Connie Shea Transcript

My name is Connie Shea. I'm a high school teacher here at St. Malachy's Memorial High School in Saint John, New Brunswick, which we have kids from grades 9 to 12. The Hidden Histories project was a student led public history and art initiative that told the stories of people who were left out of mainstream historical narratives. My class created a series of 10 interactive postcards and left them around the community as found art that on one side had art that featured the topic or the subject and on the other had information about the person or the event, and also had a a QR code that linked back to a website where the people who found them could go and read more about the topics.

So what we what we chose to do was highlight individuals who are — were hidden from kind of the mainstream narratives due to systemic inequality. So we featured stories from Black history, from Indigenous history, women, the 2SLGBTQIA community, and told really cool stories about people from our area who a lot of people don't know but should.

The project was very well perceived by students and in the school community. The students right from day one were very, very engaged for a couple of reasons. I think because of the real life aspect of the project that we were covering people from our local community, people who are here in our hometown of St. John New Brunswick and Wabanaki territory, made it special to them. They also knew that the project was designed to go beyond the walls of the school so they took it seriously from the get-go that they were doing real historical research that would be read by an audience outside of the building. I think another aspect that also appealed to them was the diversity of the project itself — that the kids in my class are just as diverse as the topics and the people we featured on the postcards. So they really enjoyed seeing themselves in the classroom and seeing people from their own communities being celebrated within the larger community. The postcards themselves also had a QR code where people could link to a website that students created and leave their feedback and tell us what they thought and everything has been positive about the response.

I've kind of been known as the the lady who's looking for people who did cool things and people all the time — I have a huge list of all these cool people from New Brunswick who've done things that I should add when we do volume two. And we're actually working on volume two specifically right now which will feature Black stories, so it'll be about Black history.

I think what the project has demonstrated is a couple of things. First, the importance of finding work for students to do that is real life and has a real life component. Students were extremely engaged from the beginning of the project that they were doing real life historical research that was going to have an impact beyond the walls of the classroom. It wasn't just an assignment for me to mark, it was something that you know our community partners were going to see, members of the community were going to see, and it demonstrated that historical thinking and knowledge of the past can have a value beyond the walls of the building. It also reiterated for me the importance of diversity within the classroom. That all of our students — and we are very diverse here at school; we're an urban school, we have kids from all over the world and all different backgrounds, and the idea that they saw themselves and their community in what we were doing in this project and celebrating it was very, very important and kind of a something to take forward from this project as well.

I think the study of history is important for students for a variety of reasons. Just first of all for the development of critical thinking and thought. That students learn knowledge and apply how to think about it in new ways, whether it's considering continuity and change or the concept of significance itself, dealing with primary sources. Also that history as a discipline is very helpful for us as we try to understand the world we live in today where our political system came from, our economic system came from, and how to solve the problems that we have today. There's some version of them in the past that we've been working on for a long long time and studying the past can do that. I think history is important as kind of — that history is a story about who we are as Canadians that we can all share and that whether you were born here, or your people have always been here since time immemorial, or you've moved to Canada recently, the stories of the people we choose to elevate and celebrate we can use that to build an identity and build community. And finally it's just interesting to to figure out how people in the past lived and understood the world.

Teaching is not an easy profession, but we have a great responsibility, I think, to ensure that the youth of today, especially in the field of history, have an understanding of where we've been to help them solve the challenges and dilemmas of the future, and that we as teachers have a role through bringing forward diverse narratives and making sure all kids and all their stories are included in our classes helps do that — helps make Canada a better place.