Dr. Samantha Cutrara:      Hi, Aaron. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I know that you are busy teaching, being coordinator at the university, being a parent, so thank you for taking the time.

Aaron Stout:        Thank you very much. It’s nice to have something different to do with today, and it’s good to see you there in Ontario.

SC:        Yeah, thank you. It’s nice seeing Alberta. How’s the weather?

AS:        Not great. We’ve got more snow. It’s going to be 14 degrees tomorrow, and then it’s going to be snow and minus four or five on the weekend, so you know.  You know, spring would be good.

SC:        We’ve had a very kind of nice sunny spring, and I keep talking about that in the video and people are like, “Uhm, just so you know it, snowing here, so….”

You know, I’m glad that we have this opportunity to talk because other people are also saying that we’re so busy now trying to adjust to this new normal, especially when our work interacts with other teaching, that we aren’t having chances to kind of think through this big ideas about pedagogy in these thoughtful ways.

So I hope this conversation can be part of that, and that’s why I always start with this big question about history: Will we think about history, like the actual subject, the actual discipline of history, differently after this moment? What do you think?

AS:        I think this moment helps us pause, and I think that’s amazing when we look at the context that we’re in. I think that rethinking about history, and history education by extension, has been something that we’ve really been doing over the last 10 years trying to understand, and trying to structure, and trying to revisit. And so, I’m hoping that this pause helps us rethink, and restructure, and reprioritize what history education is and what history education can actually do.

And my hope is that we can not only look back, but look ahead and start thinking about how will history education take a different structure when we’re meeting face-to-face with our students again? When we’re seeing them? When we’re able to see their light ‘turn on,’ or when we’re able to see them struggle? I think that’s a wonder, but what we present to them is history. I think it’s inherently connected with the awe and wonder that history can present our students in the field, in classrooms, and in our university classrooms as well.

SC:        It’s interesting, connecting to the conversation I had with Andrea Eidinger, for example, and she spoke from her perspective as being a history professor and she said, “I have hopes for a change,” and she linked her answer to a longer conversation that she has seen and been a part of in the field of history.

And so when you say history is already changing, it’s been changing over the last 10 years, it really makes me think of all these conversations we’re having about these moments of crisis help reveal structures. And people may or may not have seen a lot of these changes in the field of history or the field of history education, but now we can see, “Oh, yeah, this conversation feel different because of this moment.” So thanks for historicizing this conversation. Because other people have done it, but I think you said it in a really clear way.

This to me brings up a question of whether are we going to teach history differently after this. And I think of the video that I did with Dr. Nathan Smith who said, “I don’t think it will change, but the mode will change.” To me, then, history will have to shift and change if the mode is changing too. Do you think the teaching of history is going to change after this?

AS:        I don’t know. We’ve got a model of history education that really is content-centric, right? That comes from really positivistic stance where we can know history and we transmit the story, so then content really becomes the anchor. And that professionalization of history that we see in the early 1900s and it’s kind of extended all the way on, is still a prominent understanding of history that we see in curriculum, and especially K-12 programs. That content doesn’t seem to be open for debate.

And when you talk to teachers — so the Alberta Teachers’ Association actually surveyed our social studies teachers in 2016. And a lot of them still looked at the content aspects of the program of studies as being really important. They saw it as a struggle to cover everything, but they see it as being really important. And so, this content delivery model of history education is deeply ingrained in our education system as we have them.

Now, in the discipline of history, we see that sense of content being rethought. And we see this in gender historians, we see this in postmodern historians, we see this in postcolonial historians, where we’re starting to bust apart some of those grand narratives. But if you take a look at K-12 curriculum, it’s still really ingrained this content delivery this is the content that we need to know. And I don’t think that content isn’t important, but it’s a pillar or it’s conceptualization of history education that still exist.

So, will this moment change that conceptualization? It will, if we offer a different framework for people to think out.

SC:        I really like that framing because I also think that content as much as people want to talk about skills, I think that that teacher still gravitates towards content. And while I hear you framing it in a way that’s negative, I’ve always felt that if we recognize that gravitation toward content, and acknowledge that, it gives us greater opportunity to bring in content that can then challenge us.

