Response and Concluding Comments

My thanks to Ted McCoy, Saeyoung Park, and Cheryl Thompson for their very generous engagement with my thoughts and their incisive responses. I began writing this in 2016, fresh off that Learning Outcomes workshop, burnt out from the things we do to get tenure, and unsure of what, exactly, I was adding to larger academic conversations beyond resources for those often over-looked "background" sections of others' work. I had a strong sense of what was progressive scholarship to moor me but the how and how for me were as fuzzy as ever. At that time, it was uncertain how the academy and, indeed, Canada would react to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report, and the Brexit vote, Trump, and #MeToo had yet to unfold. I wrote to clarify what it was I thought I was doing—in teaching, research, and service to the academy—and I shared it with other historians to see if they had similar concerns. And would they? It's not something we talk about with each other until pressed: what are your practical historical priorities and why? Or are these priorities, themselves, fuzzy and contingent, and, if so, how can we "sell" ourselves as historians to others under the banner of that fluidity? When queried, some brushed me off as if this level of conversation was like being tested for a driving learner's permit all over again: annoyingly beneath them. Others said that they'd never thought about this stuff before and to do so now would require time they didn't have. Still others told me it was not their task to make active comments about what they were trying to do because they saw themselves as the "official opposition," in a constant state of reacting to the narratives of others, never setting the methodological grounds for themselves. I felt ashamed for asking the question.

What I didn't do in that moment is perhaps indicative of a larger disconnect in the profession, as well as my own myopia, and that is to turn to resources that were developed for and out of the field of Education—all the more ironic given that an Educational Development workshop was germinal to my thinking about this. Of course, folks in Education had and have been articulating these ideas for a while now and had I looked, I would have found The Historical Thinking Project out of the University of British Columbia, which is connected to their Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, or the Stanford History Education Group and Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001) or Reading Like a Historian (2011), which he co-authored with Daisy Martin and Chauncey Monte-Sano.¹ His latest Why Learn History When It's Already on Your Phone (2018) or the 2019 edition of Writing History: A Guide for Canadian Students cowritten by William Kelleher Storey and Mairi Cowan, among others, show that a critical mass of thought in this direction is available and something of a growth industry in publishing.²

What leaves me a little cold about this pedagogical stream, however, is the solidity with which it imbues historical thinking—I know, an ironic criticism given the framework of my original piece. The concreteness of the didactic genre makes sense for readers engaged in policy and curriculum development, K-12 administration, undergraduate learning—the business of delivering historical education in a top-down kind of way. But this is not only a teaching issue, it is a professional, existential, and intellectual one that encompasses the label "historian." What, in practical, concrete terms, is history's place within the academy? In Canadian society in general? I don't think we talk about these kinds of questions with earnestness and humility very much in Canada beyond platitudes about institutional innovation, interdisciplinarity, and connections with communities. We have to start being forthright about the "how" of what we do, and what we expect others to do, in order to evolve. Then the "almost seamless interdisciplinarity" that American historian Jean O'Brien sees as characteristic of Indigenous Studies, and necessary for Reconciliation and the...