Educational Materials for the Sir Sam Steele Collection
http://steele.library.ualberta.ca/index.html

Introduction

	The Sir Sam Steele Collection provides an amazing educational opportunity for students to visit an historical exhibition in person or online.  The website includes excellent pictures of artifacts and digital copies of documents that can be read online by students. Students can test their detective skills at reading 19th century hand-writing against transcribed copies of many of the documents.  

Teachers are invited to book visits to the Sir Sam Steele Collection for their grade 4, 5, 6 and 7 classes in June or September 2012.  Students who attend the exhibition in June will have an opportunity to apply their classroom learning to a real historical exhibition with many unique artifacts and documents.  Teachers are invited to use the pre-, during and post- visit activities to design a rich year-end experience for their students.  Teachers who are planning to bring their new classes in September at the beginning of the 2012-2013 school year will have an opportunity to spark their students’ interests in the history of Alberta, the prairies, the northwest and Canada.  They will also have a chance to introduce students to historical thinking and the methods of historians when they view original artifacts and read documents that they can build on for the rest of the year.  

Many teachers may not be able to arrange class trips to see the Sir Sam Steele Collection in person and we encourage you to take advantage of the excellent website.  The pre-, during and post- visit activities will work very well for a digital tour of the exhibit from any classroom in Alberta and the rest of Canada. In addition to the exhibit artifacts and documents, the archivists have pulled additional sources from the Sir Sam Steele Collection for student investigation.  These resources will assist teachers and students in their study of the learning outcomes in the Alberta Social Studies curriculum.  They will give students a deeper sense of the historical context and family life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The Steele family controversy over their 17 year old son, Harwood’s wish to enlist in the Canadian Army in 1914 is just one example.

The Sir Sam Steele Collection
http://steele.library.ualberta.ca/index.html

There are 6 themes in the exhibition and on the website:

1. The Red River Expedition

2. The North-West Mounted Police and the March West

3. Sam and Marie: An Enduring Love Affair

4. The Yukon & the Klondike Gold Rush

5. The Boer (or South African) War & the South African Constabulary

6. World War I: The Final Chapter

+  Henry Roger Ashwell Pocock ( a friend of Sam Steele)

Each of the themes has a number of artifacts, pictures and documents displayed in cases at the exhibition and on the website.  One of the advantages of the website is that it allows students to actually open the cover of diaries and books and look beyond the first page of a letter.  The pages of most of these items have been digitized and can been seen individually on line.  Many short, hand-written documents have been transcribed and the 19th century hand-writing revealed in type.

The archivists have also pulled additional documents from the collection that will assist students in their investigation of the Steele family and their time period between 1865 and 1919.  These documents have been transcribed and posted on the website, but will not be displayed at the exhibition site.

Who was Sir Sam Steele?  

	There are several short sketches of Sam Steele that you may share with your students in hard copy or online.  With younger students you may read one or more of these accounts to them and with older students, you may have them read and compare these brief, secondary accounts in the Canadian Encyclopedia and on the RCMP website. (http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0007685 and http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/hist/hnud-nhut/sam-steele-eng.htm)

Was Sam Steele a Canadian Hero?

	The curators of the exhibition invite people to consider the question: 
Was Sam Steele a Canadian Hero? (See p.5 of the Sir Samuel Steele Collection Booklet at http://steele.library.ualberta.ca/related and the timeline of Sam Steele’s life, “Sir Sam Steele: The Journey of a Canadian Hero.”) The exhibition provides students with the opportunity to consider what their criteria are for a person to be considered a hero today and for an historical figure in their own time. This is an excellent question for biographers, film makers, novelists, journalists and even students.  Robert Stewart, in his biography, Sam Steele: Lion of the Frontier, 2nd Edition, said, “I set out to write a book that would draw the attention of contemporary Canadians to one of their greatest home-grown heroes” (1999, p.11).

