Welcome

Carla L. Peck, PhD is Professor of Social Studies Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, Adjunct Professor in the Department of History, Classics & Religion, Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of New Brunswick, and Director of Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future, a SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant. She researches teachers’ and students’ understandings of democratic concepts, teachers’ and students’ historical understandings, and is particularly interested in the relationship between students’ ethnic identities and their understandings of history.

Carla has held several major research grants and has authored, co-authored, and/or co-edited numerous journal articles, book chapters, and books related to her research interests, including Education, Globalization and the Nation (PalgraveMacmillan, 2016), Teaching and Learning Difficult Histories in International Contexts: A Critical Sociocultural Approach (Routledge, 2018), and the Palgrave Handbook of Global Citizenship and Education (PalgraveMacmillan, 2019) and Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field (Berghahn Books, 2019). Her latest book, co-written with Dr. Alan Sears, Rescuing Reason: How History Education Can Help Save Democracy, will be published in 2026 by the University of Toronto Press.

Carla regularly works with teachers at the provincial, national, and international level and serves as a consultant on numerous boards and advisory groups for history and civic organizations. Strongly committed to social justice education, Carla has always sought ways to engage students of all ages in discussions about how to make the world a more equitable and just place to live. She views a solid grounding in history and historical inquiry as foundational to these discussions. Before Carla found her way to academia, she was an elementary school teacher in New Brunswick.