And so, I see this – and I would love your response to it – I see this as an opportunity to be open to more content that can be transformative, that can help mirror the questions about family, and care work, and isolation, and public health, and inequity that this moment is showing. Do you have thoughts about that?

AS:        Well, I think the content is significant. I think my previous comments really deal with this idea of content as uncritically transmitted. And I think that’s a problematic feature in our approach to content.

SC:       Right.

AS:        I think the procedural approach that we see within – especially in Ontario, where you’ve got historical thinking concepts that are built into your curriculum – I think the procedural aspects try to break apart that content to look at what you’re talking about in the sense of what voices were missed, or why was this voice really trumpeted above other voices, right?

I think understanding the structure of history and the procedural concepts to build history give us the ability to highlight these aspects or these stories or these considerations that maybe were missed. My fear, that’s echoed by a number of social studies teachers at least here in Alberta, is the idea that when we get content-dense programs within the K-12 teaching, it becomes very difficult to reveal to our students the nature of what history is and what history is not.

And I think that’s where you get to the stories that you’re talking about, is this idea of history as a construct, history as a narrative, history as a story that has been put together for purposes. And it’s really important to understand those purposes to understand that history.

And so, I agree. I think there’s wonderful content that we have. But I think there’s work to be done by curriculum framers and curriculum writers to give teachers the opportunity to follow these big questions. And I think we create opportunities in a K-12 system within that framework.

SC:        Yeah, that’s really great and a really thoughtful way to think about something that I think we all try to balance, because research shows that teachers will teach for the purpose in their history classes that they defined before becoming history teacher. And that purpose and that way of thinking about history, it’s often based on what they learned. And if they learned this content reached transmission framework, then they may revert to that even without realizing it. So I appreciate you bringing up some of these things for everyone. Like, for everyone to think about how can we ensure that we aren’t just transmitting these content. And instead think about construction.

And I appreciate that you brought in postmodern historians because my own work draws on postmodern theory and it was never intended for this video series to focus on that, but it’s been amazing how it has come up related to things about revealing structures in so many video. Anyway, I just wanted to shoutout that link because it has been coming up a lot. And I don’t necessarily think that a lot of these postmodern ideas get enough due in these conversations because they can seem really inaccessible.

AS:        And I think you’re hitting on something here in the sense that I think there’s been a lot of work done that tries to understand what narrative is. What perspective is. What a historical voice is. And I think in some ways, that’s really important work. And now I’m going to balance that with another comment.

I think that’s really important work, but my fear in that work is we prioritize those procedural considerations and we miss the voice of the individual behind the source, or behind the story, or behind the perspective. I think it’s easy for us to get into an analysis of what a primary source is and what it does and miss what it says, or miss what it reveals about humanity.

And I think that balance is a tough balance that we trend. Because on one hand, content by itself is a grand narrative that’s not critically approached. Procedural approach is whether that’s through evidence, whether that’s through judgments about continuity and change or even the construction of a narrative that prioritizes a certain perspective again aggregates data to be able to create something that resembles a coherent kind of idea. But at the core of all of that are people’s lives and experiences. And if we miss that it’s people’s lives and experience, then we miss the depth of what history is.

And I think that, as educators, we need to come back to the idea that history is about people’s lives and experiences. We need to find ways to make selections, both of content and procedural concepts, that help us unearth these stories. Help us understand these people. Help us appreciate the lives that they lived and the decisions that they made. I think that becomes a really powerful position for what history education can be.

SC:        Yeah, I agree with you. I think that’s a really thoughtful way to put it, because a lot of people that have watched these videos know that I take some issues with historical thinking. And for me, it’s because it does mimic a procedural approach in ways that doesn’t allow things like affect. It doesn’t allow for emotion. It doesn’t allow for that humanity.

It’s not like this notion of thinking historically, it’s this notion of having things in a procedure in a way that can divorce us from that humanity. Like you said.

AS:        I think it becomes our goal, right? We can talk about what my purpose is instructionally with the students. I think we also really need to sit down and think about what is the purpose of history education?

