Anna Pearson Transcript

ANNA PEARSON: One of the most insidious weapons of colonialism is to speak in the past tense and acknowledging territory only in the past tense continues that narrative. Acknowledging the histories of treaties in lands means acting in the present. I'm grateful that I live and work on the territory of the Robinson-Huron Treaty of 1850, the traditional territory of the Nipissing First Nation and the Anishinabek homeland. Acknowledging the history of this Treaty in this land means thinking and acting in the present; it also means listening.

Let me tell you about Corporal Jason Nakogee. Jason is the Eagle Staff carrier of the Algonquin Regiment, a Canadian army unit that I am honoured to enjoy close relationships with. Jason challenges us to commit to decolonizing our ways of knowing and doing, and that starts with me and my actions. I'm inspired by the lessons that he shares so I'll tell you one that's particularly relevant today. To paraphrase, “whether it's in the past or in the present, empathy starts with listening,” and as a teacher I can tell you that's a lesson we can't hear often enough. So today I want to explore some of the ways that experiential learning can empower historical empathy and vice versa.

So picture this: a group of eager learners embarking on a battlefield study tour across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. Let's call it “Warpath: the Algonquin Regiment Study Tour.” Well, because that's what we called it. "Warpath" was considered a full year course, six credits as we call it at Nipissing University, conceived of and built up — built ground-up collaboratively by myself, Dr. Stephen Connor, a history professor at Nipissing University, and Captain Tim Feick, a serving member of the Algonquin Regiment and a veteran of the Afghanistan war. Together we developed an experiential learning centred history course that was open to any student regardless of discipline or year. In the end we selected 18 students from a pool of applicants and immediately got to work.

But before we get into the specifics of the tour, I'd like to review some of the key terms for this presentation. First, we have experiential learning. Experiential learning is all about getting your hands dirty and diving into immersive experiences that stick with you. Experiential learning teaches you about the past, and as we'll see about the present too.

Next, battlefield study tours. So, these aren't field trips as we’ve come to know them, but they're about getting up and close and personal with historical battlegrounds. Think walking in the footsteps of soldiers and feeling the weight of history in the air. And finally, we come to historical empathy. Dr. Karn has laid out a pretty solid foundation for us and to paraphrase, and feel free to correct me Dr. Karn, historical empathy is a process empowering students to understand the thoughts, feelings, and actions of people in the past within the context of their time.

So with these concepts in mind, let's dive into "Warpath" as one way for participants to immerse themselves in history, walk the ground, and explore innovative ways to understand what happened on those battlefields. In mid-September 1944 the Algonquin Regiment of the Canadian Army had a tough job near Moerkerke, Belgium. Composed of about 800 men, the Algonquin were tasked with crossing the Leopold Canal.

As you can imagine, assaulting a water obstacle is a complex and risky operation, a reality further complicated by the Algonquins' need to integrate dozens of new replacements after a rough time in Normandy. Even worse, they had to deal with the entrenched German defenders and cross two canals under fire. Imagine those soldiers in the pre-dawn darkness pushing and paddling, bullets slapping the water around them and too often right through their canvas assault boats. They must have been wondering if they'd even make it through the day.

Fast forward to 2018 and there we are: three facilitators and a group of Canadian university students at that same canal, pretty much unchanged after 70 years. They started wondering “could I have done what those soldiers did?” Walking that battlefield, a place very far from a lecture room, they started thinking in new and different ways about why so many Algonquins didn't make it that day and how their lives were remembered after the war. In a nutshell, answering those questions was one of the main goals of "Warpath: the Algonquin Regiment Study Tour."

So, how did we do it? First, in the fall and winter students engaged in a form of hybrid learning, dividing their time between traditional and local relatively experiential learning opportunities. Overall, this part of the course allowed students to familiarize themselves with historical content focused on two key themes: the story of the Algonquin Regiment and their experiences in Northwest Europe, and more broadly how historians have engaged with memory, sense making, and commemoration in the decades after 1945. Beginning in May, our international portion empowers students to literally walk the ground of the Algonquins' war path in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. To do so, we focused on four key battle sites and the four Canadian war cemeteries linked to them.

Now let's talk about what this experience taught them. It was our view that "Warpath" was not just about learning facts or passing on accepted historical narratives. Rather, we wanted our students to feel a connection to history, to places, and most critically, to people. It's also important to note that connecting to people meant in the present as well as in the past. By putting themselves in the shoes of those soldiers, students gained a kind of surrogate experience, and they did so both individually and critically collectively. Emotional connection made the past come alive in a whole new way.

