My core research interests are in the history of education in Canada, especially the education provided to students who come from populations that, depending on historical period, have been variously marginalised and targeted for "integration" in society's perceived "mainstream". This started with research into the education of deaf students in Montréal in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I have published two commissioned books and several articles stemming from this research, which was mostly done in my years as a graduate student. I am currently working on revising my Ph.D. dissertation for publication in book form, and expect that this will somewhat close that chapter of my research career. I tried researching the history of deaf Albertans only to hit the proverbial "brick wall" because of restrictions to access to archives.
In my years teaching at Red Deer College, I have become increasingly interested in a second area of research, that of the approaches and strategies to teaching history at the undergraduate level. This has led me to the theories around "historical thinking concepts" and other areas of research that emphasise that history is not only about knowledge and analysis of the facts, issues, and happenings of the past, but also about framing a certain way of thinking about the world more generally. I have presented several papers on ways that I have applied some of the insights from that research in classes, but have yet to systematise and write about my research findings. As in the area of archival research, one of my main preoccupations in looking at approaches to teaching history has to do with how power dynamics have worked to shape historical perceptions, and how students from groups that the "mainstream" historical narratives exclude react to these versions of history. This has been made particularly topical by the release, in December 2015, of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which questions the ways Indigenous peoples are perceived in the eyes of Canadian history through the construction of certain types of narratives.
This foray into historical theory and teaching methods led into my emerging research project, on which I have started working in the summer of 2014: representations of Indigenous peoples in commemorative sites and museums across Canada. This was spurred by reading the report published by Margaret Conrad et al., Canadians and their Pasts (UTP, 2013), which pointed out an interesting discrepancy between most Canadians' perceptions of museums and commemorative sites as some of the most "authoritative" sources of knowledge about the past and that of Indigenous peoples, who largely discredit the story being told by these sites. I began an adventure of visiting sites of historical interest across Canada to ferret out some of the keys as to this diverging perspective. Digging deeper, I also found out that these differences in representations and the attendant perceptions are not new, hence a recent presentation that merged my earlier and newer research interests by examining differences and similarities between representations of Indigenous and deaf people at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.