The Significance of Significance:

The origins of the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking and why it is important

Author: Samantha Cutrara, PhD

Independent Scholar

Note on Text:

The following paper was rejected from a peer-reviewed journal in March 2025 for tone, accusation of “cherry picking,” and other points.

However, from the time I wrote it in spring 2024 through to today, I maintain that it is a strong deconstructive analysis of foundational ideas that have shaped the context of current history curriculum and that it is an important argument to be shared. Actively and consciously breaking away from the idealization of certain key ideas, and people, in a scholarly canon can sound different that one might expect, but this doesn’t mean the argument isn’t valid nor that the scholarship isn’t thorough and rigorous.

I don’t blame the journal nor the peer reviewers for this rejection. I understand that there are particular rules and guidelines that frame the engagement of ideas in spaces like peer reviewed journals. However, in thinking what is next for this paper, I realized that there is no reason why this argument has to live in a peer-reviewed journal.

Since the submission of this paper, I have referenced the argument many times in consulting work, other writing, and broader discussions about history education. I wasn’t able to use a formal citation because of the limbo of peer-review. Thus, I decided that rather than let this writing sit with different peer-reviewers for another 6-10 months, and potentially be rejected again for “tone,” I would self publish and make this work immediately open and accessible for those who want to engage in these ideas. And for those who don’t want to engage with these ideas, this informal form of publication makes it easy to ignore; however, I maintain the validity of the argument as well as analysis, and therefore still would encourage one’s own deconstruction of these ideas in whatever ways makes most sense to them. -SC (April 2025)

Introduction

Derrida (1978) writes that there are no origin points. That we create structures around an imagined centre and fortify this imagining with structure(s) to prevent the absence of a centre to be seen, or not seen as the case may be. But these centres are not without human creation. The structures we hold so dear, that we think are so solid, so unchanging, so clear in the formation and origin, are neither solid nor whole because of the human intervention to organize and obfuscate the references/peoples/histories/ideologies within and outside it. These are not fixed structures. They are filled with holes and cracks that tell a larger story about inclusion and exclusion, and that the theoretical, and even practical, work we engage in is disarming the illusion we have of solid structures. 

And this is what deconstruction is. Not taking things apart to look at the individual pieces. But witnessing how the structures themselves are broken, cracked, splitting, and from these fractures are ghosts, different truths, different stories, other ecosystems, just waiting to be seen and acknowledged (Derrida, 2006). Deconstruction is the witnessing of the existing fractures and the acknowledgement that there is no set, clear story with an origin point.

Engaging in historical work is important for deconstruction. Some approaches to history are deconstruction. Historical perspectives can shatter the illusion of stability. It can show how nations are imagined (Anderson, 2003) and how traditions are invented (Hobsbawn, 1992). It can show that what we consider “always” may in fact be one or two generations and what has “always” worked for one group may not demonstrate consensus.

And I think that many who are invested in history and historical work will agree that the historical origins of things and ideas are an important part of understanding the full complexity of that thing. Nothing is ever ahistorical.

So it is interesting that the formalized and structural approaches to the study of history over the last two decades has been approached, accepted, and celebrated with very little historical attention paid to it. But this absence is significant, because when we look through the history of a pedagogical approach such as the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking or the Big Six, credited and celebrated in Canada as beginning with Peter Seixas – when we deconstruct it, when we witness its deconstruction – we can see an approach to history education that may not meet the needs of contemporary students.

Actually, it might meet current demand. It might do just fine. It would depend on how one wanted to meet the contemporary moment.

With truth and reconciliation needed between Indigenous and Canadian populations, demands for racial equity and the need for clear commitment that Black lives matter, the attack on young people’s explorations of gender and sexuality, a rise in populist politics, the increasing reality of climate disaster, and the lasting trauma of a pandemic – the world right now is in a place where, I would argue, that safety, relationships, connection, and a sense of justice is needed in our interactions with young people. Young people need to be able to learn about themselves and others as historicized beings that invite and encourage them to work and fight for greater justice. This may mean outright activism, but it may also being in the world with a greater sense of grace and understanding for others and themselves. Sitting with difference, accounting for inequity in how this difference is experienced and structured, and acting on ways that can remedy this within one’s social circle and beyond. I believe and have argued (Cutrara, 2020), that education, especially history education – education based on stories and engagements that provide a matrix to our lives in a given place – need to be engaged in with a spirit of transformation and a commitment to social justice to meet this moment.

Some may not want to engage in this type of work in the history classroom, and that is fine. But I fear that some may want to teach or theorize in this direction and, because of the ubiquitous of historical thinking, they are beginning with tools that will never get them there (Cutrara, 2018). And this is why it is important, integral, to historicize the analytical tools we use in theory and practice to see where and how their limits lie. To witness their deconstruction and see what is structurally possible and what is not.

When engaging in deconstruction of Historical Thinking, we can see that historical thinking cannot do social justice work because it was not designed for social justice work. Historical thinking can transmit liberal democratic values, it can promote interactive dialogue and critical thinking – and some may use engage this work in the service of social justice – but fundamentally, historical thinking was not designed to invite a transformative examination of the (inequitable) past (and present) for a more justice-filled future. Rather, historical thinking was designed to promote and celebrate the ways that structure and discipline can “reasonably” engage with conflict and dispute by dispassionately examining evidence and weighing different perspectives. Historical thinking is designed on a liberal democratic model that was premised on believing that if everyone just followed the same rules and got on the same page then things like equality will come. Starting with inequity or starting with a commitment to personal storytelling would be too much. Rules and then equality; not equity as a way to design engagement. 

