Continuity and Change
Download Worksheets
To download these worksheets in PDF or Microsoft Word, right-click on the links below and select “save as.”
1. Continuity and Change Questions: PDF | Word
2. Continuity and Change Chart: PDF | Word
3. Continuity and Change Chart Flowchart: PDF
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Identifying Continuity and Change
Students sometimes misunderstand history as a list of events. But history is actually a complex mix of things that remain the same (continuity), and things that change. We reach a fundamentally different sense of the past once we start to consider the concepts of continuity and change.
There were lots of things going on at any one time in the past. Some changed rapidly while others remained relatively continuous. The decade of the 1910s in Canada, for instance, saw profound change in many aspects of life, but not much change in its forms of government. If students say, “nothing happened in 1911” they are thinking of the past as a list of events.
One of the keys to continuity and change is looking for change where common sense suggests that there has been none and looking for continuities where we assumed that there was change. Judgments of continuity and change can be made on the basis of comparisons between some point in the past and the present, or between two points in the past, such as before and after Confederation in Canada.
We evaluate change over time using the ideas of progress and decline.
The concepts of continuity and change involve a number of dimensions. For example, change does not always occur at the same pace. And change does not always represent progress, or affect all people the same way. These dimensions are explored in the worksheets below.
