As students and teachers get ready to return to school next month, two Calgary educators will be returning to the classroom after a summer learning lessons of their own. Nicholas Eng and Elizabeth Watts spent 10 days on an educational tour in France, visiting locations that shaped Canada’s history, like Vimy Ridge, Juno Beach and more. “Actually walking around at those former battlefields gives you a sense of… gratefulness… where you see the sacrifices that were made from previous generations. You get to see just how vast the battlefield really is,” said Eng, who teaches at Gobind Sarvar School. “It’s an experience that I can’t really put into words,” said Watts, who works at St. Stephen School. “It was very transformative and it was very emotional and it was incredible.” The tour was organized by the Juno Beach Centre in partnership with EF Educational Tours. It brought teachers to museums, cemeteries, memorials in historic locations such as Dieppe, the Vimy Ridge National Historic Site and more. Eng described the journey as a “pilgrimage of sorts” for Canadian history teachers. “Actually being there, there was a very profound sense of reflection and remembrance to honour those who gave their lives, or sacrificed in other ways during those two world wars,” he said. “Even when I was a teenager, when I was at Vimy Ridge for the first time in realizing, like, ‘I’m standing where people died.’ And it hits you… like a wave that comes over you and you think ‘this was real, this happened, it’s not just a page in a textbook anymore,’” Watts added. Both teachers said the tour moved them personally — a feeling they hope to bring to the classroom to help students better understand what took place. The stories of individual soldiers stood out to both, and they say having heard about the soldier’s journey helped put the conflict into perspective. “A lot of these boys were not much older than the kids that I teach in school,” Eng said. He said learning what life was like for an 18-year-old during WWI is more compelling than simply being given dates and names to memorize. One story that stood out for Watts was the story of a Canadian soldier in the aftermath of the Battle of Dieppe. She explained many Canadian soldiers were taken prisoner, and in that process one Canadian soldier’s brief moment of connection during imprisonment really stuck with her. “There was one particular soldier who remembered there was a French woman just crying, and she was so upset. She was so worried about him, and the soldier, he said, ‘don’t worry, we’ll be back.’ We left and eventually he was returned to Canada, but then he did come back. He came back on D-Day to liberate France,” Watts said. “It just makes you think, ‘what was that soldier thinking?’ He was a prisoner of war, he was probably terrified, had no idea what was going to happen to him. And here’s this French woman he’s never met, and she’s in tears, and he thinks of her first and he says ‘don’t worry,’” she continued. “That to me is quite beautiful.” While details about the larger battles and context surrounding the wars were also a big part of the trip, Eng and Watts both emphasize that as educators, the emotional and personal aspects is what they hope to impart to students the most. “We got to learn about what these battles were, how they affected the greater scope of the war, but more importantly, who were the people doing the fighting,” Eng said. “If you bring the humanity into these old situations that happen in history, I feel like people — children especially — can connect to them deeper and with a more meaningful way,” Watts said. Having visited the historic sites and hearing the stories, Watts adds she feels she has an even greater responsibility as an educator to ensure younger generations fully understand the weight of the conflict and what Canadians put on the line in the fight for their country. “I feel like now we are stewards of the past, stewards of Canadian history. And I feel now that it is almost like a duty to make sure that those lights, those little flickers of lights of the past, the memories of the men and the women who fought, that they don’t fade out, that they are carried forward into the future,” Watts said. The Juno Beach Centre was founded by veterans and volunteers in 2003 and is Canada’s only museum on the D-Day landing beaches in Normandy. Since 2005, the Summer Institute has hosted over 350 teachers.