Our relation to the past resides in the struggles of the present and those struggles are as personal as they are social (/cultural/political/economical/etc.). We come to the present as historical beings. The present that we live in is product of history. The past isn’t just a thing we can dispassionately examine with the appropriate rules and perspectives – it is a thing we are, it is a thing we live, it is a thing that structures our words, our choices, our experiences, our relation to each other. As Trouillot (2015) writes, “the focus on The Past often diverts us from the present injustices from which previous generations only set the foundations”  (Trouillot, 2015, p. 150). If we don’t acknowledge the present – the raw, emotional, embedded, subjective present that we live in and embody everyday – in how we approach the past, then the past becomes a separate world (Trouillot, 2015, p. 152), one that negates our very being. While the past can be a foreign country (Lowenthal, 2015), the past is also imprinted on our souls and reflected in our spaces and places. History begins with “bodies and artifacts” (Trouillot, 2015, p. 29) and Land (Styres, 2011), and to begin with the premise that greater epistemic validity is needed to fully and properly study the past, leaves people – leaves us – behind.

The central premise of this article is not to argue for transformative approaches to history education. Those are my personal, professional, and academic commitments that are not here to be proven or disproven. Rather, in this article, I’m interested in sharing the deconstructive witnessing of historical thinking through an examination of one most cited scholars in this area, Peter Seixas. Deconstructive witnessing of Seixas’ argument(s) demonstrates a political stance and tone that disregards and is dismissive of perspectives on history, history education, and one’s engagement with the past that are other/Other than his. The issue is not that Seixas advocates for a disciplinary approach to history, whether one gravitates toward that approach to history education or not. It is this dismissal, it is the logic gymnastics that turn this dismissal into an objective stance, that needs to be interrogated and reconciled as part and parcel of the DNA of historical thinking. A hubric tone and tenor was baked into historical thinking as shown through Seixas’ writings, and this suggests its genesis as a political stance rather than a pedagogy responsive or reflective to students and their contemporary needs. The fact the stance could be made while arguing for students is separate from what the work was intended to do. This tone then makes it structurally difficult, if not impossible, for historical thinking to be used to engage in transformative social justice work even if that is the goal of the teacher. This dismissal, this disregard, this hubris, is not discussed enough, if at all, in the literature. How do we reconcile this in our engagements with this work?

In this article, I want to engage in a deconstructive witnessing of Seixas’ work using one early article as a focal point. I want to place this work in a large historical and academic context and highlight what is not being said, or said only implicitly. I then want to suggest that by witnessing the deconstruction of these ideas it is easier to see how transformative, equity-focused, social justice history education is prevented from happening with historical thinking.

Objectivity and Significance

While I begin here, the story does not start here. Just as at the end of the article, the article will not end there. The story began in decades before this work and may live on decades after.

Peter Seixas has long been credited, especially in Canada, as being the father of “Historical Thinking,” which encapsulates “The Big Six” Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: historical significance, evidence, continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical perspectives, and ethical dimensions. While the lone-man citation of Seixas as the ‘father’ of historical thinking negates the work of many others, especially many women, who worked at growing and developing these ideas and networks of professionals who worked in this area, telling those stories are beyond the scope of this article. I hope at some point, a greater analysis of this history will be told from those who lived it.

Seixas’ first academic publications begin appearing in 1993. He gained a doctorate from UCLA in 1988, an MA from UBC in 1981, and was a social studies teachers before being hired by UBC as an assistant professor in 1990. Seixas’ early publications had a keen focus on the student, especially around what students brought to the study of history.[1] It is from this work that Seixas began to conceptualize what became known as the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking.

From these early days, it was clear that Seixas didn’t just want to present findings from his research, he wanted to make a particular point – to plant a stake in the ground – for history education to do something else, do something different, from what was currently being done. When reading this work deconstructively, one can see how his research findings served the purpose of proving his larger argument rather than developing one responsive to these findings. Seixas wanted to argue for a “new pedagogy” in history education (Seixas, 1994b, p. 299); one that helped young people “link their genuine, contemporary concerns with the broader range of human experience over time” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 301). What these “genuine, contemporary concerns” were was never stated but framing young people’s engagement with history as a problem was.

In 1994, Seixas published “Students’ Understanding of Historical Significance” in Theory & Research in Social Education. According to Google Scholar,[2] this article has over 300 citations and was his most cited article until the 1998 chapter: “Conceptualizing the Growth of Historical Understanding” in The Handbook of Education and Human Development: New models of learning, teaching and schooling (Seixas, 1998).

Seixas began “Students’ Understanding of Historical Significance” by stating that historical significance was one of the “key tools” used by a historian because “significance’ provides the “valuing criterion” for historians to sort through the past. The goal of history work, ‘significant’ history work, was to develop a “meaningful and coherent story” that was also “worthwhile.” Then, using ouroboros’ logic, Seixas summarized: “to say a phenomenon is significant is thus to say that it is worthy of historical study” (p. 281).

This introductory paragraph highlights key principles of Seixas’ work that continue to underlie the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: History proper is engaged in by historians who utilize tools and work within a set method; the concept of significance is a criterion, a tool, and as such useful in history work; that history needs to be worthwhile, coherent, and meaningful. What is missing here is the notions that history is engaged in worthily by people other than historians and that concepts like “meaningful,” “worthwhile,” and “significant” are concepts of judgement with shifting meanings. This is important because in this first sentence Seixas defines the space in which he is talking about without considering that others may not want to work, teach, or learn in that space, or that there are other spaces to learn about and with the past. This world building is like saying that the only way to enjoy winter is to go ice fishing, drink hot chocolate, and wear woolen mittens because if people used the proper criteria and notions of “worthwhileness,” then they will see that these are the most worthwhile choices for the winter over, say, ice skating, warm apple cider, and a down-filled jacket. What is missing, is not only that people like different activities in winter and that is fine, but that millions of people do not experience a winter where any of those activities would even be appropriate. Engaging with the lived reality of half the world living in places where ‘winter’ means something different than cold, snow, and ice changes the conversation dramatically. You may want to continue talking about activities in cold winters once this takes place, but acknowledging that not all people live in places where the conversation is relevant, broadens the ability of the conversation to include and invite in more people. It also allows the conversation to become something different than what it was intended to be; something that better accommodates the experiences and realities of people who are in the room, but also, perhaps, invites people into the room who had been reticent to enter. It may also take the ‘room’ somewhere else; someplace cold, someplace where the conversation could be engaged in experientially. Again, you may stay talking about criteria for ‘worthwhile’ activities in cold weather, but beginning by identifying the piece of the pie you’re talking about, rather than presuming that piece of the pie is the whole dessert buffet allows for different things to happen in and for the space. It is negation of other worlds in which to study, teach, and learn history besides the discipline of history that is of issue, not his actual definition of significance, whether one agrees with it or not.

