Never the two shall meet? Connecting historical and democratic consciousness in Canadian K-12 history textbooks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the intersections of historical and democratic consciousness in education, drawing on data from a study of history textbooks in Canada. We conducted a holistic analysis of 18 history textbooks published between 1994 and 2021, authorised for use at the elementary/middle school or secondary level in each provincial jurisdiction within Canada. The findings demonstrate that while many textbooks make assumptions that knowing more about the past leads to the creation of better citizens, historical and democratic consciousness are not fully developed and are largely disconnected from one another. We also found significant differences in the presence and articulation of historical and democratic consciousness between the oldest and more recently published textbooks, with more recent textbooks engaging with history in ways that promote the development of both historical and democratic consciousness. If we are to support students in becoming historically informed civic leaders in the present and into the future, we argue that all history textbooks authorised for use in Canada must pay greater attention to the connections between historical and democratic consciousness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".