The Unwritten Rules of History
Man photographing women [sic] in red bathing suit climbing out of pool, small child watches, Fundy National park, New Brunswick. July 1953. Chris Lund. ibrary and Archives Canada. Copyright: Expired
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An employee of the Maple Leaf Plastics, is shown using an automatic plate finishing machine. Toronto, Ontario. Chris Lund. February 1961. Library and Archives Canada. Copyright Expired.
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Special thanks to Jessica Knapp, Krista McCracken, and Maddie Knickerbocker for their encouragement and comments on a draft of this piece.
Dear Teaching Self
Hey it’s me. I know we don’t talk often. And I know that you’re not teaching right now. But since it’s almost Valentine’s Day, I just wanted to write you this little note anyways to let you know that I get it. Teaching is super hard. It can totally be awesome, and I know how much you love telling stories and talking about history. But it’s also a ton of work. Coming up with a syllabus is really hard, and it’s challenging to pick just the right readings. Preparing lectures and PowerPoint presentations always seems to take longer than it should. Most of your students are awesome, but there are always a couple who seem to want to make your job harder (omg, remember the student who tried to correct you with Wikipedia? In front of the entire class?). And while you’re in class, you feel great, but as soon as it’s over, you feel like a train wreck, simultaneously “on” and exhausted? And you often find yourself wondering what it is you’re doing in the first place, and whether anything is even getting through?
Some of you may remember that back in April, SFU published a feature with Mary-Ellen Kelm, interviewing her about her recent experience co-creating her syllabus with her students. My interest was immediately piqued, since you know how much I love learning about new pedagogical techniques and methods for facilitating student engagement with history. While the article provided a little bit of information about how this worked, I was dying to learn more. Thankfully, Mary-Ellen Kelm was extremely gracious, and agreed to be interviewed about her process! So I am super excited to be able to bring you this interview today, especially since we’re in the middle of prime syllabus-writing season (I’m crying with you)! Enjoy!
Mary-Ellen Kelm is a professor of history at Simon Fraser University specializing in settler colonial and medical histories of North America. Her first book, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia 1900-1950 (UBC Press, 1998) won the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize and the Clio award for British Columbia both awarded by the Canadian Historical Association. In 2007 she received the second place award in the BC Historical Federation’s annual history writing competition for editing The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary-Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast (University of Calgary Press, 2007), which tell the story of the Elizabeth Long Memorial Home, an Indian Residential School in Kitamaat, BC, from the perspective of an English teacher and nurse at the school. Her history, A Wilder West: Rodeo in Western Canada (UBC Press, 2011) is an illustrated examination of rodeo’s small-town roots, and a look at how the sport brought people together across racial and gender divides. She is currently examining the ideas and methods medical researchers brought to the study of Indigenous health in North America from 1910-1990. She is co-editor of the Canadian Historical Review.
Invasion Review at the Canadian Army Show. DND. June 1944. Library and Archives Canada, e010786198. CC by 2.0
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TL; DR version: look at old stuff, think about it, write about it, and teach it.
I mean besides kicking butt at Trivial Pursuit. 😉 This seems to be something of a mystery, and historians haven’t done a great job of clearing things up. The answer that most historians give is that historians try to understand the past. But this isn’t really a satisfying answer for most people, since it sounds more like a philosophy than anything else. So in today’s blog post, following up from last week, I’m going to tell you exactly what historians do inside their little hobbit holes.
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