Seixas begins the section on historical significance in the 1994 article by stating that “[While] a person might have a passionate interest in insignificant phenomena from the past… Historians categorize such interests and activities as antiquarianism and distinguish them from the pursuit of history” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 282). While I’ve never heard anyone call a historical passion “antiquarianism,” labels aside, there is certainly a difference between formalized historical study and historical study or passions outside of the discipline. These differences are not inherently bad, nor do they (or should they) stem from the topic being significant or insignificant. Nor, I will add, are they are binary poles that represent the only ways of doing history.

Yet, from these articulations, Seixas sets up a clear, and value-based boundary between real history – history that uses tools, has criteria, and produces something worthwhile (although worthwhile for who and what remains unsaid) – and an unserious, “insignificant” play with/around the past. The distinction between them is in concept of significance. He writes that even for a historian “a historical topic does not become significant simply on the basis of someone’s interest in it.” Rather, there has to be bigger, more significant, elements at play (Seixas, 1994b, p. 282). He never clearly explains where this larger context defining significance could come from, but he sets up this distinction as an entry point to question whether “objective criteria” for historical significance could ever be defined.

This, ironically, is significant. When witnessing the deconstruction of Seixas’ logic, not defining the larger context in which to define significance obfuscates the power and privilege within the discipline of history and those who gatekeep its boundaries. It is in places like this where the hubris of Seixas’ politics comes out. There are allusions to broader context, elements, structures that serve as measuring stick for when something is significant, but by not articulating what this context may be, Seixas turns these allusions into reality. They are the standard. All else is Other. By not stating his standard, anything that falls outside these unstated expectations becomes Otherized. As Loomba writes, “hegemony is achieved not only by direct manipulation or indoctrination, but by playing upon the common sense of people” (Loomba, 2002, p. 29). Not being clear about what he was talking about, regulates the sense of agreement with what he is talking about to the assumption of common sense shared by all. It is so ingrained that there would be a shared sense of the larger context in which something is significant (which leaves everything else insignificant), that an Other group is a corollary to common sense, not even something that has to be named of looked at.[3]

As Seixas gets into his argument he acknowledges that the notion of defining objective significance is difficult because significance is personal. He acknowledges that the “problem” is that “historical significance arises from a relationship between our lives in the present and various phenomena in the past” and that significance is defined by the historian, the large historical context, and also the “consumers” of history, including students (Seixas, 1994b, pp. 282-283). The “difficulties” of creating this definition of objective history is thus twofold: the history profession and its “problem” of historiography, and students and the “problem” of empirical research (Seixas, 1994b, p. 282).

Even though he conceded that it would be difficult, the point of his article is to get to an objective definition of historical significance, use it as a standard from which to judge students’ definitions of significance, and then use those to argue for a “new pedagogy” of history education (Seixas, 1994b, p. 299). Seixas begins his definition of historical significance reticently: “Perhaps phenomena that affect a large number of people in an important way and for a long period of time are historically significant” (italics added - Seixas, 1994b, p. 282). A little later in the article, Seixas removes “perhaps” and argues that: “phenomena that affect a large number of people in an important way and for a long period of time are significant” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 285). He follows this more solid definition by conceding that the phrase “in an important way” “introduces an element of circularity into the definition of significance” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 285) and tries to address this by identifying that topics such as race, gender, culture, labour, and women have become increasingly more significant topics for study. He concedes that “historically significant topics change with changing times” and they become relevant when they “provide contested opportunities for historical understanding particularly relevant to our own contemporary communities” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 285).

Even with examples of different types of histories, different types of sources, and the acknowledgement of “new” and different types of topics available for historical consideration – all evidence I would venture demonstrates the difficulties of attempting to have an all encompassing definition of historical significance – Seixas continues to build his ultimate definition of objective historical significance. The final definition reads:

Historical significance, then, is a quality determined by the historian or other historical thinker, but is not something mated out of nothing or woven out of fiction: A historical phenomenon becomes significant if and only if members of a contemporary community can draw relationships between it and other historical phenomena and ultimately to themselves. (Seixas, 1994b, p. 285)

I quote the entire sentence here because I want to highlight both the whole and the parts. Seixas conflates the ascription of historical significance and the definition of historical significance in one swoop. Earlier in the article, Seixas links, even respects, the relationship between the individual and the idea of significance, writing: “significance always emerges out of a particular kind of relationship between ourselves in the present and various phenomena in the past” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 284); but in this full definition, Seixas undermines the individual by taking them out of the equation and placing the emphasis on historical phenomenon. Historical significance is quality defined by who is doing that history, but that quality is only valid – that individual’s determination of that quality is only valid – if that quality fits into a larger schema that others can use and fit into understandings what is significant. One’s conception of something being significant (not their definition of significance, but their ascription of significance) is only valid if others have already thought it significant and can continue to think of it as significant in relation to themselves in a contemporary setting.

The notion that others could have a different definition of significance than the ‘objective’ one being provided is moot. It is ice fishing in December even if it is 30°C. “Significance” is defined for and in a (dominant, established) group. A person can define something as significant but that thing is only significant if it fits into the schema that others have defined as significant. The logic then reads that while historical significance is a quality that anyone can attribute to anything, historical phenomenon is what is significant and determined by the standards already in place. 

