Lévesque and Croteau's title is a puzzle. It suggests, perhaps, that the authors will lead us to a new understanding of the purposes of history education, “beyond historical consciousness.” In fact, the authors clarify in the text, “From our perspective, the justification for history in schools . . . is in terms of its contribution to historical consciousness” (p. 21). Indeed, the volume is an ambitious, fascinating but flawed investigation of the historical consciousness of students in French Canadian schools in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. In Quebec, the French language students are part of a dominant majority (which has bargained, sometimes uneasily, with the English beyond its borders). In Ontario, the French language students are a linguistic minority not only in Canada but also in their own province. How does that key difference play out in their understandings of historical struggle, collective belonging, and directions for the future?

The authors use the writing of 635 high school students who have completed their studies of Canadian history to analyze similarities and differences across regions, language, gender, and “collective identity.” They generated the students’ writing with this prompt: “Please tell us the history of French Canadians in this country as you know it,” in two pages, in one hour, deliberately leaving “country” open-ended for student interpretation. Students were not allowed to consult books or the internet during the exercise. The students’ responses were written and analyzed in French and then translated into English. Their writings are a priori assumed to be “narratives” (though the authors find a small minority failing to qualify); these narratives are assumed to be expressions of the students’ historical consciousness. An additional page of demographic information, linguistic practices, and attitudes was collected from each student.

The analysis of student writing consists of two strategies. The first is identifying and counting key words that come up frequently across different segments of the sample, for example, we, New France, and Canada. The second is a synoptic “narrative orientation” that characterizes the whole of each student's writing, for example, Francophone adversity, Francophone defeat, Canadian nation-building (italics in the text.) There are also categories for those pieces that “fail to convey any coherent interpretive vision” (pp. 27–28). Developing valid categories, reliably assigning student work, and then interpreting the results are core challenges for this kind of research project.

Three chapters provide the bulk of the empirical findings, comparing Ontario and Quebec, territories within the two provinces, differences by gender and language, and differences according to strength of “collective identification” (students self-identified on a seven-point scale, as Canadian, Québécois, Franco-Ontarian, etc.) The findings are presented through difficult-to-read frequency tables, pie graphs, and bar graphs, interspersed with translated excerpts from the student writing to give the reader a feeling for the narratives.

The authors find some broad differences between the two subsamples: Quebec students tend to locate their narratives largely within their province, whereas the Ontario students use all of Canada as the frame. The former tend to see a golden age of French colonial history prior to the British conquest in 1759–60 and focus their narratives on that period, whereas the Ontario students focus on twentieth-century Francophone struggles, not only in Ontario but across Canada. The strongest nation-building narratives come from the students who identify most strongly with their communities, whether Quebec for the Québécois, or Canada for the Ontario students. The overarching commonality that runs strong through all of the categories is some sense of Francophone struggle and survival over time, though it may be expressed through different events and orientations.

The researchers also conclude that “narrative competence” might be improved if students were taught the “constructed nature of historical narratives” and were steered beyond the oversimplifications of “mythistory” (p. 162). A counter to the tendency toward “mythistory,” they further suggest, could be school history that embraces complexity and eschews “any particular national identification through stories of collective memory” (p. 164).

To be successful, qualitative empirical research like this should be grounded in a well-articulated theory and design and based on an appropriately chosen sample. It should provide a clear explanation of the data analysis, and the conclusions should be grounded in the research that was completed. Beyond History for Historical Consciousness raises some difficult questions in respect to each of these demands.

The first two chapters, “Introduction” and “Narrative Orientations,” present the theory and design. The term historical consciousness is central. Historical consciousness “places the emphasis on the mental reconstruction and appropriation of historical information as brought into the mental household of an individual” (p. 13). They contrast historical consciousness with memory, which is “a more or less organized ‘stock of information’ as well as representations of the past that involve both the individual and the group” (p. 12). These explanations do little to clarify the difference between two of the three key terms.

The third key term, narrative, is more central to the interpretation of the data, and so its treatment is particularly consequential. The authors propose “inclusion of ‘narrative’ as a metahistorical historical concept—and ultimately a competence—that shapes how we make sense of the past and do history” (p. 30). But they do not really explain what the concept is, other than “story,” nor do they outline requisite components or characteristics. In other words, when is a piece of writing not a narrative? What makes some historical narratives more plausible than others?

The triad of historical consciousness, memory, and narrative set up the study of French Canadian students’ ideas about the past. Has the relatively simple memory of French Canada—conquest by the British and survival through ongoing struggle, handed down through generations of Francophone Canadians—been transformed into a more complex historical consciousness, as expressed through student narratives in response to the research prompt: “tell us the history of French Canadians”? And do differences exist in the responses of various subgroups of the sample?

The sample of 635 was made up of students at thirteen French language schools in Quebec and Ontario. Students at these schools whose mother tongue was not French were not excluded from the study. In fact, these make up 14 percent of the Quebec sample and 51 percent of the Ontario sample. So, when they were asked about the history of French Canadians, only a portion were writing through the lens of “their own” collective memory. The authors consequently present a conundrum when they invoke the work of James Wertsch on collective memory and imagine that students were writing “a personal narrative” of their collective past (p. 24). We need to be clear that for 14 percent of the Quebec sample and 51 percent of the Ontario sample, a history of French Canadians is not their collective past.

The authors claim to be able to reliably categorize the orientations of the writings (without providing inter-rater reliability ratings). Though they call all of them “narratives,” some fall short. Nineteen percent of Quebec students and 13 percent of Ontario students wrote Francophone presence narratives, which the authors call “descriptive,” or “without ideological orientation or particular narrative position with regard to the past and future of the community” (p. 45). Other orientations—life experience, Indigenous perspective, descriptive/presentist, and undetermined—representing no more than 3 percent each, also fall short: “These stories often reflect students’ indifference, their lack of interest, or even their historical ignorance” (p.52).

Troubling, then, is the absence of any explicit analytical tool that could have helped the three raters establish how well the students did. The authors almost acknowledge such a deficit by including a penultimate chapter, largely disconnected from the data, entitled “Narrative Competence.” Here, in discussing my own work in this area, they misinterpret my attempt to provide a framework for “narrative plausibility” (pp. 141–145) and introduce a tangled set of discussions around narrator, voice, and focalization, among others, but do little to streamline or operationalize these to make them useful in analyzing the relatively simple student narratives generated in the study (pp. 146–152).

In conclusion, the authors take it as evidence of a shared historical culture (between Quebec and Ontario French Canada) that the “French Canadian experience framework is dominant for both groups (emphasis in original)” (p. 156). But given that the research prompt was “tell us the history of French Canadians in this country,” the fact that most students wrote about the experience of French Canadians does not make a case for a shared historical culture. It points rather to a shared research exercise.

The work closes with the question, central for history educators everywhere: “How can schools foster the construction of a more reflective historical consciousness and the development of more complex narratives, founded in evidence and open to multiple voices and perspectives?” (pp. 159–160). This ambitious empirical study could have addressed it more directly.