At the Heart of It: Tracing Gendered Conceptions of Empathy and Affect Within Historical Thinking in Canada

Feelings, emotions, and connections to the past have long been positioned as incidental outcomes of engaging in the cognitive processes of historical thinking. In Canada, there has been an overall lack of discussion of historical empathy and the associated affective dimensions within history education research and curriculum. This chapter traces the gendered conceptions of historical empathy in history and history education over the past three decades. Drawing on interviews with teachers in Ontario, the author looks at the ways gendered conceptualizations of what it means to “do history” have been used to distance historical thinking from historical empathy or openness to affective dimensions of history. In so doing, the author shows how schools continue to favour seemingly more “rational” and “objective” benchmarks for learning and how such an approach devalues female-associated qualities in history education.