Award Recipients

"History in their Hands: Creating Young Historians Through Archaeology" developed out of a grade twelve native studies and archaeology credit which Cathy has taught since 1996.

The students’ assignment was to design a mock interview based on real events faced by an immigrant arriving in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. The goal of the work was to better understand the experiences, challenges, and hopes of new arrivals to the country.

Matt's blog was used as a forum to post videos, news articles, and interviews performed with First Nations leaders in relation to the Idle No More movement. From there, teachers and students from all over Canada began to add to the resources and comment on what they learned or thought of the movement itself.

As part of the CDDHS/DCMA Battlefields Project, students worked cooperatively with the archivists at the DCMA and the teaching staff at Centre Dufferin DHS in Shelburne, Ontario, conducting research which is both digital/on-line, as well as primary and oral history.

Rachel's project is a complete integration of historical thinking into the Grade 10 Canadian History course, grounded by three anchor projects/units: the course overview unit, the Glebe World War II soldier memorial and the final summative interview in lieu of a written exam.

Romy and Graeme have revitalized the Heritage Fair at their school by designing it with a critical thinking question as the focus and teaching it as a history study rather than a social studies project, embedding historical thinking concepts into each step.

Milena Ivkovic believes her students should be given opportunities to make real meaning out of history, not just learn about it. By analyzing primary source documents from multiple perspectives, she encourages students to grapple with history, to dig deeper into it, and to develop a greater understanding of what these sources tell us about our history and ourselves.

Brian Jaffray has taught in the Northwest Territories for more than twenty-nine years. During that time he has tried to provide his students with tools to encourage first-person research projects about Canadian history. But in the North, this can be challenging. Dene culture has traditionally been transmitted orally, in the Slavey language.

Effectively teaching her young students about the unique historical relationship between indigenous and non-native people of Canada was the motivation for Elizabeth Phipps when she started her Saskatchewan landscape project. Together her students created and developed a living landscape of Saskatchewan that focused on the history of First Nations, the Métis and European settlers.

Early in his teaching career Scott Masters noticed that his students often had few opportunities to connect with past generations. He made it his mission to bridge that gap. Starting with inviting individual speakers into his classroom, his project slowly grew into the Crestwood Oral History Project.