CANADIAN SOCIAL STUDIES
VOLUME 37, NUMBER 1, FALL 2002

Engaging the Field: A Conversation with Rudyard Griffiths

Penney Clark

University of British Columbia

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This is the third in a series of interviews with Canadians who are influential in the way we view Canadian history, its role in the school curriculum, and how it is taught in schools. The first interviewee was Peter Seixas, who discussed the establishment of the Center for the Study of Historical Consciousness in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia (Spring, 2001). Dr. Seixas talked about the importance of helping students to view historical knowledge as a dynamic and often conflicting set of stories which must be carefully interpreted and critically examined in order to answer questions that are relevant to contemporary issues.

The second interviewee was Mark Starowicz, the Executive Producer of the CBC series, Canada: A People's History, which is being used extensively in schools (Winter, 2002). Mr. Starowicz discussed the use of a narrative approach in promoting our "epic past." His aim is to draw students into the past through the power of compelling stories.

Rudyard Griffiths is the Executive Director of the Dominion Institute, an organization which seemingly came out of nowhere in 1997, when, on the eve of Canada Day, newspapers across the country reported the findings of its "Youth & Canadian History Survey," in which barely half of young Canadian adults could name our first prime minister. Since then one or more such surveys have been published by the institute each year. The mission of the institute, as stated on its website, is one of "building active and informed citizens through greater knowledge and appreciation of the Canadian story." (The Dominion Institute website address is http://www.dominion.ca/) Historian Desmond Morton (2000) recently commented that, "In the Prime Minister's office and among business leaders, the Dominion Institute's message has been received, studied, and filed for action" (p. 55). Given all of the attention which the Dominion Institute has managed to focus on the teaching of history in this country, I decided to talk with Mr. Griffiths. The following is an edited version of our interview.

You are Executive Director of the Dominion Institute. What exactly is the Dominion Institute?

We are a national charity that promotes Canadian history and citizenship.

Are you the Dominion Institute?

I am one of the founders. It is a charity that employs seven full time staff, and operates on an annual budget of $1.5 million.

Can you talk about why it has been called "an historical NGO"?

[Writer] Charlotte Gray used that phrase. I don't like the word. We are trying to do something different. We are also a charity. Unlike other NGOs, we don't have an axe to grind. We try to produce content that makes Canadians more aware of their history and shared citizenship. We use television, book publications, and public opinion research for the media. We are trying to tackle this unfairly labelled, stigmatized subject, which is seen by many people as irrelevant and boring. It should be at the core of the public good.

Why did you choose the name, "Dominion Institute," instead of "Canada Institute," for example?

Well, it's one of those words that comes from Canada and Canadian history. It was coined by Sir Charles Tupper in the context of Confederation. It is a word steeped in Canadian history and yet, like so much of our history, it has fallen out of use. In some ways, the name is emblematic of our mission - a resuscitation of the past.

There are problems with our school system. Only four provinces require a Canadian history course for graduation. This is symptomatic of a decades-long devaluation of the teaching of history in our schools. In our popular culture, we are increasingly bombarded by American history, American myths, American narratives. All our surveys show that, as a result, we are a country that is labouring under an historical amnesia that has profound implications for our public discourses.

Where do you get your funding?

It is mixed. We don't have an endowment. We work from project to project. Two-thirds of our operating budget comes from government, the majority from the federal government, and the remainder provincial. We have one foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, and then corporations, Bell Canada, Random House, Magma International. Historica is an important source of funding. I spend a lot of time, actually about half my time, fund-raising. I don't mind that. It is really where 'the rubber hits the road', where abstract ideas hit real projects.

Could you tell me a little about your own background?

Sure. I'm a graduate of the Ontario public school system. I studied history and political science at Trinity College, University of Toronto. I went onto grad school, studying political theory at Cambridge in England. I went into the Department of Foreign Affairs on a contract position. When I started the institute, my background was German philosophy, with a healthy dose of late 20th Century international relations. I am not an expert in Canadian history and I do not call myself an historian.

You make superb use of the media. It is to the point where we wake up on June 30th or July 1st each year, fully expecting to see headlines blaring the results of one of your polls. Last year it was, "For most Canadians, our history is a mystery" (2001, p. A1). Can you talk about your media strategies?