In conversations about history and social studies education, the way this definition is set up is important for two reasons: 1. The person and their personal connection and definitions of and to history ceases to be relevant in favour of the group and 2. The framework for engaging in these conversations becomes the unquestioned historical discipline. A discipline that has its own flaws and struggles. In fact, Seixas spends very little time talking about historiography, and moving away from these discussions, Seixas negates that ways that some historians had to fight, and still are fighting, to make some histories, sources, and topics valid for consideration.[4] It is not just that some topics are more significant now than they were then, but that histories of race, gender, culture, labour, and women have always been important even when (especially when) this discipline of history did not find them “significant.” The subjective and the political is immediately negated in Seixas’ estimation of an approach to history, an approach to history that starts with the key tool of significance as a criteria for worthwhile history production. And this isn’t an accident. This is the point.

Students and Significance

Seixas’ definition of objective historical significance validated the relationship between ‘significance’ and the individual before negating and undermining that notion of personal significance in favour of understanding significance within an established and generally agreed upon order. When focusing on students – when questioning: “Which phenomena from the past do they consider worth knowing, and what kinds of reasoning do they offer in support of their choices?” – Seixas identified two problems, one which was directly related to students: the “problem in empirical research” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 282).[5]

Seixas begins this section by questioning: “Which phenomena do students see as significant? What kinds of connections do they draw to their own lives, or to their contemporary community?” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 285). To explore these questions, Seixas situates his work in this field of cognitive research, which was popular during the time of writing. He wanted his research to be more “open ended” [6] than some of this other research in that he wanted to understand young people’s construction of significance more than their understanding of historical events that researchers found significant. His research questions were:

What account do [students] give of historical significance (ie., what makes an event significant)? Conceptually, how do they join the significant past to their own lives? What aspects, if any, of the contemporary world do students attempt to historicize? (Seixas, 1994b, p. 286).

To engage with these questions, Seixas worked with two teachers and their students, collecting questionaries and conducting follow up interviews with select students.

Using both students’ articulation of significant events and their articulation of what makes something significant, Seixas identified five categories for students’ understanding of significance: using the past to understand the present (narrative explanation), learning from past to avoid same mistakes (analogy explanation), national literacy, personal interest, and obligation to ancestors. For the discussion and conclusion of his article, three of those five categories – national literacy, personal interest, and obligation to ancestors – were dropped in favour of focusing on the criteria of narrative and analogy.[7]

Even with this paired down list, Seixas expressed dissatisfaction with students’ conceptions of significance and postured that students may have been providing answers they thought a researcher would want (Seixas, 1994b, p. 299).[8] Seixas found that students’ answers about ‘knowing the past to change the future’ were easily packaged “Santayana” responses that were unable to fully articulate their complex ideas about the past – as others have also argued (Vansledright, 1997). Seixas critiqued that students relied too much on an “underlying faith that historical knowledge can be used to guide human affairs for rational, moral progress” that was “questionable in a post-Holocaust era of impending ecological and demographic catastrophe” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 299).

Seixas wanted students to engage with significance in history in ways that get them to think less about “international politics and war” and more about “gender, procreation, work, childhood, diet, art, or thought” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 298).[9] The logic here is confusing because if “a historical phenomenon becomes significant if and only if members of a contemporary community can draw relationships between it and other historical phenomena and ultimately to themselves” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 285) then why wouldn’t a schematic understanding of significance that places large events such as international politics and war at the centre be valid?

In this moment of frustration, however, we see how this article was not just about sharing the results of his research. If it was, then all five of these categories would have been explored with more depth and interest. Rather, this article was directed toward arguing for a “new pedagogy” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 299) that was defined before the research. This new pedagogy had at its centre an objective definition of significance modeled on the (idealized) work of historians for creating history that was (defined by the history profession) as meaningful, coherent, and worthwhile. This notion of significance, and the history profession’s acceptance of, was what needed to be ratified.

Earlier in the article, Seixas wrote that “historically significant topics change with changing times” and that “more and different areas of historical study have been undertaken in recent years, and the new work historicizes areas that have not previously been treated historically” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 285). This highlighted changes that happened to include the voices and perspectives from people who did not hold dominant power in society to academic knowledge from the 1960s onward. In saying students should be interested in “gender, procreation, work, childhood, diet, art, or thought” rather than “international politics and war” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 298) Seixas links and honours these changes: If this is what the group now finds significant, then these are significant things for students to study. Even if the students did not articulate them as such.

However, the inclusion of these topics as significant is not an argument for the importance of these topics. If it was, then more time would have been spent on talking about the importance of these topics in the lives of young people. Rather, the inclusion of these topics is illustrative of the argument that an objective definition of historical significance was a useful tool, a useful criterion, for these topics to become historically significant. These topics passed the “if and only if” test of “members of a contemporary community” accepting these topics into the fold; in being able to link the relationships of these topics “between it and other historical phenomena.” Because this acceptance happened, these topics are now significant for exploring the relationship between these topics and for students “ultimately to themselves” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 285).

This goes back to the back-and-forth between individual and group in his definition of objective significance: Anyone can find something significant, but that thing can only be significant if it fits into the schema of the larger group. Once in that schema, individuals can process the significance for themselves and others. This moves the individual from outside the group, with their insignificant and antiquarianism historical passions – their Other(ed) historical interests – to within the group and a sense of hegemonic acceptance. Once part of the group, part of hegemony, the individual can move back to being an individual (an individual but no longer an Other) who can process and accept that significance for themselves; who have assimilated that version of significance to/for themselves. Other to Hegemony to Assimilation. And to be clear, the hegemonic group is not free from conflict nor free from expansion. This is what “gender, procreation, work, childhood, diet, art, or thought” allowed Seixas to illustrate. Through reasoned inquiry with evidence – through looking at these new/Othered topics – with the lens of an objective definition of historical significance, the group is able to show how “historically significant topics change with changing times” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 285).

