Bringing History to Life: Teaching Fact and Fiction

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

History has never been as present in our daily lives as it is today.

Through any number of media outlets, tens of millions of people are in daily contact with historical discourses and practices. Between games, informational articles, social media posts and other sources, history is everyherein Civilization VI, life-size role-playing games, The Berlin Trilogy, The Iron Throne, and the works of Tolkien or Satrapi. Its in cultural productions that evoke events or phenomena that happened or are still happening (Assassin's Creed Unity, SLV and Kanata, Gone With the Wind).

This rise in popularity of history, along with an unprecedented access to social platforms, provide opposing and irreconcilable views of what should be commemorated (or debunked), of decolonization and reconciliation, and of other historical and social justice questions such as the elimination of police brutality and racism.

How can we help our youth develop critical thinking around these questions

Reflecting on the use of non-scholarly and non-academic works in the classroom, the authors of this book explore the possible and desirable uses of secular or public history in the classroom to teach students about history so that they become better informed and empowered.

Author Bio

Julien Bazile (Contributor)
Julien Bazile holds a PhD in Information and Communication Sciences from the University of Lorraine within the CREM (Centre de Recherche sur les Mdiations). He also holds a PhD in History from the University of Sherbrooke (QC, Canada). His doctoral research project focused on the narration of history in video games, particularly within the action-adventure game Assassin's Creed (Ubisoft, 2007). This research aims to shed light on the logics at work in the creation of historical video games and the issues related to this creative process. A graduate in contemporary history from the University of Lorraine, he seeks to inscribe his work in an interdisciplinary logic, to question the process of creation of these historical games with regard to the duty of rigourous historical research, the limitations due to the game's medium, and the economic, cultural and commercial imperatives linked to the functioning of the video game industry. Finally, it is a question of observing what the historical discourse represents from a historiographical point of view, in order to see how the video game can be considered a writing medium that works on our relationship to history.

Etienne Anheim (Contributor)
Born in 1973, former student of the ENS Fontenay/St-Cloud (1993-1998), agrg d'histoire (1996), doctor of history (2004), former member and then CNRS researcher at the cole franaise de Rome (2002-2006), Etienne Anheims work first focused on the history of scholarly culture in the late Middle Ages, in particular on scholasticism and polyphonic music, and continued with his doctoral dissertation on culture (music, painting, literary and theological production) at the court of Avignon under the reign of Pope Clement VI (1342-1352).

His research currently focuses more on the economic, social, and material history of painting as well as, more broadly, on the history of written practices between the 13th and 15th centuries, from literary figures such as Petrarch to library inventories and accounting records, while at the same time addressing questions of historiography and the epistemology of history.

Anheim is a member of the editorial boards of the Revue de Synthse, Mdivales and Annales.

Vincent Boutonnet (Contributor)
Vincent Boutonnet has been a professor of social sciences and humanities didactics at the Universit du Qubec en Outaouais (UQO) since May 2013. He is interested in the epistemological progression of future history teachers during internships (research funded by the FRQSC), but also in the practices of humanities and social sciences teachers as well as their use of resources such as textbooks, iconographic documents or digital documents. He conducts analyses of cultural products such as historical films and video games (research funded by SSHRC). He is a member of several funded teams working on agentivity and citizenship education (DiSEC group) as well as on the use of textbooks and digital technology in secondary school history and geography classes. He is an associate researcher at the Centre de Recherche Interuniversitaire sur la Formation et la Profession Enseignante (CRIFPE).

Penney Clark (Contributor)
Penney Clark is Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. Dr. Clarks research interests centre on the production and provision of elementary-high school textbooks in historical contexts, the historical development of history and social studies curricula in Canada, and history teaching and learning. She has published widely in these areas. S) She has been awarded the Canadian History of Education Association Founders Prize (2012) (with co-authors Mona Gleason and Stephen Petrina) and again in 2022 (sole author). She has also been awarded the Canadian Association of Foundations in Education Publication Prize (2013) (with graduate student Wayne Knights). Her most recent major publication (with Alan Sears) is The Arts and the Teaching of History: Historical F(r)ictions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020.)
She has served in multiple leadership roles in the department and beyond. Department roles include Deputy Head, Graduate Coordinator, Undergraduate Coordinator, and Social Studies Area Chair. Along with Dr. Mona Gleason, Dr. Clark completed a five-year term as co-editor of Historical Studies in Education/Revue dhistoire de lducation in 2020 and she currently serves on the Board of this journal. She served as President of the Canadian History of Education Association (CHEA) (2010-12), on the Council of the Bibliographical Society of Canada (2012-15) and is currently serving on the SSHRC Awards to Scholarly Publications (ASPP) Committee.


