(Re)Framing Our Past, Contesting the Present: Centring Diverse Women’s Historical Agency in the Framing Our Past 2.0 Project

This chapter examines the obstacles and opportunities encountered in the design of gender history lesson plans for high school history teachers in Ontario. As part of an educational design research project team, the authors were tasked with representing women’s historical agency in lesson plans based on works from Framing Our Past: Canadian Women’s History in the Twentieth Century (Cook et al., 2001). The authors look at how this bilingual project managed to decentre the masculine framing of history (e.g., individualism and Eurocentrism). The lessons shared in the chapter forefront everyday women and their capacity to effect social change, highlighting how a diversity of perspectives change our historical understandings of topics such as the industrial revolution, war, and colonialism.