That we can see that within the big six historical thinking concepts that these procedures, that these historical thinking concepts help us frame how researchers might take documents and make judgments about them and those judgments ultimately become the narratives that we look at. Not sacrosanct in and of themselves. Their judgments that people have made to make the best sense that they kept out of the source evidence that they have. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if my purpose is, ‘I want my students to understand what evidence is, which has value,’ then that becomes the focus pedagogically. If our focus becomes, ‘let’s take a look at this letter and just listen to what this letter says,’ I think that becomes a powerful moment.

I did a workshop not too long ago with a number of teachers and we looked at just a letter from the frontlines in World War I. And it was a letter from an individual. His name was Harry Morris. And in the letter, it talks about his experience in the trench and getting injured in the trench.

And he talks about them sitting and they’re in kind of a dug out that they’ve created in the side of the trench. Him and his buddies, they’re having lunch. He talks about what they’re eating and then they talk about how the shelling starts. And he reflects on this experience of going, “Wow, it’s going to be a busy night,” and it hits just right beside their hole. And so they all get out and they’re like, “Ah, well, let’s just finish the last bite of this before we go,” and I was sitting down, “Okay.” And then they get into this big firefight and another shell goes off and it goes through his leg and he’s sitting reflecting on this experience in this hospital bed talking about how fast shrapnel flies.

The story was a great experience, not only to say what were the trenches like, but how is this individual internalizing this experience. How is he telling it back? Why is he telling it back? What would it be like to be there in the trench with him at that period and at that time? There’s so much richness that we can find in that source that spurs the imagination. And by selecting something like that, you can engage your students in thinking differently about people and the past.

Like, we know that the trenches are bad, but what would it be like? What would it sound like? What would it feel like? What would be — what is this individual saying about that experience that gives us a window in who they are and into how they experienced this moment. I think that can be a really powerful moment for our students. I think it can be a powerful moment for us as individuals to sit, to imagine, to breathe into the sources. There’s merit to that.

And then we can sit down and we can talk about, “well, he was in this hospital bed. How fresh would these memories be?” We can talk about contextuality. We can talk about the nature of the letter being sent back home, and that he probably had an intention for this letter to be shared around with the peer group, right? How does that change? We can talk about those things. That’s okay. But first, can we breathe with it?

SC:        Yes. I love that so much because, yes, we can have those conversations, but let’s also just take a minute or a few to just internalize it, and just think about it in ways that aren’t going to be assessed and evaluated, but to allow us to recognize the humanity of people in the past just so that we can also recognize value, our humanity in the future and in the present.

AS:        Absolutely. Absolutely.

So often we’ve seen history in curriculum documents – and we can say it history, we can also lump in social studies. And I know that’s a little bit of a hybridization and I’m aware of that, and that’s another conversation – but when we look at it from its earliest inclusions in public education, it has been seen as a pathway toward citizenship. But that pathway toward citizenship has somewhat been clouded in the sense that early on that pathway as seen as very much a pathway that was directed. Here is what it means to be a British citizen in a British empire, and we’re going to own that. And all of you immigrant populations coming to Canada are going to learn what it is to be a Christian, what it’s going to be, you know, learn what it is to be a British citizen, learn how to relate to that.

That has since changed. We’ve seen a change in that in some ways. Though the grand narrative is still present in some ways, we’ve seen a shift and we’ve seen that change, and we’ve seen a greater movement towards inclusion within our school systems and that. History opens the window for us to really start to see citizenship through the idea humanizing content trying to understand perspective. Trying to appreciate the perspectives of the past in a real and meaningful and in a deep way. And it’s these skills that help us understand the perspectives of the past that actually foster in us a desire to understand the perspectives in our present.

And I think those attitudes of being open-minded, fair-minded, full-minded, if we can apply those into a historical context, those become aptitudes and attitudes that we bring into our modern context, especially when we consider the global nature of our world, especially when we consider the multicultural and pluralistic sense of our society. These skills are essential and we foster them in the history classroom.

SC:        That’s so wonderful. Thank you so much. And I think it leads to our last question about imagining a new ‘we’.