Dr. Clark is currently co-lead of the Curriculum and Resources cluster in the Thinking Historically for Canadas Future project that was recently awarded a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership Grant (2019-2026).

Olivier Ct (Contributor)
Olivier Ct has been Curator of Media and Communications since 2015. This field encompasses postal history, the media (print, radio, film, television, the Internet and social media), transportation and advertising. He focuses on contemporary Canada, particularly on the concepts of myth, memory and nationhood, and the evolution of national identity. He is currently a member of the team that is developing the Canadian History Hall, which is scheduled to open in 2017.


In 2014, Olivier Ct published Construire la nation au petit cran, a monograph on the television documentary series Canada: A Peoples History produced by the CBC. As a media historian, he is interested in the impact of mass communications on the understanding of history, the collective imagination and political cynicism. His current research explores Canadian television as a vehicle for modernity and identification with the nation in the 1950s and 1960s.


Olivier Ct has a Bachelors degree in History from Laval University, a Masters degree from York University and a PhD from Laval University. He is a founding member of the website HistoireEngagee.ca.

Stphanie Demers (Contributor)
Stphanie Demers holds a PhD in Educational Foundations from the Universit du Qubec Montral. A professor-researcher in the Department of Education at the Universit du Qubec en Outaouais (UQO) from 2011 to 2021, she has taught the History and Theories of Education and Foundations and Theories of Learning courses at the Bachelor of Education and Master of Education levels.

Her research, rooted in social theory and critical pedagogy, focuses on agentivity in teaching cultures and practices at all levels, particularly with regard to the development of agentivity in the face of knowledge of teachers and students, the construction of relationships to knowledge in a university context, and the consideration of socio-school injustices.

She is currently co-piloting a research project on the effects of a pedagogical community of practice in a university context.

Simon Dor (Contributor)
Simon Dor is an associate professor in video game studies at the Universit du Qubec en Abitibi-Tmiscamingue (UQAT), at the Montreal centre.

Professor Dor is particularly interested in strategy games, approaching them from the point of view of their playability, their history, their competitive or narrative experience, the cognition they imply and the representation they induce. However, his research and teaching have also led him to take an interest in e-sports, immersion, ethics, emulators and game design. He has been blogging about his research for many years (www.simondor.com) and uses contemporary video game broadcasting toolsTwitch and YouTubeto better understand what these new objects imply about video game culture and to disseminate his research.

Alexandre Lanoix (Contributor)
Alexandre Lanoix holds a doctorate in social studies didactics from the Universit de Montral. His research focuses on the place the concept of nation occupies within the teaching of history and the social representations of history teachers. For several years, he has been involved in the initial training and professional development of elementary and secondary social studies teachers.

Anik Meunier (Contributor)
Anik Meunier is a full professor of education and museology at the Universit du Qubec Montral. She is the director of the Groupe de recherche sur l'ducation et les muses (GREM). She is particularly interested in issues related to museum education. She also founded and directs the collection "Culture et publics" at the Presses de l'Universit du Qubec.

Sabrina Moisan (Contributor)
Sabrina Moisan is a professor in the Department of Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education, Universit de Sherbrooke. She works on history teaching and citizenship education and is particularly interested in representations of "national" history in Quebec and the challenges of teaching an inclusive history in a pluralistic society.

Carla Peck (Contributor)
Carla L. Peck is Professor of Social Studies Education in the Department of Elementary Education. Carla joined the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta in 2007. Her program of research has two main foci: The first seeks to map the qualitatively different ways that teachers and students understand key democratic concepts such as diversity, and citizenship. The second area of her research is on students historical understandings, and in particular, the relationship between students ethnic identities and their understandings of history. Before moving west, Carla taught elementary school in New Brunswick.

Bastien Sas