How should students feel about their history education? In asking this question our goal is not to replay the long-standing debate about how much history education is needed or to posit the type of narratives students should learn. Instead, we have in mind a different but related concern: when students leave a history course, should they feel optimistic about the current state of Canada and its historical trajectories?
For us, this is not an idle question. We team-teach two introductory-level Canadian Studies courses that make extensive use of historical methods. These courses are intended to mark key processes and events in the creation of the modern Canadian nation-state and to explore the dynamics of national identity, colonialism, and neo-liberal economic retrenchment over the last generation. Said differently, the courses self-consciously look to narrate the nation in ways that our students will find unusual and which, we know from experience, can be challenging. For many students, these courses present difficult knowledge, but our approach is consistent with other approaches to survey teaching as indicated by the CHA’s workshop on the Canadian historical survey course held two years ago.
We work at a small “primarily undergraduate” (in Maclean’s words) university. Most of our students are relatively young and study full-time. The older students on campus are typically around twenty-three or twenty-four. Most are Canadian, with a majority from the Atlantic region. The courses themselves are structured using a lecture/tutorial model that is intended to maximize first-year student contact time with faculty. Last year, the team consisted of professional academic historians and a literary critic who specializes in documentary long-form poetry, but this is not always the case. Historians are always part of the team but so, too, have been other literary critics, political scientists, and faculty who teach Feminist and Gender Studies, Asian Studies, and who come from a cultural studies background. Importantly, historical methodologies used in these courses do not simply provide background context, in ways that can often happen in interdisciplinary courses, but rather function as a set of tools (e.g., attention to process, agency, defamiliarization) that is designed to encourage students to locate themselves within broader narratives.
On a personal level, we have at times wondered if the courses were too challenging. This comment might require explanation. Like other survey courses, these courses attract a lot of elective and distribution credit students who we will not see again. As the CHA’s survey workshop panel noted, this is potentially the only chance one has to teach students about history, its connections to the present, its analytic tools, and to move students more fully into a different kind of narrative space. With that potential comes a series of choices that relate to how much information, critical perspectives, and difficult knowledge a student coming out of high school can reasonably assimilate. Is there a point at which a course becomes too heavy?
The syllabi designed for these courses are intended to provide an accurate presentation of Canada’s development as a neo-liberal colonial society. Some of the subjects addressed include Indigenous academic integrity (compared to our institution’s policy), the dimensions of Canadian colonialism (along with Residential School denialism), the lived experiences of racialization and diversity, neo-liberal economic retrenchment and the effects of deindustrialization, and environmental change. How do students react to these subjects and this narrative?
The short answer is: in several ways. There is the usual cluster of students looking to “get the right answer.” And, over the years, a few students have implicitly supported neo-liberalism and expressed indifference to, say, the dislocation that follows from deindustrialization. A few have expressed anger and frustration about what they see as the rank injustices embedded in Canada and its historical development. But most of the time students are receptive to the difficult knowledge conveyed to them and express concern that the subjects we address were not addressed at lower levels of their education.
Their optimism emerges out of this context. Last academic year, as one course was close to ending, we explored a unit on the changing character of labour markets and small-town out-migration associated with deindustrialization. The students screened Tony Trembly and Ellen Rose’s The Last Shift, a documentary that explores the life and death of paper production in the town of Dalhousie in northern New Brunswick. There is much to learn from this documentary about gender relations, racialization, and Dalhousie’s relationships with nature. The key focus of our exploration lay in the changing expectations of work, benefits, career advancement, and working-class culture, drawing an explicit comparison between today and the heyday of paper milling in northern New Brunswick. The students also had a reading to supplement the documentary and, earlier in the course, they were given data on the character of economic inequality.
Our goal is not to depress students, but to raise questions about the historically changing nature of work structures. The conclusions one might draw from this story, however, are not inherently bright. They show the burgeoning of a gig economy, the racialized recomposition of the working class, and the results of class conflict when the working class lost.
As we discussed this narrative and these developments in class, and later as we read an assignment the students had to complete on the subject, we were struck by the sheer number of students who looked – deeply – for a happy ending. This was not the story we sought to tell, but what we heard back was something close to a repurposed Whig narrative: a reframing of the gig economy as a positive development full of employment opportunities. As we read over assignments, we wondered: why did our students tell this story? And what are its implications?
A number of answers come to mind. These are first-year students, at least half of whom were taking the course because they needed a distribution credit. Most – but by no means all – of our students come from a middle-class background. Their world outside of the classroom might indeed look pretty good. The ideology of improvement – of things getting better – is also hard to escape and there might be a somewhat natural (a word we use cautiously) tendency to want to see happy endings. Doing so provides a sort of redemptive dynamic to a narrative that is otherwise telling a different story.
There are darker possibilities, too, but we’ll avoid these for now to focus on something else. We suspect the need for a happy ending is fueled by a range of different factors, but that might not be a horrible thing. On one level, there is some evidence that optimistic students learn more effectively than pessimistic students. Optimism, then, whatever its origins, might be a useful part of teaching and learning. Since the end of the last academic year – and before the beginning of this one – we have had a chance to workshop our concerns at our institution’s annual Spring teaching day and to present on them at the 2024 Dalhousie Conference on University Teaching and Learning. Our colleagues have made a range of suggestions and helped us to refine our thinking.
It could also be that students are looking for answers and solutions. Running alongside the narratives of colonialism and neo-liberal retrenchment are narratives of resistance and resilience. These cannot become alibis for colonialism, but they might point to narratives wherein optimism can be warranted. What is more, there is some evidence that optimistic narratives tend to be more politically animating than negative storylines.
The dark possibility is that narratives of a benevolent Canada – for example: of a nation characterized by tolerance, diversity, and peacekeeping – are too deeply embedded to shake even when the problems of Canada and its historical development are recognized. We are not at all certain that this is the case. Seeing an optimistic future is necessary, Antonio Gramsci argued long ago, for progressive politics. Optimism, however, needs to be balanced with a clear-sighted conception of our current historical location. Is this the kind of optimism our students carry? We hope so.
Andrew Nurse, James Hahn, Courtney Mrazek, Elizabeth Jewett
Canadian Studies, Mount Allison
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Andrew Nurse is acting director of Canadian Studies and lives in Sackville, NB with his wife Mary Ellen. He researches media history in addition to the scholarship of teaching and learning.
James Hahn (they/them) is a queer, non-binary settler whose research focuses on settler and Indigenous literatures and historiography in Canada.
Courtney Mrazek is a social historian of health in 20th-century Canada with particular interests in public health, eugenics, and how settler colonialism has and continues to shape healthcare structures and experiences. She is currently the W.P. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow in Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. Her current research projects include examining patient demographics in Atlantic Canadian sanatoria, women-led health activism in rural Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1980s, and expanding her dissertation research.
Elizabeth (Beth) Jewett is an environmental historian whose research also intersects the history of sport and leisure, and food history. Her ongoing projects include the history of golf course landscapes (golfscapes) in Canada between the 1870s and 1940s and the history of the development of Canada’s maple syrup industry. She is a faculty member in Canadian Studies and the Director of Extended Learning at Mount Allison University.