would like to see done or covered in the future? 252