The Death of the Good Canadian: Teachers, National Identities, and the Social Studies Curriculum (Counterpoints)

This book documents the failed attempt of successive social studies curriculum to create a sustainable mythic structure of Canadian identity, and it situates teachers in the uneasy space between the modernist concepts of national identity prescribed in the curriculum and the lived world of the classrooms they experience daily. In The Death of the Good Canadian, George H. Richardson endeavors to represent the ambivalence of curriculum «delivery» in an era when there is frequently a striking dissonance between the rigid boundaries that the modernist curriculum creates between «national self» and «other,» and the more hybrid and problematic sense of national identity formation as an ongoing process of the articulation of cultural difference, which is suggested by the plural classrooms of the twenty-first century.