History magazines have to be the greatest magazines on the planet. I thought Google was the only place to find great lesson ideas and teaching methods. Apparently there are actual, textual documents that I can get subscriptions to for that kind of thing. Canada's History/The Beaver has a dual purpose: provide some pretty awesome articles and interviews pertaining to Canadian history AND suggest ways of teaching history in the classroom through differentiated instruction, lesson plans, and field trips.
Canada's History/The Beaver website is equally accessible for teachers, including my favourite page called "Young Historians". It can be found under the education section, and it includes a long list of articles and blogs written about and by history students from across Canada. The reason this page struck such a chord with me was because I'd never seen anything like this in the English department. There's no celebration of the new critics in our midst; I can't think of a good reason why. Maybe it's that English is so varied? Huh, history seems to be the same way as a discipline, never mind! Anyways, this page has a list of really fascination links - including ones that are totally punny! I really love me some puns - that are all personal accounts from history students across the country. My favourite was Shelagh Staunton, a student at UWO, who recently published a book of letters and correspondences from World War One. Her shock was genuine, her excitement was sincere, and her research was very interesting.
In Literary Studies, which is not the only kind of criticism I have experience with but the only branch I've ever participated in at a graduate level, critics rarely explore their own personal experiences. That's better left to individual reviewers on the Chapters site. From the very first essay I wrote in grade 10 to the very last essay I wrote during graduate studies, I was told that my opinion on a particular work, any emotions it elicited within me, or any observations that lacked a textual reference had to be omitted from my work. This is kind of a shame for me, since I really started to love criticism in graduate studies. Watching new texts excited me. I started to see the world as a growing collection of essays that had yet to be written. There were even some texts that I found I liked strictly because they were critically interesting. Nevertheless, no one in academic wants me to talk about my emotions, and if I do, they have to be in one of the lesser forms of literature: blogging, for instance.
What Canada's History/The Beaver is doing is fabulous. They're validating emotional responses of history graduate studies, all of whom, I'm sure, experience the same thrill of analysis as I do, and while they're still delineating between academic writing and personal writing by hosting blogs, it's nice to see greater circulation for critics' personal responses. Sir Ken Robinson states that the education system is training students to think of their bodies as nothing more than transports for their brains. Critics generally behave as if this training has worked. The body includes feelings, sentiment, emotional reactions, all that stuff that has no place in the academia in any other capacity than transport. By showcasing the emotional reactions of critics and encouraging students to discuss their feelings, Canada's History/The Beaver doesn't disavow the emotional capacity of critics or the pleasure that goes into the act of criticism. They also manage to avoid compromising their discipline in the process by showing the acts of textual analysis working in tandem with the emotional reactions. As a result, Canada's History/The Beaver offers a broader definition of what it means to be a historian, which is something all teachers and students can benefit from.
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