Historians would ask this question in a slightly different way: 
How significant was Sam Steele in the history of Alberta, the prairies, the Northwest, and Canada?  The Historical Thinking Project (www.historicalthinking.ca/) founded by Professor Peter Seixas of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, University of British Columbia, suggests that there are 6 key historical thinking concepts that can help students engage more deeply and meaningfully with historical content. 

 To think historically, students need to be able to:
1.	Establish historical significance
2.	Use primary source evidence 
3.	Identify continuity and change 
4.	Analyze cause and consequence 
5.	Take historical perspectives, and 
6.	Understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations. 
Taken together, these concepts tie “historical thinking” to competencies in “historical literacy.” In this case, “historical literacy” means gaining a deep understanding of historical events through active engagement with historical texts.  The Sir Sam Steele Collection exhibition and website provide a unique opportunity for students to engage in historical thinking.
To gain a quick overview of the criteria that the Project recommends teachers and students apply when using each of these concepts, see the summary charts on the next three pages.

	HISTORICAL                                         SIGNIFICANCE
How do we decide what’s important to learn about the past?	EVIDENCE

How do we know what we know about the past?	CONTINUITY &                 CHANGE

How do we understand the complexity of the past?	

ASPECTS 	
• Resulting in change 

The event, person or development had deep consequences, for many people, over a long period of time. 
• Revealing 

The event, person or 
development sheds light on enduring or emerging issues in history and contemporary life. 
• Event/development/person occupies a meaningful place in a narrative. 
	
• Good questions are necessary in order to turn a source into evidence, the first question being, “what is it?” 
• Authorship: The position of the author(s) is a key consideration. 
• Primary sources may reveal information about the (conscious) purposes of the author as well as the (unconscious) values and worldview of the author. 
• A source should be read in view of its historical background. 
• Analysis of the source should also provide new evidence about its historical setting. 
	
• Continuity and change are interrelated: processes of change are usually continuous, not isolated into a series of discrete events. 
• Some aspects of life change more quickly in some periods than others. Turning points help to locate change. 
• Progress and decline are fundamental ways of evaluating change over time. 
• Chronology and periodization can help to organize our understanding of continuity and change. 

AT THE MOST SOPHISTIC-ATED LEVEL, 
STUDENTS WILL BE ABLE TO: 	
• Demonstrate how an event, person or development is significant either by showing how it is embedded in a larger, meaningful narrative OR by showing how it sheds light on an enduring or emerging issue. 
• Explain how and why historical significance varies over time and from group to group. 
	
• Use several primary sources to construct an original account of a historical event. 
	
• Explain how some things continue and others change, in any period of history. 
• Identify changes over time in aspects of life that we ordinarily assume to be continuous; and to identify continuities in aspects of life we ordinarily assume to have changed over time. 
• Understand that periodization and judgments of progress and decline can vary depending upon purpose and perspective. 

SUGGESTED STUDENT 
TASKS: 	
• Explain what made [X] significant 
• Choose the “most significant events” [e.g., in Canadian history; in the 20th century; for new immigrants to Canada] and explain your choices. 
• Identify and explain differences in significance over time or from group to group (e.g., Why is women’s history more significant now than 50 years ago? Why do Canadians consider Louis Riel significant, while Americans generally don’t?) 
	
• Formulate questions about a primary source, whose answers would help to shed light on the historical context. 
• Analyze a primary source for the purposes, values and worldview of the author. 
• Compare points of view and usefulness of several primary sources. 
• Assess what can and can’t be answered by particular primary sources. 
• Use primary sources to construct an argument or narrative. 
	
• Place a series of pictures in chronological order, explaining why they are placed in the order they are. 
• Compare two (or more) documents from different time periods and explain what changed and what remained the same over time. 
• Assess progress and decline from the standpoint of various groups since a certain point in 

	CAUSE & CONSEQUENCE

How do we explain the effects of decisions and actions taken                                        in the past?	TAKING AN HISTORICAL        PERSPECTIVE

How can we better understand                             people in the past?	ETHICAL DIMENSION

What can we learn from the past to help us better understand the present?	

