Hallowe’en greetings (1900). Toronto Public Library, Special Collections OSB-CARDS-N-148 CC by 2.0
The latest in blog posts, news, and podcasts from the world of Canadian history.
Tag: historian’s toolkit
So guess who is Active History’s newest contributor? Me! Over the next year, I’ll be writing a few blog posts for Active History about the teaching of Canadian history. My first post went up today, and is my latest Historian’s Toolkit, focusing on the CBC Digital Archives. Here’s a sneak peak:
Anyone who has searched the internet for videos to use while teaching Canadian history has run into one big problem: the overwhelming dominance of American media online. Adding “Canadian” or “Canada” to your Google search doesn’t necessarily solve this problem. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t great Canadian videos, soundbites, and films available. You just have to know where to look for them! This post is going to focus on my favourite place for Canadian audio-visual material: the CBC.
Read the rest here!
“Let’s All Do More to Win the War,” 1944 Dawes Black Horse Brewery calendar / F. S. Berinner. Library and Archives Canada e010756828 / CC BY 2.0
The latest in blog posts, news, and podcasts from the world of Canadian history.
In our Historian’s Toolkit series, we look in depth at one online resource that history professors can use to teach Canadian history. You can view other posts in this series by clicking here.
Have you ever wondered where I get the awesome pictures that I use in the Roundups? One of my favourite places is Fickr Commons, so in this edition of the Historian’s Toolkit we will be taking a closer look!
It’s often a challenge for Canadian historians to find good visuals for lectures, blog posts, or publications. One factor is the tremendous prevalence of American images online, which makes searching for purely Canadian content something of a nightmare. The other problem, especially for blog posts or publications, is that of copyright (though lecturers should also be considering this problem!). Many images that are available, either though digitized archival collections or museums, are still under copyright or you need to ask permission to use them.
When I was an undergrad at McGill (in the dark ages, before mobile devices…), one of the classes I dreaded the most was the pre-Confederation introductory survey class. It was like something out of my worst nightmare: an hour and a half lecture twice a week, with occasional tutorials. Those lectures were hellish. Not that there was anything really wrong with the professor. She was lovely. But she read her lecture out from a prepared text. I was usually asleep within about 20 minutes. Tutorials weren’t much better, since they usually involved the TA awkwardly asking everyone about their thoughts on the readings.
Like most professors, much of my teaching style is based on which classes I hated or enjoyed the most as an undergrad. That pre-Confed class has stayed with me as an example of what I wanted to avoid. Especially when I contrasted it with a course in English literature that I loved (confession, I have a minor in English lit. Don’t judge me too harshly.). I don’t remember much about the content, since it was also a survey class, but I remember looking forward to the tutorials, where the group of TAs gave us activities to do in small groups.
As I mentioned in my previous post, most professors receive little to no training in pedagogy. I certainly didn’t. The closest I got was a TA training course, complete with diploma from the UVic Learning and Teaching Centre (I probably still have it somewhere too…). While I believe that this should be a requirement, especially for those intended to try for a career in academia (try being the operative word here), there are a number of great resources available online. So in this blog post, I’m going to share my journey to make my introductory Canadian history classes better through active learning techniques. I’ll also include information about how you can develop the same kinds of activities for your classes. This blog post is a revised version of the talk that I gave at the 2016 Festival of Learning conference, which I wrote about last week.
Aimé, Dolorès and Clément Déry playing with rabbits on Déry farm, Cold Lake, Alberta (1951). Provincial Archives of Alberta, A15762.
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