Sarah Elvins

Open State Career Award – Other than Canadian History

Dr. Sarah Elvins’s innovative pedagogy combines experiential learning with primary source analysis. In her courses at the University of Manitoba, she employs a broad range of different primary sources, from advertisement to sheet music to cookbooks to budget documents. Her pedagogy also encourages student engagement with material culture as primary sources. It asks students to grapple with the fragmentary nature of the past as it survives into the present. Her assignments promote historical thinking as they lead students through the difficulties of interpretation. What is more, she accomplishes this work in team-taught and interdisciplinary courses, ensuring students come to understand the importance of historical knowledge in a broad range of different situations. This approach to learning and teaching represents a long-standing commitment that one of her colleagues calls “exceptional.” The Canadian Historical Association’s Teaching and Learning Committee is overjoyed to name her as a winner of one of this year’s CHA Teaching Awards.