The goal for the social studies, history, civics, and social justice curricula at the secondary level include the following shared elements: To provide students with opportunities to think critically, to have students issues and events of the present and make connections with the past, to compare a range of points of view on an issue, to access a range of primary and secondary information sources on selected topics, to identify and understand examples of Canada’s treatment of minorities, and to examine the place of racial and ethnic group diversity in Canada’s collective history.
This unit was developed with funding from the Canada Council on Learning, and Heritage Canada, and in consultation and collaboration with practicing classroom teachers in various schools in Metro Vancouver BC. Its goals were to make the newly-digitized archival collections of ethnic groups available in meaningful ways to classroom teachers working with students in the above mentioned courses. The full archival collections are available at multiculturalcanada.ca
This unit is a collection of lessons that utilize the archival documents to examine the question: Has Canada become a more compassionate country over time?
Students pursue this question in relation to strands of evidence dealing with immigration, ethnic group history of Canada, rights and freedoms. Students can work individually or be divided into partners or small groups to examine an array of documentary evidence, which has been collected and digitized on the Multicultural Canada website. The main strength of the unit is helping students understand the contested nature of historical knowledge more deeply, as they cover the mandated provincial curriculum.
Students will utilize critical thinking skills, develop research skills as they work with archival documents, and develop the skills and attitudes of citizenship as they learn about the complex history of Canada’s ethnic and racial plurality.
The unit is most in line with the Social Studies 11 curriculum. But relevant PLOs in History, Civics, and Social Justice are also noted in each lesson plan. While this was developed in BC with the BC curriculum in mind, the PLOs have counterparts in other provincial jurisdictions, and the archival materials themselves are not isolated to, or primarily concerned with, the BC context. Thus the materials and lessons will be relevant to teachers across Canada.
We welcome you to examine the materials we have collected. The unit is designed around a series of case clusters:
