Reverberating Echoes: Challenging Teacher Candidates to Tell and Learn From Entwined Narrations of Canadian History

Abstract

A key challenge confronting teacher educators is to help their students identify perspectives that depart from dominant historical narratives of a nation‐state’s development so as to potentially derive alternative meanings of shared pasts from marginalized perspectives. In this article, we examine the nature of this challenge both as a theoretical issue and empirical engagement with two classes of history and social studies teacher candidates. We identify several tensions involved in work with multiple perspectives that shape historical narratives: avoiding culturally reductive or stereotypical images of others, the taming of historical complexity for ease of communication, and something of a fraught encounter with the dissonance that echoes at the heart of historical identifications and perspectives. As we conclude, there is much to learn about teaching from engaging these tensions that emerge when we re‐read in a writerly manner what and how we have been taught.

Endnotes

Notes

1 Throughout this essay, we refer to “a” grand narrative as a particular type with several versions as explored in our literature review. Later, when we refer to “the” grand narrative, we do so more specifically to signify an English‐Canadian version at play in our research site.

2 We made this assignment a digital project to meet a new provincial curricular inclusion of media literacy and its call for teachers to include both the study and use of technology in social studies. We organized workshops where technical support staff introduced students to various software programs to produce videos. Students had complete freedom of choice in regards to what elements to include (e.g., music, narrations, text) in their videos.

3 See den Heyer (2009) for an extended argument for the future as a necessary temporal framing for history education.

4 Students were guaranteed anonymity and therefore we refer to them only by a capital letter.

5 To follow N’s narrative perspective, one example of the necessity to attend to search language lies in the difference between “gay” and “queer.” For an exploration of the difference in what these terms “mean” or “signify” or might net in an Internet search, see Seidman (2001).