Teaching Strategies and Practices
In this section you will find some reflections on my teaching strategies and practices that include: sources as evidence and interpretation, and the interconnectedness and ripple effects of history.
Sources as Evidence and Interpretation
In the classroom, I believe in the importance of incorporating primary sources in both your storytelling of the past and as formative activities. For first-year history classrooms or interdisciplinary classes, it is important to provide a basis in how to analyze a primary source. Attached to the appendix of my teaching portfolio is a handout to guide students in how to analyze a historic photograph, which is supplied during a how to analyze primary source lesson plan. To continue this learning of how to use sources as evidence, I believe incorporating source analysis in your lectures and seminars are critical. Including photos, letters, and newspapers in lectures as a means to tell the history and offer an analysis on the past leads by example to demonstrate to students how they are useful. This can transition into inviting and including students in analyzing photographs as a formative assignment for students to work together and gain a better understanding of how to analyze primary sources. The several layers of inclusion of primary sources help demonstrate how they are used as evidence and interpretation.
Interconnectedness and Ripple Effects of History
In HREQ1800: Justice for Children we have a tutorial dedicated to the history of the Children’s Aid Society that challenges the assumption of its benevolence. We begin by first discussing what people think of or know about the history of the Children’s Aid Society and its mandate. Once we have gone over popular ideas, I discuss how the Children’s Aid Society was used as a tool to remove children living in poverty from their parents and place them in asylums, such as the Orillia Asylum. I contextualize this process within ideas of mental hygiene and fitness. I further complicate this in the present by connecting it to how racialized and poor communities are often targeted for surveillance by the Children’s Aid Society through community examples and the role of social work in the Sixties Scoop. We end this discussion with a richer understanding of how the past shapes the current operating functions of the Children’s Aid Society and pose questions about if and how the institution can be transformed. This serves as an example of the interconnectedness of today and the past, and the ripple effects of ideology onto today’s institutions. The overarching learning goal of this lesson is that students would be able to apply this historical thinking to other institutions and ideologies that have effects on today.