Well, I think what we have done as an organization--growing up post the period within which there was a lot of government funding for the kinds of things we are doing--is to see that there is a bit of an opportunity in being able to take content and package it for different media simultaneously. With every single project that we do, we look at it in terms of how it will function in various media, including the Internet and television. We ask if there is a book component in it. Can we re-use it in a school program? We have done two things. We have converged content and converged media entities. We have developed an approach that allows governments to get out their messages at arm's length. Our business model is to provide our media partners with content that we have funded and developed, and in turn the sponsor recognition satisfies the funding agencies.

You have called for National Standards. What do you mean by this and how would it help?

Well, the word, standards is a loaded one and that is unfortunate. I think a lot of educators hear "standards" and they usually think of the failed exercise in England under Margaret Thatcher that tried to bring together a core curriculum for all students. People equate the term, "standards" with a particular political perspective. We like to talk about voluntary guidelines.

There are two opportunities that we could exploit with voluntary guidelines.
Educational publishers have to produce materials for provincial markets, primarily those of the larger provinces. Unlike the United States, where they do have national standards or national guidelines, we don't benefit from economies of scale. Wouldn't it be great to have a single national textbook, backed up by other media and pedagogical support materials?

The other point is a kind of process. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on subsidization of culture in Canada, including film, TV, and the arts. We are competing on a playing field that is never going to be level. The Americans dominate our culture and the minds of our children with their content. The classroom is one of the last zones of Canadian sovereignty. There we can say what's in and what's out. I think it's shocking that we don't have--not just for history, but for geography, history, civics-national guidelines, that would ensure that a child graduating in Goose Bay, Labrador, or Nanaimo, would have, not only common information about Canada as a country, but what we have accomplished. In our polling we find that 80 percent of Canadians and most history teachers support this idea. In the poll last fall with Ipsos-Reid, they say that up to 80 percent of our provincial history curricula should be standardized across the country. We should have a core which communicates a national story. Around that story have local and regional narratives.

It is very frustrating working on this project. We have empirical research that shows that we have public support, and media coverage ad nauseum, but what we don't have is the leadership at the federal level to let the dollars flow to somewhere like the Council of Ministers of Education to get the ball rolling. We are paralyzed by the Constitution Act and some timidity on the part of the federal government. It does not want to be perceived as overstepping jurisdictional issues surrounding education; though the Council of Ministers of Education, or history teachers' or social studies teachers' associations, are open to cooperation with the federal government. Until that leadership happens at the national level, common provincial guidelines stand an ice cube's chance in hell of succeeding.

What are the next steps for the Dominion Institute?

We just marked our fifth year anniversary, and we have three things which are focus points for the future. First, is our marquee educational initiative, which is called the Memory Project. This project helps veterans go into schools to talk with kids. We have spent over $1 000 000 on this. Sixty thousand kids have taken part in Ontario in a one year period starting last Remembrance Day. We are now launching it across the country. We are setting up speakers' bureaus in Alberta, BC, and Quebec, where we invite veterans into schools. Kids hear the story firsthand and then go onto the Internet and record the story for posterity. It puts kids in the position or role of historian. That's our major educational push.

Second, on a policy level, we will still be out there banging our heads against the wall of national standards. We will not give up on this.

Finally, we will continue doing what we do best, which is creating projects popularizing Canadian history, that show that it is relevant, engaging and even fun. We will do a mock trial of Louis Riel with CBC this fall, with Edward Greenspan and other lawyers playing various parts. We have two books coming out. The First Three Years, published by Penguin, is a compilation of the Lafontaine-Baldwin lectures, with John Ralston Saul, Supreme Court Justice Beverly McLaughlan and others. Our other book, Passages to Canada, is stories of Canadian authors and writers coming to Canada. These include Ken Wiwa, Moses Znaimer, Anna Porter, and Alberto Manguel. It will be published by Doubleday Canada. We are developing in-house television production capacity. Our first prime-time documentary will air on Global Television this September. We hope to get it into the schools by offering educators free copies. We will send out a circular each year on the Dominion Institute resources.

