About
What I offer:
Expertise, advice, resources and professional training to help you become an even better history educator. My goal is to help you and your colleagues to more effectively engage your students, broaden their learning, and make the past truly come alive in your classroom.
My Vision:
History class has to be about far more than just dates and names. Sure, content – the facts – are important. But rote memorization isn’t the point. Facts should be the means to a much more important end: they’re the evidence we need to understand how we got to the present moment, and where we want to go next.
Students need to experience, first hand, the processes of history: how knowledge is created, questioned, and refined. By acting as historians themselves, and drawing upon evidence to engage with various historiographic challenges, students can learn that history is far more than just knowledge: it is a way of thinking, one that can equip them to grapple with evidence, think critically, and respond thoughtfully to the challenges of the past, present and future.
It’s crucial that we, as educators, ‘peel back the curtain’ of historiography. When students grapple with complex historiographical questions, they come to appreciate what historian Alan Megill calls the innate “fictiveness” of history. This means consciously resisting the urge to accept simplistic answers, embracing, instead, a level of necessary ambiguity.
After all, historical understanding is ever-evolving – what we are learning today merely reflects our best efforts at understanding what happened, given what we know so far – and will inevitably change as new evidence emerges and analysis shifts.
Students are better off for knowing this. It helps them become better critical thinkers – and less likely to accept simplistic or misleading narratives about the past. And that’s what it’s all about: creating engaged, knowledgeable, and thoughtful citizens.
My Guiding principles:
My approach to historical education is guided by several key principles:
Collaboration – because, together, we are all more creative and productive.
Experiential – because students learn best by doing, reflecting, and doing again.
Differentiation – because students learn differently, so let’s support them equitably.
Diversity – because multiple perspectives provide richer understanding and promote inclusion.
Critical Thinking – because facts offer ideal context for higher-order thinking.
Historical Empathy – because contextualizing people in the past helps us to understand diverse perspectives in the present.
Historiography – because exploring the nuances and challenges of the process enhances critical thinking.
Decolonization – because history is a powerful force that can help liberate and uplift, maintain inequalities or even reinforce oppression.
ABOUT Me:
Hi there — I’m an experienced Canadian social studies teacher eager to share his skills, creativity and insights with a broader audience of like-minded educators.
Inspired and guided by amazing colleagues and mentors — and aware of the power of peer education — I created this site to further a simple yet important goal: to help make historical education as engaging and impactful as possible…because what we do with the past in the present matters – indeed, it shapes our future!
My passion for teaching history is rooted in my life experiences and professional training. A self-diagnosed ‘history buff’ from a young age, I studied both history and education in university, ultimately graduating with a Masters in History. I have fifteen years of experience as a secondary-level social studies educator. Over my career, I’ve taught both BC and international courses, including Socials 9, 10 & 11, Global Politics 10, Law 12, Social Justice 12, Geography 12 and AP Comparative Government & Politics.
In 2020, I was honoured to be short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for the Teaching of History for my work in developing “Through Their Eyes”, a year-long Socials 10 project which engages students with the historical thinking concepts as they explore Canada’s twentieth century history through the real-life experiences of (extra)ordinary Canadians.
A life-long learner, I continue to hone my craft by engaging in ongoing professional development. In recent years, I’ve been particularly focused on developing my grasp of Indigenous cultures and histories, the First Peoples Principles of Learning, differentiation and experiential education. Working with several mentors, including a nationally-recognized master-teacher, I’ve enjoyed facilitating in-service training for colleagues and student-teachers, and have served as a cooperating teacher-mentor for several teachers-in-training.