ASPECTS

	
• Historical Actors or Agents are people (individuals, or groups) who cause historical change. 
• They do so in social, political, economical, historical contexts that impose limits on change. 
• Actions often have unintended consequences. 	
• Taking the perspective of historical actors depends upon evidence for inferences about how people felt and thought. 
• It is important to avoid presentism—the unwarranted imposition of present ideas on actors in the past. 
• Historical events or situations involve people who may have diverse perspectives on it. Exploring these is a key to understanding the event. 
• Taking the perspective of a historical actor does not mean identifying with that actor. 	
• All meaningful historical accounts involve implicit or explicit ethical judgment. 
• In making ethical judgments of past actions, we always risk imposing our own standards of “right” and “wrong” on the past. 	

AT THE MOST SOPHISTICATED LEVEL, 
STUDENTS WILL BE ABLE TO: 
	
• Identify the interplay of intentional human action, and limitations on human actions in causing change. 
• Identify various types of causes for a particular event, using one or more accounts of the event. 
• Be able to construct counterfactuals (e.g., if Britain had not declared war on Germany in 1914, then…) 
	
• Recognize presentism in historical accounts. 
• Use evidence and understanding of the historical context to answer questions of why people acted the way they did (or thought what they did) even when their actions seem at first irrational or inexplicable or different from we would have done or thought. 
	•
 Make judgments about actions of people in the past, recognizing the historical context in which they were operating. 
• Use historical narratives to inform judgments about ethical and policy questions in the present. 	

SUGGESTED STUDENT 
TASKS: 	
 Examine an everyday event (e.g. a car accident) for its potential causes 
• Analyze a historical passage, and identify “types of causes,” (e.g., economic, political, cultural; conditions, individual actions) that it offers as causes. 
• Examine the relationship between an individual actor’s motivations and intentions, and the consequences of their actions. 
• Chart of the causes of [X] and explain their arrangement. 
• How might people at the time have explained the causes of [X] and how does that differ from how we would explain it now? 
	
• Write a letter, diary entry, poster (etc.) from the perspective of [X], based either on some sources provided by the teacher, or sources the students find. 
• Compare primary sources written (or drawn, painted, etc.) from two opposing or differing perspectives about a given event. Explain their differences. 
	
• Examine a historical issue involving conflict [e.g., the outlawing of the potlatch], identify the perspectives that were present at the time, and explain how these historical conflicts can educate us today. 
• Students identify an ethical issue today [e.g. Canadians’ role as peacekeepers, private vs. public health care, protection of the environment], research aspects of its historical background, explain the implications of the history for today. 

Mike Denos & Roland Case’s Dimensions of Historical Thinking 
from Teaching Historical Thinking, The Critical Thinking Consortium, Vancouver 2006.
(as summarized by Allan Hux)

Dimensions of Historical Thinking
	
What could this look like in your class?	
1. Historical Significance:
Prominent: Immediately? Duration?
Consequences:  Depth? Spread? Lasting?
Profile: Remembered? Revealing?		
2. Evidence
Uses:      Traces?   Accounts?
Sources: Primary?  Secondary?
Primary: Authentic? Credible?
Secondary: Realistic? Justifiable?
       Claims based on what evidence?		
3. Continuity and Change 
Pervasive 
Positive & Negative Dimensions
            from Different Perspectives
Comparing Periods
Tracking over Time		
4. Cause and Consequence:
Distinguish: causes from prior events & consequences from after the fact events;  
Causes: classify types; rank order; multiple and interconnected; constraints;
Human Agency: identify critical agents; compare intentions & results 
Consequences: direct; indirect; unintended; impact; what if?		
5. Historical Perspective:
a different reality from today; focus on different norms & worldview not feelings; many diverse views at the same time in the past; understand the historical context and frame of reference & do NOT judge from today’s’ values		
6. Ethical/Moral Judgment: is only 1 type of historical judgment; stated: explicit or implicit;      - an ethical assessment: is it justified or not? examine historical context; responsibility depends on who had obligations & power to act or not act; individual, collective, multi-generational responsibility?