By emotionally engaging with the past through empathy, participants didn't just gain a new knowledge, they gained a deeper understanding of the human side of history. This emotional connection helped them see things from a different perspective and made historical narratives and content feel more real, meaningful, and shared. The exercise of historical empathy was at the heart of our "Warpath" journey. This meant trying to understand people in the past, their feelings, experiences, and perspectives. This wasn't just about learning the facts but connecting with history actively in ways uniquely possible through experiential learning. Historical empathy underpinned our approach to the program.

Now with that in mind, let's focus on three key areas on "Warpath" in which we centred historical empathy: historical context, immersive experiences, and commemorative activities. These learning opportunities worked together to help us immerse participants in the past and encourage them to engage with history meaningfully and empathetically. Gaining and understanding historical content and context remains the primary focus of traditional post-secondary education history settings. In history, it's the subject of a course and tends to privilege what happened and why. For us the content focused heavily on the Algonquin Regiment and its major movements and operations from August 1944 to May 1945.

Students actively engaged historical context and narratives through lectures, seminars, and in-depth exploration of primary and secondary sources. For example, both Dr. Connor and Captain Feick presented lectures and facilitated discussions that explored key battles in detail as well as their impact on postwar historiography. In many ways these activities were familiar to any post-secondary education student, and as you probably guessed, we did didn't stop there. To expand on and develop this learning students met with serving Algonquin soldiers and members of its veteran’s association.

These interactions provided a human dimension to the historical narrative allowing students to gain new and often unexpected insights from those connected directly to the regiment and its legacy. Armed, pun intended, with contextual knowledge and enriched by personal interactions, "Warpathers" were better prepared to immerse themselves deeply in the experiences of the soldiers of the Algonquin Regiment during the Second World War. By the time we departed for Normandy, our participants had already taken the first step towards a deep understanding of the tough times and sacrifices these soldiers faced.

The next key area to consider was our commitment to immersive experience. By physically visiting historical sites and retracing the footsteps of their predecessors participants gained a visceral understanding of the trials and triumphs faced by the Algonquins, many of whom the students now knew by name. Unsurprisingly, students also very quickly realized what three kilometres in hot weather felt like. And that with was without Germans shooting across the canal at them. This immersion transcended traditional learning and teaching methods, enabling participants to engage differently with the past and from new perspectives, shaped by personal connections, surrogate experience, and a sense of having a shared space across time.

Let me give you a specific example of how we did this. So, we did this namely through the Tactical Exercise Without Troops, or how we call it is a TEWT. So a Tactical Exercise Without Troops involves the examination of a hypothetical scenario employing current doctrinal concepts either using conceptual or the actual orders of battle. So on several occasions in Canada and Europe we engage the students with TEWTS as a means to immerse students in the echoes of the environmental, physical, and tactical challenges faced by the Algonquins.

We crafted our TEWTS to foster historical empathy and to provide students with a unique surrogate and informed experience that relies and fosters it. One of the most notable TEWTS took place at the Leopold Canal, a pivotal obstacle encountered by the Algonquin Regiment during the Battle of the Scheldt in 1944. Before visiting the battlefield we met with locals in Moerkerke where the Algonquin Regiment headquarters had been located in the town's church bell tower.

Here the students received a briefing on the historical context of the battle and were divided into groups to simulate the decision-making process faced by the regiment's commanders. Armed with maps and intelligence drawn directly from the war diary, students followed the flow of the battle from the town to the canal's edge. Doing so provided a deeper sense of space and distance and time which engendered a practical comprehension and insight into the aspects of the battle largely unrepresented in the secondary sources and impossible to convey through traditional post-secondary education pedagogy.

Almost immediately students began, painfully aware of the challenges that they had never considered such as how physical distances and terrain complicated non-combat operations from moving supplies and ammunitions forward, to evacuating casualties to the rear. When we reached the canal itself students were initially shocked at how relatively narrow it was and needed to make sense of how and why the battle progressed as it did. We toured the location of the German defences and the objectives for each company was tasked was securing before giving each group time to develop their plan of attack. Finally, we walked to the ground and reviewed their decisions while reflecting on what actually happened in 1944.

An immersive experience, the TEWT offered a unique opportunity for us to accomplish several goals. The first: the complexities of decision-making and the need to consider factors such as terrain and enemy positions, available resources, and the need for speed and surprise were reinforced and, put bluntly, made painfully obvious in ways often impossible to convey in a post-secondary education lecture room.