Thus, when Seixas says that these topics are important for students to find significant, it is because they prove the importance and rules of the group. It is not the topics, it is testing and examining the rules, the tools, the criteria, and the strategies that got them there. “Crucial tasks” for a history teacher includes “not only expanding the range of historical events and developments accessible to students” – “gender, procreation, work, childhood, diet, art, or thought” etc. – but also “subjecting to critical scrutiny the strategies by which they accord significance to those events” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 300). As Sampson (1993) wrote in response to similar sematic changes to psychology, there is an accommodative rather than transformative way that disciplines took up these encounters: “If, in order to be heard, I must speak in ways that you have proposed, then I can be heard only if I speak like you, not like me. Rather than being an equal contributor, I remain enclosed in a discursive game that challenges your continuing advantage” (p. 1220). Thus, it is not “gender, procreation, work, childhood, diet, art, or thought” that Seixas wanted students to study, it was learning about, and respecting, the rules of the “discursive game” that made their inclusion so. These topics were able to “speak” in ways the history discipline proposed, the ways the history discipline (allowed to be) heard. And this, Seixas is implicitly saying, is how to deal with conflict. How to deal when the dominant order is being challenged. This is how to deal with changing times.

While Seixas writes of these changes banally saying “historically significant topics change with changing times” and that “more and different areas of historical study have been undertaken” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 285), as he moves toward the end of the article, the real conflict behind his thesis comes out. At that point, it wasn’t just that different areas have been undertaken for historical studies (passive voice) but, as he writes at the beginning of the ‘discussion and conclusion’ section, that “within the North American history profession, challenges to the historical canon have amounted to a concerted assault within the past 20 years on traditional concepts of historical significance” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 298).

The concept of a “20 year assault” was not a feature in early parts of this article, nor was this “assault” set up as a problem his work was intended to solve. Earlier on, we learned that significance changes with changing times, and that more areas of study are considered significant. It is a thing that happens. It is a thing that can be reasoned and is reasonable. But at the end, this was an “assault,” a “challenge.” And it wasn’t just history. Seixas writes there were “fundamental shifts in the symbolic order of popular culture” that students had to grapple with (Seixas, 1994b, p. 299). There was “impending… catastrophe” that had to be addressed (Seixas, 1994b, p. 299).

This heightened sense of worry about the larger world (not just banal changes that happen during changing times), was also suggested in his research questions. He was interested in how students were processing their contemporary world using history. He asked: “What kinds of connections do they draw to their own lives, or to their contemporary community?” (italics added - Seixas, 1994b, p. 285). He also asked: “Conceptually, how do [students] join the significant past to their own lives? What aspects, if any, of the contemporary world do students attempt to historicize?” (italics added - Seixas, 1994b, p. 286). He wanted students to speak about the past in/for the present. Even if the research instruments did not really invite that type of discussion.[10]

Seixas was frustrated by students’ responses because the contemporary world did not enter in the ways he expected. They did not reflect this more violate context outside of school: the assaults, the shifts, and the catastrophe. At the time this research was being done – the early to mid-1990s – explicit political clashes between conservative and more radical politics were happening in Western democracies. In Canada, where Seixas was writing, Conservatives had been in power for almost a decade until Liberal Jean Chrétien became head of the Government in 1993. In the States, where Seixas was originally from and where he did his PhD, Republicans held the White House from 1981 to 1993, when Bill Clinton beat George H. W. Bush in a general election. In the UK, where early research arguing for the disciplinary model of history education was conducted,[11] Margaret Thatcher had been in power since 1979 and followed by another conservative, John Major, who served until 1997. These conversative politicians were polarizing and polarized, and many people who were marginalized fought back against the conservative/Conservative zeitgeist, demanding that their voices be heard and respected in the formal and informal cultural milieu. This happened within the academy, but vocally and violently outside the academy as well. One could categorize this period, and the decades leading up to this, as an “assault” to the dominant and “symbolic” order; one that, if not reigned in, could result in “impending catastrophe.”

But only at “rare moments” did students reference anything close to this context (Seixas, 1994b, p. 298). Instead his research findings showed that students talked about history in very academically acceptable ways:[12] they talked about wars, about politics, they talked about learning from the past to shape the future. They did not talk about controversies nor did they broach any topics that were personal. They did not seem to need to be showed how to engage with the “critical scrutiny” that brought some topics into the fold and others not. They showed up as part of the group that acquiesced to norms about history learning. They did not show up as Other. And this is what was frustrating for him. This is what caused the disregard for students’ own answers. Because he the wanted the article to argue that the “assault” on history meant that students would need “guidance moving through it” and that “such guidance might ultimately constitute a new pedagogy of history” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 298). Instead, students showed up as people who felt that history could teach them preventative lessons for the future and how we got to where we are now. This was not enough. There was impending catastrophe after a 20 year assault. This needed something new. This needed a model for how to critically scrutinize what made some topics significant and, therefore, what caused others to be (reasonably) insignificant (Seixas, 1994b, p. 300).

So the context is important. The context not explicitly mentioned is important. And his perspectives on this context is important. The perspective that there is an “assault” that students need critical scrutiny to shift through and deploy relevant strategies is important. The idea that an objective definition of historical significance is a way to do this is important. The idea that students need a “significant past” important (Seixas, 1994b, p. 300) – (because of the ways it suggests that students do not currently have this).

Seixas writes that students need to be engaged in history learning that helps “help them link their genuine, contemporary concerns with the broader range of human experience over time” (Seixas, 1994b, p. 301).[13] But students’ “genuine, contemporary concerns” were never articulated nor asked in this research. They were speculative. And I would guess that Seixas would have placed students’ concerns into the pre-hegemony category of significance, which is why the article and the argument was set up as it was: historical significance is an important tool for writing worthwhile history; significance changes over time but having an objective definition helps with determining real significance over insignificance; students come to the concept of significance as a (empirical) problem which a new pedagogy can help solve.

