Where the Ontario Curriculum Meets Local History

I recently read an interesting article by Ian Milligan on the ActiveHistory.ca website entitled “‘Local Effort Brings Our Past to Life’: Halifax Chronicle-Herald.” The article briefly related the efforts of a Nova Scotian historical association to put out a book of local history and donate it to children in grades 4, 5 and 6 in their area (a similar initiative was carried out by my local historical association several years ago). Using this act of charity as a springboard for discussion on the importance of local history, Milligan posed a number of thought-provoking questions in his article, the first of which being “[s]hould local history have a bigger role in history curriculums?”

The truth is, the role of local history in our curriculum (at least at the secondary level in Ontario) is already well-established. Although we currently only have one mandatory history credit in high school (don’t get me started -- that’s a rant for another day!), it does include a strand entitled “Communities: Local, National, and Global” which explicitly includes the study of local history. The larger description for this strand is as follows:

Communities may be viewed from local, regional, national, and world perspectives. Communities interact with one another through commerce, cultural exchanges, colonization, war, and international agreements. These interactions are the basis of today’s globally connected world. Over time, communities and their interactions have changed because of factors such as changing technologies and patterns of human migration. It is through the study of communities that students begin to understand who they are in time and place.

And, while the inclusion of local history is explicitly laid out in the Communities strand above, there are multitudes of opportunities for teachers to include it when covering the expectations in the other strands (Change and Continuity, Citizenship and Heritage, and Social, Economic, and Political Structures) as well.

Since teachers are legally bound to the curriculum as laid out by the Ontario government, it is not a matter of should but of must; it is part of our responsibility as secondary school teachers to include local history in our lesson plans in order to ensure that all curriculum expectations for the province are being met. The problem is that few teachers do and those that do often don’t do so effectively. Usually, as Milligan points out, the inclusion of local history within the majority of history courses is done on a purely superficial level, achieved by tossing a short anecdote or trivial fact into a larger discussion. Rarely is local history given centre stage.

Perhaps the question that we should really be asking is “how do we, as teachers and historians, go about incorporating local history in more meaningful ways within history curricula?”

I believe that one way to do this is for schools and teachers to allot time not only for discussing history on a local level with their students, but also showing it being done. I realize field trips are difficult and time consuming to organize, but as educators we should be exposing students to local archives, historical societies, historical architecture and historic sites and/or monuments. This type of exposure to local sources of history would fit seamlessly (I think) into the Historical Inquiry section of the curriculum and is therefore easily justifiable to administrators.

At the end of his post, Milligan wonders if local histories are only important when tied into the larger narrative of provincial or national history or, if by approaching local history in this way we are undermining its importance in the lives of everyday people. I think this is a valid concern. But, for now, in a time when high school teachers should be including local history in their lesson plans, but often get away with ignoring it altogether, I think we have to take the inclusion of the topic wherever we can, and build on that.