Second, interacting with the site itself engendered an awareness of spatial and temporal realities that historical narratives, and even maps and interviews, cannot or rarely express or portray. Third, this TEWT also provided emotional engagement; as students stood on the canal banks surrounded by the same landscape as soldiers of the Algonquin Regiment.

Many battlefield study programs require students to research and present a biography or profile of a fallen soldier linked to a site toured as part of the program. On "Warpath" we focused on Algonquin killed at one of the battle sites we attended and interred at a nearby Canadian war cemetery, and we extended the biography beyond historical inquiry and recollection to include immersive and commemorative components as integral parts of the project. We asked students to prepare their biographies before departure.

To do so, they employed traditional methods of historical inquiry to discover and interpret primary sources related to their specific soldier and secondary sources more generally to contextualize their life and death. Participants began their investigations with the official personnel files to uncover as much detail as possible about their soldiers, as they quickly came to call them. This included a physical description, hometown, family life, hobbies, and ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Indeed, for a number of our students, these features helped them connect both with an individual soldiers life and the Algonquins' rich diversity of Indigenous, Black, Jewish and Eastern European Canadians.

Universally, our students increasingly engaged with their soldiers historically and on a very human level as individuals with backgrounds, values, and aspirations remarkably similar to their own. Put simply, research and analysis of primary sources offered a pathway into the past, but it was historical empathy that profoundly enriched the process of completing the project, and also its impact and meaning for both the student researcher and the group as a whole.

With their biographies completed, we challenged participants to consider participatory and commemorative ways their profiles could be presented. This moved us beyond research and traditional historical recollection and challenged students to create a commemorative activity that reflected their soldier’s story meaningfully and appropriately.

So, I'm going to wrap up with a few examples. One participant, let's call him Student A, was a Franco-Ontarian from a small northern community. Their soldier was Private Roland Aubry, himself a francophone born and raised in small town Sturgeon Falls, Ontario. This was one of several connections that Student A uncovered and explored. During his graveside presentation they recalled Private Aubry's love of baseball, much like their own, and as a commemorative action left a vial of sand that they had collected from the baseball diamond at Sturgeon Falls.

The immediate impact on the group was profound. Reflecting later on this experience Student A remarked in his journal, “My commemoration towards my soldier gave me a bigger sense of appreciation than anticipated. The emotions I felt today are some I will never forget: humility, happiness, and mourning."

So let me give you one more example. While the biography of Corporal Benny Hockenstein was researched and written by a single student, the graveside commemoration was presented collaboratively. Student B, the primary historian so to speak, detailed Corporal Hockenstein's journey to the Algonquins as a replacement in the aftermath of the disastrous engagement at Point 140 in August 1944. They described him as a young Montréal tailor who enjoyed basketball in his spare time. They also noted that his attestation papers and headstone made specific mention of the importance of Corporal Hockenstein's Jewish faith to him in life and death, as evidenced by his headstone.

Wishing to reflect on the centrality of this Student B collaborated with Student C, themselves a member of Jewish faith community. As a central component of the commemoration, this student intoned the Mourner’s Kaddish, a traditional prayer in honour of Hockenstein. As they concluded, the two students invited the rest of the group to leave pebbles on the headstone, an appropriate and common act of remembrance practiced by Jewish graves.

These brief examples illustrate the powerful and emotional nature of commemorative activities in some of the ways that our participants developed and embraced them. Demanding empathy, acts of commemoration, enabled students to develop historical knowledge and understanding in ways that transcended traditional post-secondary education settings and pedagogies. At one level, soldier biographies and acts of commemoration that we embedded in them promoted ethical learning. At another, they also ask students to confront history differently, and with their moral compass firmly in hand, connect to the past to the present and indeed to themselves.

So "Warpath: the Algonquin Regiment Study Tour" is just one way, and a good way, I think, that post-secondary education and learning can be enriched by the power of experiential learning and historical empathy. The immersive experiences provided by the battlefield study tours allowed participants to step into the shoes of the soldiers and to feel the weight of history in the landscapes of where they fought and died. By contextualizing history, engaging in immersive experiences, and participating in commemorative activities, students forged unique, personal, and emotional connections between past and present.

Our program challenged students and participants to embark on a transformative exploration of history that transcended traditional classroom boundaries, engaging with the stories, sacrifices, and humanity of individual soldiers. By learning about, and from their experiencing, and honouring their memory, we enrich our understanding of the past. Now more than ever is a critical time to engage meaningfully with our terrible history, and I recognize its enduring relevance in shaping our present and future. And I fear that our future really depends on it. Thank you.