Historical Thinking in Ontario Secondary Schools: A Multiple Case Study

In recent decades, history and education scholars in the Western world have argued for a constructivist approach to disciplinary thinking in history, known as historical thinking. This generated a large body of scholarship and many curriculum revisions. In Canada, these included the articulation of six historical thinking concepts designed to operationalize historical thinking for the classroom. Four of these concepts were embedded into the 2013 secondary school history curriculum in Ontario, the context of this present study. Yet, there has been little classroom-based empirical research exploring how teachers implement and enact historical thinking, generally, and historical thinking concepts, specifically. The present study asks: How do Ontario secondary school history teachers, who conceptually and practically embrace historical thinking as their approach to teaching history, understand and implement the Ontario history curriculum? Multiple-case study methodology was used, with the participation of four history teachers. Data for each case was generated by a survey, three interviews, two think-aloud activities, five classroom observations, document analysis of lesson plans, student and teaching resources, and assessments. The results revealed teachers’ different interpretations and expressions of the Ontario history curriculum. Two pedagogical profiles emerged. In one, teachers understood historical thinking concepts as skills for developing students’ critical thinking, as a transferable generic skill. Historical thinking was a means to this end. In the other profile, teachers used historical thinking concepts as critical inquiry lenses for creating new knowledge about history; they used historical thinking to help students understand history as a process of interpreting humanity and society over time. Historical thinking was its own end. These results support other studies in suggesting that there is no singular pedagogical approach for delivering a secondary school curricula. The particular contribution of this study, however, is in its detailed descriptions and analysis of how and why teachers negotiate between curriculum imperatives and their own teaching philosophy, and how they adapt their knowledge and understanding of historical thinking to do so. This study concludes by exploring the implications of this research for curriculum implementation, for teaching practice, for teacher education (both pre-service and in-service), for curriculum development, and further classroom-based research.

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