You have stated that only four provinces-Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island-require a Canadian history course for high school graduation. You have said that this course "usually starts with the First World War and works its way through the major events of twentieth-century Canada, ending with the patriation of the Constitution in 1982" (2000, P. A13). You don't include British Columbia in this list. And yet, your description sounds very much like the Social Studies 11 curriculum in this province. In fact, much of the grade nine, ten and eleven social studies curriculum in BC is devoted to Canadian history. Why do you leave this province, and others, out of your list, when, in fact, they have an extensive mandatory history component in what they call social studies?

On two levels. It is called social studies and not history because it is not history. The differences are profound. A social studies approach privileges those elements of the past that are relevant to students today. This approach looks at those aspects of Canadian history that have a priori social relevance or significance. You might say that is great because it will make history relevant and interesting. In the majority of these social studies courses there is an absence of chronology. They jump around from Canada to the world. They can move in a single course from history to economics to politics. The sense of the story becomes lost. Canadian history becomes reduced to a series of factoids. What I loved in school was the sense of story. Yes, you might learn a lot that is not relevant to this or that contemporary problem. But it is relevant to the building of our nation. A social studies approach deracinates the country. There are lots of great things within the BC and Alberta curricula, and those of other provinces as well, but they don't have chronology.

And then I guess, on another level, many of these [social studies] courses really aren't history. Within them are politics and law, for instance. It becomes a simple matter of time and space within the school curriculum. We want to see kids getting 120 hours of mandatory history instruction. If Law is also mandatory, then make it mandatory. But, give it more time. Don't force history into a smorgasbord of social studies sub-subjects.

BC has chronology. Have you looked at the chronology around which the BC curriculum is shaped?

My understanding, from research at Queen's, is that, yes, there may be elements of chronology in a multidisciplinary social studies approach. It approaches content spirally, returning to particular themes at various times and adding more information. In some ways, there is a chronological line through those themes.

Do you address the fact that there is often a gap between curriculum mandates and classroom teaching?

A curriculum is constructed under the direction of democratically elected officials. A lot of effort goes into curriculum development. Testing is one way to ensure that a curriculum is taught. A lot of Canadians support the idea of mandatory testing. Many parents want to see testing to the expectations or outcomes of the curriculum. We have asked teachers if they would use a voluntary examination and they say they would.

There is a social justice aspect to this. Kids that are poor tend to move around. If there is not a standardized curriculum, if content is not the same school by school, those children suffer to the degree that the affluent child does not. This is just not fair. Regardless of whether you are rich or poor you should benefit from the same curriculum.

Are you familiar with the Begbie Canadian History Contest, a test that is offered to grade eleven students in British Columbia each year?

I am a big supporter of the Begbie Contest. I understand that funding is forthcoming from the Department of Canadian Heritage to take the test national. [BC teacher] Charlie [Hou] has done a good job with this.

You have suggested that there is not enough mandatory Canadian history within the formal provincial curricula. Ken Osborne, professor emeritus, University of Manitoba Faculty of Education, has said that it is not enough to mandate more Canadian history. We need to concentrate on the quality of teaching if we want to improve the standing of history in schools. If you were a high school history teacher, how would you teach Canadian history?

As chronology, much like the curriculum in Ontario. I am most familiar with that because we had input there. I would start with the First World War. I would try to strike a balance between the macrohistory; the politics and economics of Canada in the 20th Century, and the microhistory. I am a big fan of biography, the way in which individuals can act as exemplars of their time. I would look at macrophenomena through the writings and actions of individuals who shaped the 20th Century.

Mark Starowicz [Executive Producer of the CBC series, Canada: A People's History] thinks high school history textbooks are boring and that we need to use film more in classrooms? What do you think?

We did a definitive survey with Ipsos-Reid of almost 1000 teachers across the country and the number one teaching methodology is the socratic method; number two involves use of textbooks. Use of a-v is 15% or less. Teachers are there to teach; it is their life. Canada: A People's History is a great project. But sitting watching TV. is passive. It is not ultimately what we need. We need teachers who are passionate about their country and about teaching its history.

References

Campbell, Murray. 2001. "For Most Canadians, Our History is a Mystery." Globe & Mail, June 30, A1.

Griffiths, Rudyard. 2000. "Mistakes of the Past." Globe & Mail, September 18, A13.

Morton, Desmond. 2000. "Teaching and Learning History in Canada." In Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg (eds.), Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (pp. 51-62). New York: New York University Press.

Osborne, Ken. 1999. "Revisiting the History Classroom." The Beaver, 79(August/September), 6-7.