But before I ask that question, I just wanted to show you the irony of you talking about purpose right now. So before the pandemic happened, I mapped out all these videos I wanted to do for the spring and summer. And like, this week literally was on purpose. I’ve already recorded and edited two videos on teachers thinking about their purpose. And so I think what I’ll do is I will package them up and I will post them for next week because I do think, moving online, you need to be even more clear about what you want students to learn, not just what you’re going to teach. And I think that when you clarify your own purpose of running a course, it helps with that. So thank you for bringing that up. I think that’s a really useful way when teachers right now are trying to figure out how to negotiate this new identity that they have and being a remote teaching teacher can — it will help to help them think about why are they doing this? What does history mean to them?

AS:        Yeah, absolutely. That would be great.

SC:        So that does lead to the last question, which is imagining a new ‘we’. So I often will see this divide, whether or not people wanted it or not, between like us that know Canadian history and those that don’t. And whether that is cultural or racial or, like, generational divides, that can be an implicit purpose that teachers come in with, which can be really problematic.

So the idea about needing to imagine greater circles of inclusion in our classrooms, and in what we consider to be Canadian history, has really been important to me. And I have been interested in whether or not people think this notion of ‘imagining,’ or this notion of a ‘we,’ might shift and change because of this moment.

Because for me, things like community and collaboration and even creativity I’ve always imagined on a face-to-face basis. So, do you have any thoughts about imagining a new ‘we’ after this moment?

AS:        Well, I think the idea of imagining a new ‘we’ is — with your permission, I think I want to take it in a different slant —

SC:        Please!

AS:        — in a sense that I think this idea of ‘we’ and a future ‘we’ that is more inclusive, that is multicultural, that embraces diversity directly happens within the context of our history classroom because, like the antecedents that we look at are really in the way we approach and understand the past. But approaching and understanding the past in a structured timeline becomes really empty and meaningful.

So I think our pathway to this new ‘we’ of understanding complexity, and citizenship, and individuality is really something that prioritizes the choices that we make as history educators.

How do we champion microhistory? How do we let diaries really speak from the past into our present that gives a window into the expressions of other people? I think that becomes an essential component.

So even more than conducting the structural components of our classrooms, it comes down to how do we engage in history that captures our imagination and our emotions that then propels us into the critical thinking that we need to engage with with any historical source? And I think that’s turning the pedagogical structure around a little bit from what many of us have experienced as far as history education.

So I’ve looked at doing that in a couple of different ways. And again, I’m experimenting all the time and I’m not sure if it works. But one of the ways is taking resources like autobiography. So at our school, we actually champion the idea of every student reading The Education of Augie Merasty. And it was done through our Department of Liberal Education.

It’s a really powerful piece in that it’s an autobiography that was written by an Indigenous man who went through a residential school system thinking about those experiences as he’s older, and who worked with David Carpenter, who is an English professor, to kind of cobble this together.

So really, it’s a work of two people working together to put together this memoir. And it’s really powerful when you read it. It really shares a voice. Now, how much that voice has been moderated? You’d have to ask the two participants to really know that. But the powerful piece in this book comes out at the end when David Carpenter is reflecting on his experiences in this relationship to create this product. And he talks about how we can look at differences or how we can create what might be the norm and the other in society, but he talks about how his experience really humanized his understanding of just being a person and how overwhelmed he was by the welcome, by the compassion, and by the generosity of these people that he was working with.

And I think we need to see history as an engagement that brings us to that insight, right? That we’re not talking about a group of people that we can other because they exist in the past, or we can other because they share different gender, racial, or ethnic perspectives. We need to choose pieces that help us see humanity in a clear way.

And so when we talk about that practically, that might be engaging students in historical stories that are put into different formats. Historical fiction can be really powerful because it entrenches the reader within the idea of human agency and intentionality. We can use picture books. There are some really fantastic picture books that tell historical stories. They really work for younger students, but bring up all of these key questions.

There was one that came out about Viola Desmond that I read to my kids. And my kids were six at the time that I read it to them. And the story of Viola Desmond being a Black woman who goes to the theatre and is asked to move because she’s sitting in the wrong section becomes a profound story of civil rights within Canada, and I think that’s significant. But my kids looked at that and said, “Well, why did that happen to her? And why are they treating her differently? And why are there all these issues around different standards of behavior? And what did it mean to be a Black woman at this time?”

