Project Director
Carla L. Peck is Professor of Social Studies Education in the Department of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta and is the Director of the Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future SSHRC Partnership Grant. She researches teachers’ and students’ understandings of democratic concepts, teachers’ and students’ historical understandings, and is particularly interested in the relationship between students’ ethnic identities and their understandings of history. She has held several major research grants and has authored, co-authored, and/or co-edited numerous journal articles, book chapters, and books related to her research interests, including Education, Globalization and the Nation (PalgraveMacmillan, 2016), Teaching and Learning Difficult Histories in International Contexts: A Critical Sociocultural Approach (Routledge, 2018), and the Palgrave Handbook of Global Citizenship and Education (PalgraveMacmillan, 2019). Her most recent co-edited book, with Anna Clark, is Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field (2019, Berghahn Books). Carla regularly works with teachers at the provincial, national, and international level and serves as a consultant on numerous boards and advisory groups for history and civic organizations. Strongly committed to social justice education, Carla has always sought ways to engage students of all ages in discussions about how to make the world a more equitable and just place to live. She views a solid grounding in history and historical inquiry as foundational to these discussions. Before Carla found her way to academia, she was an elementary school teacher in New Brunswick.
Project Manager
Vivian Lei holds a Ph.D. in Language Acquisition and Learning from the Department of Elementary Education, University of Alberta (UA), where she also obtained her Master of Education. She has been working with the UA for over ten years across the Faculties of Education, Medicine and Dentistry, and Rehabilitation Medicine. She brings to the project extensive research experience, as well as experiences in project management and research coordination. Vivian is passionate and deeply committed to supporting research that brings positive impacts on practice, community-response, and policy decisions in the educational context.
Executive Committee Members
Dr. Marie Battiste is a Mi’kmaw educator of the Potlotek First Nation, Professor Emerita at the University of Saskatchewan, a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellow, and an Honorary Officer of the Order of Canada. Her passion, research and scholarly work for decolonizing education, protecting Indigenous knowledges, and cognitive justice, through balancing diverse knowledge systems and languages have earned her graduate degrees from Harvard and Stanford Universities, and four honorary degrees from University of Ottawa, Thompson Rivers University, University of Maine, and St. Mary’s University.
Her scholarly work includes books, chapters in books, journals, and reports, notably Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit and Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge. More recently, she co-authored a report for the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences Igniting Change: Final Report and Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Decolonization (2021) and co-guest edited the Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Based Research, Teaching, and Learning on the theme Indigenous and Trans-systemic Knowledge Systems.
An elected Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada, she holds multiple awards including a National Aboriginal Achievement (now INDspire) Award; University of Saskatchewan Distinguished Researcher award; Distinguished Academic Award from the Canadian Association of University Teachers; Saskatchewan Centennial Medal for significant contributions to the people of Saskatchewan; Alumni Achievement Award, University of Maine; 125th Year Queen’s Award for Service to the Community; Canada’s Who’s Who, Yearly since 2010 University of Toronto Press; and multiple honouring feathers and blankets from First Nations communities. Marie recently joined Cape Breton University as Special Advisor to Vice President Academic and to Unama’ki College on decolonizing the academy for the academic years 2021-2023.
Penney Clark is a history educator, historian of education and professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. She was Director of The History Education Network/Histoire et éducation en réseau (THEN/HiER) (SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Clusters Grant, $2.1 million) for ten years. She has published widely on history and social studies education and on the history of educational publishing in Canada, and has received publication awards from the Canadian History of Education Association (with Mona Gleason and Stephen Petrina) and the Canadian Association for Foundations in Education (with graduate student Wayne Knights). She is co-editor, with Mona Gleason, of the journal Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation, editor of New Possibilities for the Past: Shaping History Education in Canada (UBC Press, 2011), and co-editor, with Roland Case, of Learning to Inquire in History Geography and Social Studies: An Anthology for Secondary Teachers (TC2, 2020) and The Anthology of Social Studies: Issues and Strategies for Elementary Teachers (TC2, 2016), which are used in social studies teacher education courses across the country. Her most recent book, The Arts and the Teaching of History: Historical F(r)ictions (2020), co-authored with Alan Sears, was published by Palgrave MacMillan. For more information see https://edcp.educ.ubc.ca/faculty-staff/penney-clark.
Maxime Dagenais is the Research Facilitator for the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of History at McMaster University. A historian of New France, British North America, and early America, he is the co-author (with Béatrice Craig) of The Land in Between. The Upper St. John Valley, Prehistory to World War One and the co-editor (with Julien Mauduit) of Revolutions Across Borders: Jacksonian America and the Canadian Rebellion. His articles have appeared in Canadian Military History, Canadian Journal of Media Studies, Australasian-Canadian Studies, The Canadian Encyclopedia, Bulletin d’histoire politique, Quebec Studies, American Review of Canadian Studies, Enjeux de l’univers social, and The Conversation. He is currently working on a general history of the Canadian Rebellion – A History of the First Canadian Revolution, 1837-1842 – with Julien Mauduit.
James Doiron is the Research Data Management Services Coordinator, University of Alberta Libraries and the Academic Director of the University of Alberta Research Data Centre. With an educational background in the Social Sciences (Psychology; Criminology), James has extensive applied research and data management experience across a wide range of disciplines, areas of focus and data types. James actively sits on a number of local, national and international advisory and working groups, including both as a member of the UofA’s Institutional RDM Strategy Working Group and Health Research Ethics Board, the Statistics Canada Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) External Advisory Committee, and the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Council. James is co-Chair of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) Portage Network Data Management Planning (DMP) Expert Group, and is additionally a member of the Portage Research Data Management (RDM) Training Expert Group, as well as the Dataverse North Working Group.
