UPDATE: This research is now completed, and I am no longer conducting interviews. Thanks to all for sharing your stories! My book, Snacks: A Canadian Food History, is available from University of Manitoba Press.
Share your snack food stories!
Book launch
Celebrating the publication of my first book!
The book launch will take place at Winnipeg’s McNally Robinson on Saturday, 27 April 2013 at 2 pm.
The book is a history of 3 workplaces – Friesens, Palliser, and Loewen – and discusses the transformation of Mennonite identity in the second half of the 20th century.
Public lecture
University of Winnipeg History Seminar Series, 13 February 2013.
Why I don’t give exams
I taught high school students for a decade and a half before my current university career. I obtained my education degree in the early 1990s, at the height of the interest in “alternative assessment.” The phrase “alternative assessment” was replaced eventually by “authentic assessment” and finally the term became simply “assessment.” The change in terminology reflected a change in understanding: alternatives to traditional paper-and-pencil testing should not be considered “alternatives” but as central methods of assessing students. Those methods should be “authentic” in that they reflect actual real-world (meaning, outside of school) tasks, and should require demonstration or performance of student skills. As these ideas became the norm among secondary school teachers, the adjectives “alternative” and “authentic” fell away.
Old Dutch “Kids’ Bids”: searching for past contestants
UPDATE: This research is now completed, and I am no longer conducting interviews. Thanks to all for sharing your stories! My book, Snacks: A Canadian Food History, is now available from University of Manitoba Press.
Continue reading “Old Dutch “Kids’ Bids”: searching for past contestants”
Class discussions
Earlier this year, I led a workshop for the University of Winnipeg History Department on leading class discussions. Below is a summary of that workshop.
Preliminaries:
In my first scheduled class with undergraduates, I take some time to explain how to read journal articles in preparation for class discussions. (See the suggestions provided in Patrick Rael, Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students (Bowdoin College, 2004)). I like to centre the first discussion around a non-threatening text – usually a poem, such as Tom Wayman’s “Paper, Scissors, Stone” or Bertolt Brecht’s “A Worker Reads History.”
History of Canadian Snack Foods
PROJECT: “Snack Foods: A Canadian Social History, 1945-2010.”