My six-year-olds are coming up with questions like that. It just floored me that they were inherently interested in this story of injustice and it opened up a wealth of questions out of that that require historical thinking concepts to be able to answer, but what enraptured them was this story of injustice why it would be that way? And almost this sense of appreciation for who this person was.

And so, I think we need to blow off the doors, as far as material we’re using in the classroom and use to challenge our students . And we need to be broad, we need to see diversity, and I think we need to seek this disillusionment, that especially white settler populations like my own, we don’t need to be comfortable.

We need to hear somebody’s voice that makes us sit down and go, “Whoa, why would people treat people that way?” And then give us the tools to be able to answer those questions. Give us the tools to be able to struggle with those realities.

SC:        And to also say to our students or our children, like, “I don’t have the answer. Let’s look that up together,” right? To say, “These are questions we all have.” To not hold onto that fear of not knowing, because the more we recognize what we don’t know, the more we can learn from it, right?

I think about the conversation I had with Dr. Kristina Llewellyn about oral histories, and she said that, “I think that students can handle a lot more than we give them.” And this is something I found too and I appreciate you saying this, and that’s why I always say that students need connection, complexity, and care because, yes, the connection element is very important and that’s often what teachers will bring to their classrooms, which is great, but to acknowledge the complexities , the complexities of emotion, of structural inequity, of experiences, of the fact that not everyone in this classroom is going to hear it the same way or understand it the same way because of their own lived experiences and their family’s lived experiences I think is so important.

I don’t think that that went off the question at all. I feel like that, for me, is exactly what I imagine when I’m saying imagining a new ‘we’, how can we allow for greater space in our classroom for these connections, and complexities, and the care for the other even when, especially when, we don’t know who the other is and how they are going to think or react. And it does come down to being okay with a little bit of discomfort, and sometimes a lot of discomfort.

But to go back to your other point, if you think of your own purposes of teaching history as just being the expert in the room, you don’t have space for that. But if you allow space for your purpose to be able to have some of that complexity and that ambiguity, you can bring up a lot of that.

So thank you so much for that thoughtful answer. I hope that really shapes the way people might want to approach some of these ideas. .

AS:        Can I add one thing?

SC:        Yes, of course!

AS:        In Alberta, we really had a mandate from about 2016 on where Indigenous education has become part of the teacher quality standards that have been adopted. And out of Faculty of Education, we’re working at incorporating that.

One of the things that really has been profound in that work that we’ve been engaged with has been this question of reconciliation through relationship, and the importance of that relationship through conversation.

And although it becomes hard to have a conversation with somebody in the past, when we choose sources that reflect that conversation, that reflect that level of engagement, that personal kind of connection, I think we get closer as close as we possibly can to understand the depth of feeling and to understand the importance of the mandate to seek to understand this full mindedness that becomes really important.

And so, I just wanted to add that piece to it because I think it’s more than knowing facts and dates. I think it’s cultivating that characteristic that I want to know. I want to know something that I don’t understand. I want to know people that aren’t like me. And I think that can be a powerful thing that happens in our classrooms.

SC:        And I’m open for that knowing to change me.

AS:        Absolutely. Yeah, thank you.

SC:        I’m glad that you brought up the element of reconciliation in our curriculum because I always start by talking about the fact that the TRC was very clear that it’s not all about teaching residential schools. That is not what reconciliation means. Reconciliation is an ongoing relationship in which we have to understand our own epistemologies, our own colonial structures to be able to develop those relationships.

And so, thank you for bringing that up as this notion of relationality, and this relationship, and the fact that we need to be open to what this might look like.

AS:        Thank you.

SC:        Well, this was such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much, Aaron. I think that you brought a lot of perspectives that did bring together a lot of different interviewee’s ideas, but in ways that are new and fresh, and this is such a great way to end the week. So thank you so much.

AS:        Well, thank you very much for having me and I look forward to seeing more of your work and more of your interviews as they come out. So thank you for doing this.

SC:        Oh, of course, of course. Bye!