If students showed up in the way he expected, his argument could be more cohesive. Because they didn’t, there are parts within the whole but not a whole itself. Not a whole that draws from and reflects on concerns of students. Ironically,[14] Seixas’ treatment of the research findings from students illustrated his definition of significance. The findings became significant “if and only if” he was able to draw relationships between the findings and the concerns identified by the larger community. The findings could not stand on their own, otherwise they could be “mated out of nothing or woven out of fiction;” the context for their significance had to already be in place. This is why placing this work within a larger context is integral for seeing where this work developed from and where it was pointed towards. What students actually said and how they came to their argument was put to the side – was insignificant – in the face of the significance need for a “new pedagogy” that could respond to drastic shifts, changes, and assaults to the world with tools, criteria, and objectivity to critically scrutinize it. The student themselves is irrelevant. The argument for reasonable hegemony is.

The significance of Significance

In the later-1990s and into the 2000s, when Seixas becomes Chair of Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness at the University of British Columbia, his work moves away from direct student research and toward theoretical writings.[15] Rather than use this platform to expand the concepts of history and history learning, Seixas’ overall thesis continuously get repeated: a focus on the discipline is needed to attend to a volatile world. A world with Others. Students need guidance in how to not be an Other and how to reconcile with Others.[16]

As Seixas said in 2000, “Rather than promoting identity fissures in a multicultural, multinational, and multiply gendered world, [the discipline orientation] offers the promise of deliberative distance” (Seixas, 2000b, p. 25). This “deliberative distance” gives students the tools to develop a common national consciousness and in the process a common purpose for moving Canada into the future (Seixas, 2004a, 2004b, 2006a, 2006b, 2009). According to Seixas, “There are too many origins, too many heroes, too many stories” to do anything else (Seixas, 2006c, pp. 20-21). Students need to follow in the tradition of historians who “never takes [the source author’s] words at face value,” but always take a “critical stance” – Do other approaches to the past, such as Indigenous’ peoples historical tradition of storytelling by and with Elders do this? Seixas (2012) asked.[17]

Jamaican scholar and novelist Erna Brodber likened traditional history writing to a court of law.[18] In 1983, she wrote: “History, like the judge in the law court, requires evidence. It requires that any event postulated to have occurred, can be demonstrated to other persons to have indeed occurred” (in Fenton Stitt 10). What then of significant (and “insignificant”) histories embedded in the identities of people where evidence and understanding of ‘truth’ in a hegemonic community is impossible? What then of these histories? Of these people? Creating “deliberative distance” in the study of history may be the stated goal (Seixas, 2000b, p. 25), but the unstated goal is the objectification of the past, a past without spirit learnt by consumer without spirit (Palmer, 1983). And teachers and other education professionals may do different things with this work, but the premise in the DNA of historical thinking is that the discipline knows better than the individual and Seixas is the one to bestow this learning on the history education community.

Students are not historians. Most will never be historians. And further, even if they were historians, historians do not have all the answers either, no matter how objective their criteria for significance is or how methodological their methods.

But students should not be constructed as the problem within history education. Starting here is a fundamental flaw in one’s approach to history education. Students know history – perhaps not correctly, perhaps not wholly, perhaps not coherently – but students are embodied historical archives and should be respected as such. And this knowing, this embodiment, comes from and also shapes their identity(ies). Identity is how we come to history. Subjectivity is how we read and interpret the past. Students, just like adults, are the result of generations of people, traditions, cultures, languages, experiences, which all coalesce in a classroom waiting (perhaps reticently) to learn official narratives of the country they now live in. Young people may not know national narratives, but they have a sense, even at a young age, of how they and their family fit in larger cultural systems: where they are welcomed, where they are excluded, where they see themselves, where they want to be seen. They have also heard family stories; they’ve heard the structure of family stories; the ways in which the stories that tell them about their family are shaped, they way they sound, perhaps the way they move, the way they smell, the way they taste, the way they feel in their own body, the energy they give or take for themselves, others, or the room they are shared in. Students, like adults, are these embodied stories, embodied histories, embodied archives, embodied political identities, and this doesn’t go away just because they are mandated to learn a country’s history.

Classroom teachers do not have to take up the mantle of communing with these ghosts that sit alongside students,[19] but they should respect them. They should respect not only students’ differing histories but the differing ways students and their families “do” and have “done” history. The differences should be honoured, as well as the fact that there are differences should be honoured. Not better or worse that what is going to be taught in the classroom but as something equal and alongside and, at best, the role of formal history education is to complement and contextualize the histories that students hold in their bodies. Not to demonstrate how or if these histories hold up to “critical scrutiny” when pressed (Seixas, 1994b, p. 300). Not to be a reminder that they are “too much” in an already busy world (Seixas, 2000b, p. 25). Not to challenge and disbelieve the stories of their Elders (Seixas, 2012). But to bring their complexities and their connections together in an environment that cares about how these could make sense in a larger context (Cutrara, 2020).

Conclusions

This close, deconstructive witnessing of one of the seminal works that provided the foundation to historical thinking, Seixas’ 1994 article “Students’ Understanding of Historical Significance” was meant to demonstrate Seixas’ commitments to history and history education that sit outside a response to students and inside a political argument for greater neutrality, greater objectivity, in dealing with conflict in society. Concerns for students and their historical consciousness fall within that argument; they didn’t build it.

Seixas is not alone in this reverse engineering. The findings from the Chata project in the UK at this same time was used to make an argument for history education that focused on “metahistorical” concepts in a historian’s toolbox rather than substantive concepts of historical names and dates.[20] However, the argument for a history education that would take the politics out of history can be traced as existing before the research was conducted,[21] even by Seixas himself.[22]

In this article, I engaged in a deconstructive witnessing of Seixas’ approach to history education to show what formed the basis of what we call the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking. I wanted to show the politics, commitments, and understanding of difference that underlay Seixas’ approach to this work. I wanted to show that students were secondary to the argument and that primary was an emphasis on “objectively” dealing with difference. Seixas came to this work with a concern for a society under assault and one needing a logical, rational, and objective way of accommodating difference. But this approach assimilates Other into the group, it doesn’t imagine new ways of being together based on transformative commitment to equity and justice. And, in someways, it is entirely antithetical to it.[23]

If transformative, justice-focused approaches to history and social studies education is not one’s professional or personal commitments, then historical thinking may be the right fit for one’s pedagogy. But one of my main goals for this article was show the ideas behind the curtain. To show that the great and powerful approach to history education that provides structure to inquiry and learning in history especially in environments with difference and conflict, is there to promote hegemony and encourage assimilation. If you want to engage in work for reconciliation, you can’t. If you want to engage in student self-examination of their stories, you can’t. If you want to learn from history through creative play that some may call fiction (but others call life writing with an absence aesthetic (Stitt, 2021)), you can’t. If a commitment to social justice through and with the study of the past is an important value to maintain in this work, then fully reconciling the history of this work into current praxis is integral. And, when doing so, it may show to be more difficult that one would want.

