Josh Cole

Ph.D. Candidate

Social and cultural history; the history of education (schooling, tertiary, lifelong, and non-formal); modernity; liberalism; history education

Phone: 613-533-2150
Fax: 613-533-6298
Email: 5ajc2@queensu.ca

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Education

MA in history, Queen's, 2007
BAH in history, Huron University College (at UWO), 2006

About

Teaching Fields:

Post-Confederation Canadian history; Pre-Confederation Canadian history; twentieth century American history

My SSHRC-CGS funded dissertation, supervised by Dr. Ian McKay, is entitled Children, Schools, and Utopias: Education and Modernity in Ontario's Long 1960s. It is a history of that province's influential and contentious 1968 statement of "aims and objectives in education," Living and Learning, also known as the "Hall-Dennis Report." In 1965, Bill Davis, Ontario's Minister of Education, appointed Emmett Hall, a Supreme Court Judge, to chair a committee charged with devising a new blueprint for education in the province (and, by extension, for the whole of Canada), in order to bring it up to speed with a late-twentieth century modern world driven by ever-accelerating social, cultural, and economic change. The result was one of the most ostensibly radical government documents ever produced in North America. It advocated the overhaul of much of the existing educational system in Ontario, including the elimination of key elements of traditional pedagogy (such as testing, graded progression, and corporal punishment), in favour of educational innovation (through interdisciplinarity, multiculturalism, and the extensive use of communication technologies in the classroom). Most importantly, the committee insisted that education must be centered on the individual child's unique learning experience in relation to the changing world of the 1960s. All of this, taken together, would have Ontario' children raised as liberal-humanistic, democratic, globally-oriented citizens. In short, the report was deeply utopian in both content and form (being lavishly illustrated in a distinctly avant-garde style). By the early 1970s, it came to stand in for everything that was either very right, or very wrong with Canadian education. Although this project centres upon the creation and reception of the report in relation to provincial, national, and international trends in education, it equally seeks to use the theme of educational reform as a unique entry-point into the social and cultural history of postwar Canada.

In addition to my dissertation, I am working with Dr. Rosa Bruno-Jofré on a chapter for a collection of essays entitled Teacher Education in a Transnational World, to be published by University of Toronto Press in 2012. It is entitled "The Idea of the University, its Historical Transformation and the Development of Faculties of Education: An International Approach." Broadly, it explores the university's changing role in teacher preparation, from the late-nineteenth century to the 1990s. More specifically, it examines the influence of various key factors upon teacher training during this period, including the drive to professionalization, technological advance, the development of a culture of rights, and the introduction of critical theory into educational research.

Peer Reviewed Articles:

"'La Vida es Movimiento Continuo, la Inercia es Muerte': El Informe Hall-Dennis, la Modernidad y la Educación Progresiva en el Ontario de Posguerra" in Sembrando Ideas 5 (1), 2011

Articles and Book Reviews:

"DIY U: Can Digital Solutions Save Universities?" (2010) in Rabble.ca: http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2010/06/diy-u-edupunks-edupreneurs-and-coming-transformation-higher-education (reprinted in Best of Rabble.ca 2010)

"Raymond Williams and Education – 'A Slow Reach Again for Control'" (2008) in The Encyclopedia of Informal Education: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/raymond_williams.htm

Conference Presentations:

"'A Stimulus Leading to the Morrow's Joy': the Hall-Dennis Report, the U.S.S.R., and Postwar Ontario Education," Canadian Historical Association/Réunion annuelle de la Société historique du Canada, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo, May, 2012

"The Hall-Dennis Report, Special Education, and Cultural Deprivation in Postwar Canada," Society for the History of Childhood and Youth Biennial Conference, Columbia University, New York City, June 2011

"'Should We Devise a Happening, and Call it a School?': Educational Television, Utopian Pedagogy, and The Hall-Dennis Report," Canadian History of Education Association/l'Association canadienne d'histoire de l'éducation Conference, York University, Toronto, October 2010

Selected Scholarships and Awards:

Queen's Graduate Award, 2011-2012
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Canada Graduate Scholarship, Doctoral Scholarship, 2008-2011
Ontario Graduate Scholarship, 2008/2009 (declined)
Women's Canadian Historical Society of Toronto Doctoral Award, 2007/2008
Ontario Graduate Scholarship, 2006/2007
The Nelson Viglianti Memorial Mature Student Award, 2006
The Huron University College Alumni History Award, 2005/2006
The Huron University College Kevin Cunliffe Fourth-Year Scholarship, 2004/2005

Teaching Assistantships Previously Held:

History 262: The Canadian Challenge II: 1950-2000
History 269: Nineteenth-Century Political History of Canada
History 249: The United States from 1865 to the Present
History 280: Gender in North American History
History 288: The Rise of the British Empire
History 274: The Cultural History of Modern France
History 218: Byzantium

Contributions and Service:

Member of the Miss G_Project Project for Equity in Education's "Bill 13 Expert Committee" examining Ontario's proposed "Accepting Schools Act," January/February, 2012
"Ontario Election Expert (Educational Reform)," Queen's University, News and Media Services, September/October, 2011
Conference Chair, "'Forward Through the Rearview Mirror'? Re-assessing History as a Medium," McGill-Queen's Graduate Student Conference in History, Queen's University, Kingston, March, 2009

Professional Associations:

Canadian Historical Association
Canadian History of Education Association
Society for the History of Children and Youth