“Glossed over and missing”: Preservice teachers learn about slavery in Canada

ABSTRACT

The more than 200 years of chattel slavery in Canada is an example of the country’s occluded history predicated on structural racism. This study of preservice elementary teachers in a social studies methods course helps to reveal how the history of Black enslavement in Canada has been effectively erased from the national consciousness. Using a symbolic interactionism/grounded theory methodology, I seek to make meaning from more than 70 preservice teachers’ written responses to a reading on slavery and abolition in Canada. This study’s findings help reveal some of the challenges to, and possibilities for, interrogating historical consciousness and national identity narratives as a process of learning within the contexts of methods courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Abolitionist teaching
• Black history
• Canadian national identity
• historical consciousness
• slavery
• social studies methods
• teacher education

Acknowledgment

I owe a special thanks to Dr. Tianna Dowie Chin for her timely and substantive feedback which helped to focus and strengthen the manuscript that eventually became this article. In particular, she pressed me to consider several pieces of literature from the field of Black Studies that became instrumental to shaping my understanding of the data. Although she declined my offer to share authorship, feeling that her contribution did not rise to that level of ownership, it is important that readers recognize that this article would be much impoverished without her advice. I look forward to working with her in the future on the topic of Canadian identity. Thank you, too, to Tiffany Mitchell Patterson for taking the initiative to introduce me to Tianna. I am grateful for her generosity of spirit that makes engaging with members of CUFA so edifying for me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Little Rock Nine were the first Black students to be integrated into the Whites-only Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas amid scenes of violence and intimidation that eventually necessitated the deployment of the National Guard to ensure their safety and to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.