HISTORY TEACHERS IMAGINING THE NATION: World War II Narratives in the United States and Canada

Abstract

A comparison of the enacted history curriculumi in Canada and the United States presents an opportunity to draw conclusions about the processes by which citizenship and the nation are constructed in the high school history classroom. While this collection has largely focused on how textbooks represent the nation, this chapter examines the teacher’s role in “enacting” or teaching the narrative content of textbooks. The interaction between history teachers and textbooks is largely unstudied (Thornton, 2006), yet teachers have the power to reinforce, challenge, or complicate the story of the nation as told in textbooks and other texts.