9 Digital History in the Classroom: Mapping Montreal Migration Stories
9 Digital History in the Classroom: Mapping Montreal Migration Stories
Daniel Ross
In this post, I’d like to provide a short overview of a recent experience integrating digital history into my teaching. This fall, I taught the course HIS4567, Histoire de l’immigration et des communautés ethnoculturelles au Québec, for the first time at the Université du Québec à Montréal. HIS4567 is a second-year undergraduate history course with a group small enough–30ish students–that we could mix lectures and discussions. It was a great learning experience, for me (and I hope for the students too), and also a chance to experiment.
One of the first things I did was think about grading and term work. As I designed the course, I was particularly interested in finding assignments that would engage students from a range of personal and disciplinary backgrounds–social work, political science, education, history, certificate programs in intercultural relations. Many, I knew, might be unused to historical research & writing, or unfamiliar with the major themes in the field. At the same time, at UQÀM, we were lucky enough to be studying immigration history in the heart of a North American metropolis whose history has been defined by migrations — I thought that was worth exploiting in this class. All the more so considering there is very little in the way of public history around Montréal’s immigrant past, although that is changing with initiatives like the Museum of Jewish Montréal.
I settled on a digital history project with low barriers in terms of technological expertise (which I don’t have anyway), a collaborative ethic, and a product designed for public consumption. Over the course of the semester, the students and I created, with only a few hiccups, a collaborative digital map of Montréal migration history using the fabulous (and free!) HistoryPin platform. We called it “Montréal : ville de migrations”.
Over the last decade, a number of colleagues in the US and Canada have experimented with this kind of assignment in undergraduate classrooms. So by no means was I venturing into uncharted territory. The idea for the project came both from hearing their reflections on how best to go about these kind of digital history projects (thanks Gilberto Fernandes in particular!) and from my own playing around with HistoryPin in the past.
As part of prep for this project, the Museum of Jewish Montréal hosted my students for a walking tour of Jewish Plateau Mont-Royal (c.1900-1950), and an informal Q&A about their project. It was a chance to discuss the profound impacts migrations and migrant communities can have on the urban landscape, both through their day-to-day life patterns and the founding of institutions and businesses. We also saw firsthand how neighbourhood identities depend on presence and use, and how they evolve and change over time: in the twentieth century Plateau Mont-Royal has been shaped successively by rural Québec migration and by immigration from Britain,