Interest was a significant part of Week 3’s Learning and Development class with importance directed at how to spark a student’s interest and how to build that spark into lifelong learning. As a future history teacher, there is a common stigma from students that history is boring and it is simply memorizing facts, which I used to believe as well. I grew up with a dad who was a massive history buff, specifically about the world wars, and he would show me movies, documentaries, and books which sparked my interest in history. Him and I would sit for hours and talk about new information that he had learned and how it connected to what we already knew.
When I began history in school in grade 7, my teacher simply had us read from the textbook and answer questions which continued into grade 8. I found this incredibly boring and I hated having to interact with the topic of history in class. I hoped in grade 10 my teacher would make the subject interesting but all my teacher did was read word for word off of PowerPoint presentations and quiz us on names and dates. That is when I developed a hatred towards school history classes, but continued with my love of history at home. Had I not had a previous interest in history, I would have finished my engagement with history after finishing grade 10.
This changed when I took grade 12 history and I decided to give school history one last chance. My teacher in grade 12 sparked that interest in me again when looking at history in school since she made the topic interesting and engaging. It was Early Modern European history and we spent time looking at the Renaissance and Reformation and instead of just looking at names and dates, we focused on individual people and the larger themes in society. This made the content fascinating and easier to understand.
I hope to be the teacher that sparks interest in my students in all history classes. While I may not have personally enjoyed the content in grade 7, 8, and 10 history, when approached differently, the content is actually very interesting and directly related to how Canada is run today. Students are not going to engage with the topic if the only interaction they have with it is reading textbooks and answering worksheets or memorizing names and dates. Showing students individual people and explaining the history through them can make it much more personal. The history turns into a lived experience that students will be able to connect with better.
Grade 10 history is an easy way to show how this can be implemented. When learning about the world wars, teachers can often get lost explaining battles by focusing on when it happened and where it happened. How can a student properly engage with that? The specific expectations of the curriculum can still be covered when the lesson is made engaging to students. For example, students can cover expectations C2.3 (“explain the main causes of World War II, and analyze Canada’s contribution to the war effort”) (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2026) and C2.5 (“explain some ways in which World War II affected non-Indigenous Canadians, including how the war changed the lives of various groups in this country”) (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2026) through one interactive assignment. Using the website Project ‘44 (https://project44.ca/), students can pick one Canadian soldier who was involved in a battle during the war.
This site has original war diary entries from soldiers during WWII so students can see how Canada contributed to that specific battle, the soldier’s specific contribution to the battle, and how the outcome of the battle affected them. Using this assignment, students have the power to pick any of the thousands of Canadian soldiers based on their own previous interest. It is not difficult to make history an interesting subject for students but it is very easy to make it a subject that students dread. It is up to the teacher to either extinguish any previous interest or spark interest and allow it to blossom into lifelong learning.
References
Ontario Ministry of Education. (2026). History, Grade 10. Curriculum and Resources. https://www.dcp.edu.gov.on.ca/en/curriculum/canadian-and-world-studies/courses/chc2d.
ElizabethH@OTU
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