‘Doing’ history makes it come alive  

Jessica McIntyre, left, with Governor General Mary Simon, receives the 2024 Award for Excellence in Teaching History at Government House in Winnipeg. 

Photo: Anne-Marie Brisson

 Jessica McIntyre 

 

‘Doing’ history makes it come alive  

Glebe Collegiate’s Jessica McIntyre was thrilled to win the 2024 Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Teaching, but what really touched her was the reaction of her students when they heard the news. 

“When they were told, they erupted in hoots and hollers and cheers,” she says. “It was such an affirmative moment, it was really humbling.” 

The 38-year-old history teacher travelled to Winnipeg in November with her parents, her husband and two sons, aged six and eight, to accept the award, along with six other recipients, from Governor General Mary Simon. 

“She’s so kind, such a role model,” McIntyre said of Simon, who insisted on picking up her youngest boy for a group photograph. “It was a wonderful experience.” 

McIntyre’s award was in recognition of Project True North, which started in 2021. It focused on “what is not written,” illuminating the often-overlooked role of some First World War participants, like nurses and Black soldiers. 

Each student was assigned one person, then had to do primary research, going through census records, military documents and old newspapers to tell their story. It’s a lot different than memorizing names and dates, the way history used to be taught, but that’s the way they do it at Glebe, where history is the largest department. 

Glebe students don’t study history, they do history,” insists McIntyre, who’s been at the school since 2011. “We’re asking them to think about the world, not just remember things.” 

Her three Grade 10 classes – two French immersion and one English as a second language – first studied the No. 2 Construction Battalion, the only all-Black military unit, that worked behind the lines in Europe to build roads, bridges, railways and water systems.  

She was amazed how deep her students went. One spent 250 hours building a model of the ship that took the battalion to Europe because after great controversy, it carried the first non-segregated load of Canadian troops. “She wasn’t just building a ship,” says McIntyre, “she was building a piece that unified.” 

Another student went through 2,000 pages of PDFs to find the alleged crime for which his soldier was court-martialled. “He genuinely cared. ‘It’s not any soldier, it’s my soldier’.” 

The next year, the focus was on 2,800 nursing sisters who cared for wounded soldiers in Canada, England, France, Belgium and Russia. At least 58 died during the war, including 14 killed when the Llandovery Castle hospital ship was sunk by a German U-boat. One girl told McIntyre that young women often didn’t relate to war stories mostly about men but “she thought this project allowed a lot of girls to see themselves in our history.” 

In the third year, students researched soldiers who had medals housed at the Canadian War Museum, using primary documents and interviews with relatives to produce biographies of their subject. 

McIntyre grew up in Ottawa and says she fell “in love with history at a young age” as she listened to her father tell old stories, and she credits other mentors along the way – her Grade 8 teacher Jamie Waite, her Colonel By history teacher David Parsons, uOttawa history prof Sharon Cook (mother of historian Tim Cook) and the high-school principal who later became her boss at Glebe, France Thibault – “She’s my North Star.” 

She also thanks Blake Seward and Mason Cook, former teachers and now entrepreneurs. They developed Project True North for the entire school board; McIntyre was chosen to lead the pilot project. 

Its success at Glebe lead to another project, Walking Them Home, in partnership with Lisgar Collegiate.  Students pieced together the lives of soldiers who died in the Second World War and, with permission of current householders, put signs in front of the homes where they once lived. Many of you have seen them. There were 35 signs in 2023; that grew to 90 last year. 

“When you focus on individuals, history is a lot more tangible,” says McIntyre. “You think that this soldier, who walked to school the same way I do, did that. We’re teaching world history through a local lens.” 

McIntyre’s prize included $2,500 for her and $1,000 for Glebe. Most of the personal prize is paying tuition for her husband who’s returned to school to become a teacher. The Glebe money is going toward digitizing school archives that go back to 1923, providing accessible research material that might be used for another history project. 

 

Roger Smith, a retired journalist and copy editor of the Glebe Report, wrote this story with contributions from local author Ian McKercher, a former English teacher at Glebe Collegiate. 

 

Share this