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Cutrara, S. (2020). Transforming the Canadian History Classroom: Imagining a New" we". UBC Press.

Cutrara, S. (Forthcoming). Til We Are Ghosts: Haunting Canadian history education.

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Lee, P. (2003). A Scaffold Not a Cage: Progression and progression models in history. Teaching History, 113, 13-23.

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ENDNOTES

[1] Seixas, P. (1993a). The Community of Inquiry as a Basis for Knowledge and Learning: The case of history. American educational research journal, 30(2), 305-324. , Seixas, P. (1993b). Historical Understanding Among Adolescents in a Multicultural Setting. Curriculum inquiry, 23(3), 301-327. , Seixas, P. (1993c). Popular Film and Young People’s Understanding of the History of Native American-White Relations. The History Teacher, 26(3), 351-370. , Seixas, P. (1994a). Confronting the Moral Frames of Popular Film: Young people respond to historical revisionism. American Journal of Education, 102(3), 261-285. , Seixas, P. (1994b). Students' Understanding of Historical Significance. Theory and Research in Social Education, XXII(3), 281-304. , Seixas, P. (1997). Mapping the Terrain of Historical Significance. Social Education, 61(1), 22-27.

[2] As of June 2024.

[3] But, as Derrida (2006) writes, “This Thing looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there” (p. 6).

Derrida, J. (2006). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international [Spectres de Marx] (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Routledge. (1994)

[4] In Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian history, published in 2022 almost 30 years after Seixas’ plication, editors Michele Johnson and Funké Aladejebi write about the continued fight for Black Canadian stories to be included in Canadian history and the Canadian imagination. They identified that the work has come along way and that has been because of the work of academic historians but also local historians, community activists, and scholars across disciplines. “Still,” they write, “there continues to be critical silencing around questions of race and racism within wider Canadian scholarship and discourses of the nation, resulting in an absented Black presence in Canada.” Intervening in these absences is work. It is ongoing work. It involves disrupting “the reupholstered and re / articulated mythologies of Whiteness to uncover, understand, and bear witness to the challenges, triumphs, negotiations, resistances, and resilience / s of Black communities as they work to negate the tropes of their erasure /s in this place called Canada.” (p. 6-7) 

Johnson, M. A., & Aladejebi, F. (2022). Introduction. In M. A. Johnson & F. Aladejebi (Eds.), Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian history (pp. 3-28). University of Toronto Press.

[5] Seixas never again uses the phrase “empirical research” and it is hard to know where and how to place this in his argument. Is he, and others like him, the ones doing research and so the ‘problem’ is that not enough empirical research has been done about students? Or are students doing (or potentially not doing) [historical] research and the ‘problem’ is that their research is not appropriately “empirical” for exploring historical significance?

[6] Although, interestingly, he writes that gaps in his research may be remedied by research methods such as checklists; approaches that counter his own desire for more open-ended research.

In his 1997 article, “Mapping the Terrian of Historical Significance,” a checklist is included for students to weight in on. Seixas, P. (1997). Mapping the Terrain of Historical Significance. Social Education, 61(1), 22-27.

[7] He defined the “Narrative” orientation as “a development ending in the circumstances of the present, thus providing explanations for the current state of affairs.” He defined the “Analogy” orientation as thinking of  “historical knowledge as … a fund of lessons from the past either for policy guidance or for understanding who we are in contrast to others from past eras.”  (p. 298)

[8] I’m not critiquing his methods here. Engaging in research with youth is a difficult endeavour, and added elements have to be added into the planning, executing, and analyzing research when one in engaging in educational research.

[9] Topics, I might add, that were not featured as needing help anywhere else in the article.

[10] The appendix of this article had the initial survey he gave to students. He chose students to interview following these surveys. The interview questions were not provided in the appendix.

[11] Ashby, R., & Lee, P. (1987). Discussing the Evidence. Teaching History, 48, 13-17. , Ashby, R., Lee, P., & Dickinson, A. (1997). How Children Explain the ‘Why’ of History: The Chata research project on teaching history. Social Education, 61(1), 17-21. , Lee, P. (1983). History teaching and the philosophy of history. History and Theory, 22(4), 19–49. , Lee, P. (1991). Historical Knowledge and the National Curriculum. In R. Aldrich (Ed.), History in the National Curriculum (pp. 35-65). Institute of Education. , Lee, P. (1998a). ‘A lot of guess work goes on’: Children's understanding of historical accounts. Teaching History, 92(August), 29-32. , Lee, P. (1998b). Making sense of historical accounts. Canadian Social Studies, 32(2), 52-54. , Lee, P. (2003). A Scaffold Not a Cage: Progression and progression models in history. Teaching History, 113, 13-23. , Lee, P. (2004). Understanding History. In P. Seixas (Ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness (pp. 129-164). University of Toronto Press. , Lee, P., & Ashby, R. (2000). Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7-14. In P. N. Stearns, P. Seixas, & S. Wineburg (Eds.), Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and international perspectives. (pp. 199-222). New York University Press. , ibid., Lee, P., Dickinson, A., & Ashby, R. (1997). ‘Just another emperor’: Understanding action in the past. International Journal of Educational Research, 27(3), 233-244. , ibid.

