New Possibilities for the Past: Shaping History Education in Canada (2011) Penney Clark, editor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In my early days as a graduate student, I was invited to a function associated with the Governor General Awards for History.It was billed as a venue where researchers and educators could exchange notes about pedagogy and history.The guests of honour were those recognized as being the most successful history teachers in the country.I assumed, naively, that this arrangement would make it a cordial gathering where the professoriate would come down from their ivory tower to mingle with their allies in the trenches of high schools and elementary schools across the country.To my surprise, once the opening formalities were over, the event turned into a stern lecture by professors-many of who had never taught outside of the academy-about the poor quality of history education in elementary and secondary schools.As an in-service secondary school history teacher and a graduate student in history, I found this exchange confusing, frustrating, and problematic.I would like to say that this event was an isolated incident.However, my own experiences in tower-trench relations over the last six years indicate that this kind of dialogue is often the norm and cuts both ways, with secondary and elementary school educators frequently painting academics as navel-gazers who have little interest in the realities of the primary or secondary classroom.If a conversation happens to transpire between these reluctant allies, it is too often uneasy and punctuated by a sense of mutual mistrust, if not outright hostility.The History Education Network (THEN/HIER) has worked to create a forum for productive and mutually supportive dialogue between stakeholders.Thus, Penney Clark's edited collection, New Possibilities for the Past: Shaping History Education in Canada (2011) filled me with a sense of excitement and trepidation.My initial concern resulted from examining the authors' biographies.Only two contributors indicated any classroom experience outside of tertiary education.Fortunately, their positionality was generally not a hindrance to producing accessible, useful, and academically rigorous content.As I read the chapters, it became clear that Clark and the other contributors did a nuanced job of writing what can easily stand as one of the most important and lucid collections on history education in Canada.The first section focuses on historiography, while offering little new information for most academic historians, or history education scholars, grounds the later parts of the book in a shared understanding of content.Margaret Conrad's essay has the added utility for secondary and elementary school teachers of highlighting more recent trends in historiography.The one caveat is Conrad's decision to dismiss postmodernism by reducing it to "a form of scepticism"
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".