| The study of history has always been very significant to me. My early and most vivid exposure to the subject occurred when I took the mandatory Canadian history course in grade ten. At the time, I felt that a part of me was disconnected from the content we were taught. I was not able to identify myself with the history narrated in the textbooks. However, I fell in love with history that semester, and later on I did my undergraduate and graduate work in the discipline. I came to recognize how influential textbooks were in my understandings of history. While completing my M.A., I began to examine history from a critical perspective, and thought about whose history was being taught. Textbooks play a powerful role in the way the students understand history and in their cultural and political formation.;Overall I found that the minority groups I studied were marginalized in the textbook Making History: The Story of Canada in the Twentieth Century. Representations of these groups were placed on visually different looking pages, and minimized. The language that was used when discussing their history depicted white Canada as superior. These groups were also spoken for, and there were limited primary source accounts from minority groups. Such representations were in line with the Conservative ideologies of the Mike Harris government. In the textbook Canadian Sources Investigated: 1914 to the Present, there was a much wider representation of minority groups. Their stories were not placed on visually different looking pages, and their histories were given an ample amount of space. The textbook was filled with various primary source accounts from individuals from the minority groups that I studied.;This study is theoretically framed by Catherine Hall's (2002) critical race theory, Sherene Razack's (2002) critical race theory, Burton's (1990) post colonial theory, the knowledge of the 'orient' as explained by Burney (2012), and Michael Apple's (1991) ideas of textbook politics, and his theory of textbook architecture (1994). I compared two ministry approved grade ten history textbooks to examine how the history of non-white minority groups has been represented and integrated into the narrative of the textbooks at two different political times, within the same decade. I explored meanings in the text that may not have been previously obvious, while approaching the knowledge of the 'other' as discussed by Burney (2012).The selected texts approved in Ontario are Making History: The Story of Canada in the Twentieth Century, published in the year 2000, and Canadian Sources Investigated: 1914 to the Present, published in the year 2008. I investigated the representation and place of the historical narrative of Black Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians, Vietnamese Canadians and South Asian Canadians in the historical narrative. Furthermore, I analyzed how the Ontario government's educational objectives and their differing agendas in 2000 and 2008 intersected with the content in the textbooks having as a point of reference (although without neglecting the whole) the place of minorities in them. |