[12] I’m not suggesting that students or young people generally find these topics significant. My own research doesn’t, for example, show that at all. Instead, I am demonstrating what Seixas’ stated research said and the way it operated in service (or not in service) of his larger thesis.

[13] Again this is a new problem that doesn’t show up in the early parts of his article. The lack of the explicit links suggests implicit interweaving of objective significance and students’ potentially polarizing views of history even if these views do not show up in his research sample.

[14] And I think unconsciously.

[15] Seixas, P. (1999). Beyond 'Content' and 'Pedagogy': In search of a way to talk about history education. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 31(3), 317-337. https://doi.org/10.1080/002202799183151 , Seixas, P. (2000a, Dec 26). History's Fractured Mirror. The Globe and Mail. , Seixas, P. (2000b). Schweigen! die Kinder! or, Does Post Modern History Have a Place in the Schools? In P. N. Stearns, P. Seixas, & S. Wineburg (Eds.), Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History (pp. 19-37). New York University Press. , Seixas, P. (Ed.). (2004b). Theorizing Historical Consciousness. University of Toronto Press. , Seixas, P. (2006b). What is Historical Consciousness? In R. Sandwell (Ed.), To the Past: History education, public memory, and citizenship in Canada (pp. 11-22). University of Toronto Press. , Seixas, P. (2009). National History and Beyond. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 41(6), 719-722. http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/00220270903045253 , Seixas, P. (2012). Indigenous Historical Consciousness: An oxymoron or a dialogue? In M. Carretero, M. Asensio, & M. Rodríguez-Moneo (Eds.), History Education and the Construction of National Identites (pp. 125-138). Information Age Publishing. , Seixas, P. (2017). A Model of Historical Thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(6), 593-605. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2015.1101363 , Seixas, P., & Morton, T. (2012). The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts. Nelson. , Seixas, P., & Peck, C. (2004). Teaching Historical Thinking. In A. Sears & I. Wright (Eds.), Challenges & Prospects for Canadian Social Studies (pp. 109-117). Pacific Educational Press.

[16] In the interest of fairness, I want to flag a publication that came in between the 1994 article that I have discussed here and Seixas’ work during the Chair-ship at UBC. “Mapping the Terrian of Historical Significance” was published in Social Education in 1997. Published by the US’s National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), Social Education was more magazine than academic journal. In this research, methods he mentioned in the 1994 article, such as checklists and concept mapping, were used to get to a more full sense of students’ conceptions of historical significance than the 1994 article. This research also had a larger and purposefully more ethically diverse sample than the research referenced in the 1994 article. He states that the research “begins with the premise that we can neither dismiss nor ignore any students’ framework of historical significance” (p. 22).

Limitation to length of this paper means that a full deconstruction of this article and research cannot take place, especially in comparison to the 1994 article. However, the findings of this 1997 paper do not contradict the argument that I am making in this article. Even if Seixas is committed to “neither dismiss[ing] nor ignor[ing] any students’ framework of historical significance,” he still understood them to be a problem – an Other. Ones who have “intellectually legitimate” and intellectually [ill]legitimate positions on significance (p. 27). The students who were most praised as having “intellectually legitimate” positions on significance were ones who demonstrated that “individual events became significance because of their place in a larger historical narrative” (p. 27) – a definition very similar to the one Seixas puts forth in 1994. It is this type of “intellectually legitimate” ways of approaching significance that would help students, especially marginalized students, navigate the “problematic choice” of “either building a significant past around his or her particularistic concerns or adopting the authoritative grand narratives while relegating self and family to the margin outside ‘really’ significant history.” How is this reconciled? When students could reconcile their ideas of significance within the group, leading to a change to the group but also a more legitimate version of themselves. 

[17] For context, the full quote is: “The position of the authors (or artists or photographers, etc.) is always of interest, but their authority always demands a critical stance. The historian never takes their words at face value. How different is the aboriginal approach to the interpretation of traditional stories of elders?”. (Seixas 2010, P.133)

In a footnote, Seixas concedes that these sources were still valid by using the Supreme Court of Canada not Indigenous peoples themselves to make this argument. He writes: “the legal analog of this educational question was played out in the Delgamuukw decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997. As J.R. Miller (200, p. 387) summarizes, ‘The court upheld the significance of oral history evidence, a clear sign that the judiciary was now willing to accord Aboriginal standards of reality and Aboriginal forms of history (italics added) the same respect Euro-Canadian ones received.’” (Seixas 2010, P.133). He then thanked scholar Penny Clark for the reference.

[18] Also see previous footnote.

[19] Although they can if they want. Cutrara, S. (Forthcoming). Til We Are Ghosts: Haunting Canadian history education.

[20] Ashby, R., Lee, P., & Dickinson, A. (1997). How Children Explain the ‘Why’ of History: The Chata research project on teaching history. Social Education, 61(1), 17-21. , Lee, P., & Ashby, R. (2000). Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7-14. In P. N. Stearns, P. Seixas, & S. Wineburg (Eds.), Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and international perspectives. (pp. 199-222). New York University Press. , Lee, P., Dickinson, A., & Ashby, R. (1997). ‘Just another emperor’: Understanding action in the past. International Journal of Educational Research, 27(3), 233-244.

[21] Lee, P. (1991). Historical Knowledge and the National Curriculum. In R. Aldrich (Ed.), History in the National Curriculum (pp. 35-65). Institute of Education.

[22] Seixas (1998) as identified that Peter Lee, one of the primary Chata researchers, made this argument in 1983 before the Chata project was conceptualized and funded. See: Lee, P. (1983). History teaching and the philosophy of history. History and Theory, 22(4), 19–49. , Seixas, P. (1998). Conceptualizing the growth of historical understanding. The handbook of education and human development: New models of learning, teaching and schooling, 733-750.

[23] Seixas’ 2012 article “Indigenous Historical Consciousness: An oxymoron or a dialogue?” is not focused on enough in historical thinking literature. The dimissive tone he takes regarding Indigenous ways of knowing and relating to history is both professionally and academically appalling.