History & Social Studies

As a child I loved story time, dreaming up, and writing my own stories of adventure. The older I got (and largely because of my 10th grade history teacher Miss. Ianni), the more I came to realize that studying history is like an adult story time. History has an important role to play in our present day context and much like the stories that were read to us as children, history books provide us with life lessons, wisdom, and real life moral connections.

History is filled with rich stories of adventures, conquests, inventions and innovations, and human connections. More importantly, stories from the past can be used to understand present day social structures, political & judicial institutions, human relationships, social justice issues, etc.  These stories allow us to understand how things have come to be, the battles individuals and groups of people have fought before us in an effort to evolve and grow as a human race.   

Laura King, a journalist from The Guardian reminds us,

It (history) can improve understanding of how social change might be achieved, by examining how change happened in the past. It can be a tool to instigate that change in and of itself, as examples of what happened in the past can be used to explore controversial subjects such as euthanasia or abortion today. It can offer an examination of why the same failures keep happening.

Perhaps most of all, a longer-term historical perspective can be a huge resource in social justice and tackling inequality and discrimination – showing the long-term roots of a population, a movement, a type of behaviour or whatever else is so powerful.

From “Historian are too white and too male…”

I am passionate about history and feel fortunate that I have an opportunity to foster students exploration and inquiry into the past to help them make sense of the present.