Research

My research is centred on the history of education in Canada. At the University of Ottawa, my doctoral work concerned the origins of schooling in Upper Canada in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I analyzed the expanding print culture in the colony and juxtaposed it with a reading of the political debates of the time. I concluded that the first waves of advocacy for popular schooling began much earlier than historians have previously supposed, and involved a greater number of participants than previously assumed. That research has formed the basis of my recent book, The Idea of Popular Schooling in Upper Canada: Print Culture, Public Discourse, and the Demand for Education (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012). From 2009 to 2011 I held a research fellowship at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. I helped build and document a repository of the material culture of schooling from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. My research there broadened my understanding of the history of education, and enabled me to explore the ways in which material culture has shaped classroom experiences for children over the past two centuries. It also allowed me to consider the ways in which historical artifacts can be used to enhance student learning and the teaching of history. It was during my time at the museum that I also became interested in the history of Aboriginal education, and the question of who knew what when about residential schooling.

My current major project, funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture, is exploring the history of cross-border education in Quebec and Vermont. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people living in the borderland region of the Eastern Townships and Northern Vermont were sharing social and cultural institutions, including schools. Considering that the legal jurisdiction of schooling in Canada and the United States was at the provincial and state levels, the presence of international cross-border schooling raises challenging questions about the administrative and cultural history of education in this region.  The research for this study is being conducted on both sides of the border, and includes an analysis of school registers, reports, census records, public opinion, and political debates. It aims to make sense of the ways in which residents in Quebec and Vermont rejected or simply ignored jurisdictional lines for well over a century. I am also examining education more broadly by looking at the creation of shared establishments such as libraries, cultural centres, and voluntary associations. I believe that this research can tell us much about the dynamics of community, identity, and policy making among people with a shared local history but separate national histories.