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The study argues that attention to students’ historical thinking explains the tendency to frame a “gap” between past and present. 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regarding feminism for its educational context?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"The paper treats feminism as polysemous and notes that school materials often present a limited, homogeneous portrait linked to liberal feminism, shaping students’ understandings.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":32,"og:type":75,"og:title":10,"og:site_name":45,"og:description":12},"article",{"robots":77,"canonical":32},"index,follow",{"doc_id":79,"site_id":7},598117,1792190206,{"code":4,"msg":82,"data":83},"success",[84,88,92,96,101,106,111,115,120,123,127],{"id":22,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":85,"show_sort_weight":86,"slug":87},"Story & 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Historical Consciousness and Theories of Agency Can Explain Female Students’ Conceptions of Feminism  \nScott Pollock  \nTeacher  \nSt. Mildred’s-Lightbourn School  \nMarie-Hélène Brunet  \nAssistant Professor  \nFaculty of Education  \nUniversity of Ottawa  \nThis paper describes the results of two research projects, which were focused upon female students’ historical understanding of feminism. In both cases the researchers found that the student participants harbored ambivalent or negative attitudes towards feminism and saw little connection between the present and feminist struggles in the past. While this attitude could be attributed to a wide range of variables, the authors illustrate that a focus upon the students’ form of historical consciousness and theories of agency can explain the tendency to see a “gap”between past and present. This paper concludes with a call for further research into the interaction between historical thinking, historical consciousness, and theories of agency.  \nIntroduction  \nThis paper began when the two of us met, by chance, at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2017 . Marie-Hélène attended Congress to be a part of a Canadian Historical Association panel, where she gave an overview of the research she had recently completed for her doctoral dissertation at the Université de Montréal. Marie-Hélène’s research had focused upon students’ understanding of narratives of feminism in textbooks (Brunet, 2017a) . Meanwhile, Scott had come to Congress to be part of a Canadian Society for the Study of Education panel, where he described an action-research project he had recently completed (Pollock, 2017) . This research had investigated how high school aged girls think about historical significance. While our work, described in more detail below, was conducted in different provinces—with differing socio-linguistic realities—and used different methods, we quickly saw many similarities. In particular, we had both been surprised by our participants’ attitudes towards feminism, which, in line with research in the United States (Levstik & Groth, 2002; Colley, 2015), were often dismissive and at times outright negative.  \nAs we re-examined our work to try and better understand our participants’ thinking, we considered the possible impact of a number of factors that are often discussed within the scholarly literature on historical thinking such as the influence of textbooks (Clark 2009; Porat, 2004) and popular culture (Porat, 2006; Seixas, 1994) on student’s thinking about the past. Further reflection, however, led us to the conclusion that a different analytical approach might offer richer, or at least different, insights. Specifically, we began to focus on our participants’forms of historical consciousness and their personal theories of agency, noting how our participants made use of narratives of ‘Girl Power’ to deny the existence of gender inequality today, and to thereby conclude that the past is disconnected from the present.  \nPollock & Brunet, 2018 Canadian Social Studies, Volume 50, No. 1  \nAn important aspect should be emphasized here. Feminism is a polysemous term, referring to a multitude of theoretical and practical approaches, which are sometimes complementary, but can also conflict in important ways. To name a few, Marxist, radical (lesbian), post-structural, or postfeminist perspectives have developed views and conceptualizations of feminism that can seem irreconcilable, particularly when they are studied in a way that ignores the socio-spatio-temporal context in which they emerged (ZancariniFournel, 2005) . However, this research focusses, first and foremost, on feminism as viewed by students. Program documents and associated resources such as textbooks – what constitutes history in schools – share a quite homogenous and limited portrait of feminism that can be associated with liberal femin","cbCaiiKIgGrjbQq0","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiiKIgGrjbQq0","pdf",242927,14,"English","# Introduction\n## Two research projects and shared participant patterns\n## Analytical shift: historical consciousness and agency\n# Conceptual background on feminism and its educational framing\n## Liberal feminism in school narratives\n## Textbooks, waves, and missing analytical categories\n# Research aims and paper structure\n## Overview of methods and findings\n# A Tale of Two Projects","[{\"question\":\"What attitudes do the female student participants show toward feminism?\",\"answer\":\"Across both projects, participants display ambivalent or negative attitudes toward feminism and often fail to connect past feminist struggles to present issues.\"},{\"question\":\"How do the authors explain the perceived gap between past and present?\",\"answer\":\"They argue that students’ forms of historical consciousness and their theories of agency help explain why learners frame a “gap” between past feminism and present struggles.\"},{\"question\":\"What does the paper focus on regarding feminism for its educational context?\",\"answer\":\"The paper treats feminism as polysemous and notes that school materials often present a limited, homogeneous portrait linked to liberal feminism, shaping students’ understandings.\"}]","“When it became equal” - Female Students’ Conceptions of Feminism - Historical Consciousness and Theories of Agency | PDF",1792086319,35]