Catherine Duquette is an Associate Professor of Social Studies and History Education in the Department of Education at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC). She is a member of the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la formation et la profession enseignante (CRIFPE). She is a member of the UNESCO Chair for “la transmission culturelle chez les Premiers peuples comme dynamique de mieux-être et d’empowerment” lead by UQAC’s professor Élisabeth Kaine. She has published several journal articles and book chapters about historical thinking, historical consciousness and the role of assessment in history education in French and in English. Her current research interests include progression models for historical thinking, the impact of provincial examination for history education and the question of assessment. Over the last five years, Catherine (Cate) has worked with the PEI and New Brunswick ministry of education (francophone division) providing professional development for the high school social studies teachers. She was a member of the consultation committee for the Quebec Ministry of Education’s reform of the history of Quebec and Canada curriculum. She teaches with Prof. Carla Peck at the annual Historical Thinking Summer Institute organized by the professor Lindsay Gibson and she has partnered with Canada’s National History Society.
Lindsay Gibson is an Assistant Professor of Social Studies and History Education in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. He has published several journal articles and book chapters about historical thinking, historical inquiry, history teacher education, the ethical dimension of history, and assessment of historical thinking. Prior to completing his PhD in Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC in 2014 Lindsay taught secondary school history and social studies in Central Okanagan Public Schools (Kelowna, B.C.) for twelve years. For more than a decade he has collaborated with organizations including The Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2), Historica, and others to develop learning resources that promote historical thinking and historical inquiry. Over the last five years Lindsay has worked on K-12 social studies curriculum writing teams in B.C. and Alberta, is on the Executive Board of the Historical Thinking Project, and organizes an annual Historical Thinking Summer Institute in partnership with Canada’s National History Society.
Jacqueline P. Leighton is currently a Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology. She is a registered psychologist and has received her training at the University of Alberta and Yale University. She specializes in the cognitive, emotional and social variables associated with academic achievement, test design and performance, and learning in both children and adults. Her research has been funded by grants from a variety of agencies, including NSERC and SSHRC. She is past editor of Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, and currently serves on the editorial board of Journal of Educational Measurement. More information can be found at leighton4learning.com.
Kristina R. Llewellyn is Associate Professor of Social Development Studies at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. She is a member of the Ontario College of Teachers and affiliated faculty with the History Department and Games Institute at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Llewellyn is an expert in oral history education, civic learning, equity in education, and the history of education. Dr. Llewellyn has published numerous books, including The Canadian Oral History Reader (McGill-Queen’s, 2015); Oral History and Education: Theories, Dilemmas, and Practice (Palgrave, 2017), Oral History, Education, and Justice: Possibilities and Limitations for Redress and Reconciliation (Rutledge, 2019). She is currently the Director of the SSHRC-funded partnership Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation: The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children History Education Initiative (DOHR, www.dohr.ca) and the SSHRC-funded project Model Citizens: Youth, Global Citizenship, and the Model United Nations.
David Scott is an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Learning in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. His research has focussed on how educators interpret and pedagogically respond to new policy and curricular mandates particularly within the area of social studies and history education. This scholarly focus has included work supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded doctoral study (2012-2015) examining how non-Indigenous educators in Alberta negotiated curricular directives to engage Indigenous historical experiences. Supported by a Global Affairs Faculty Mobility Program grant, he has also examined how Brazilian educators understand and make sense of recent curricular initiatives seeking to promote the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous histories. Situated within the larger scholarship of curriculum reform and change, his current line of research focusses on how societal actors from historically marginalized communities are engaging in public political action aimed at reshaping curriculum reform efforts. Dr. Scott has co-edited 1 academic book, authored or co-authored 12 peer reviewed journal articles, and published 7 book chapters in referred edited collections.
Partner Representatives
Renee St. Germain is a member of Rama First Nation in Ontario. Currently residing in Ottawa, Ontario, Renee is the Director of Languages and Learning at the Assembly of First Nations (AFN). The AFN Languages and Learning Sector advocates on behalf of First Nations in K-12 Education, Post-Secondary Education, Education Infrastructure, Labour Market Training and Languages Revitalization and ultimately for First Nations control of First Nations education. Renee is an educator by trade and holds both a Bachelor of Education and a Master of Education through the University of Ottawa. Prior to joining the AFN, Renee worked with the Ottawa urban Indigenous community in early childhood education through the Aboriginal Head Start in Urban and Northern Communities program. Through this work, Renee noticed a need to create space for Indigenous students who were transitioning from culturally rich environments into the public school system. This led Renee to work on professional development for elementary teachers on how to incorporate space for Indigenous knowledge and learners into their classroom.
Maureen McNamara is currently the president of the Social Studies Teachers Association of Nova Scotia and a director with the Social Studies Educators Network of Canada(SSENC-RESSC) in both roles she is committed to social studies education in Canada. Maureen’s involvement in curriculum development and professional development focuses on supporting educators and students. Maureen’s diverse professional learning experiences and commitment to lifelong learning provides a unique perspective of the complexities of leadership, collaboration and curriculum, that are an integral part of social studies education. She is an advocate for social studies education!
Lise Pinkos is a proud Franco-Manitoban and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Education degree, both from the Université de Saint-Boniface. Her studies focused on human rights education and how students can learn about human rights to become engaged in taking action for human rights. Lise was part of the inaugural team at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and is currently Director, Programs. Throughout her career at the Museum, Lise has been privileged to have the opportunity to meet with Canadians from coast to coast to coast who generously shared their human rights stories with the Museum. In her current role, she oversees the development and delivery of human rights education programs onsite and online for learners of all ages. Lise is also the Vice President of the Board of Governors of the Université de Saint-Boniface and is maman to Marianne, 8 and Théodore, 3.