History Teaching and Narrative Tools

Abstract

Based on an analysis of five English-speaking students’ written narratives on Quebec’s history, this article proposes a pedagogical tool for better integrating and vitalizing these students’ language community in Quebec. Despite tendencies of reliance and opposition emerging from their historical consciousness, these students do not employ clearly articulated and coherent English-speaking storylines for positioning themselves as a minority group. To this end, I suggest the creation of schematic narrative templates of English-speaking Quebec’s collective historical experiences for offering students workable springboards to develop personal narratives of belonging, while taking Francophone concerns of linguistic and cultural fragility into account.