We know the world is changing, and that education must change with it to prepare students for a future that none of us can predict.” This was Dave Hancock speaking in 2010. As Alberta’s minister of education at the time, he was kicking off another major review of the province’s K–12 education system, which included a curriculum redevelopment process that, remarkably, continues to this day, 14 years later.
What is curriculum and how does it prepare students for an unknowable future? The Alberta government defines curriculum as “values, learning foundations and outcomes for Kindergarten to Grade 12 education.” In the past the process of writing and revising curriculum was generally straightforward, the work done by public servants in consultation with curricular and subject experts. That process hasn’t changed. But today curriculum has become hugely contentious—particularly social studies. Everything gets argued about in public, from who should be consulted on the curriculum, to what schools should teach, to the emphasis given to various material, to the sequence it’s taught in, to which grades to teach different ideas at, and then, finally—no small consideration—what students are asked to do with the material they’re given.
Under Hancock, the goal of revising curriculum was to present “a vision for education to 2030.” Those days of optimism would sour. Drafts of the new curriculum were criticized for emphasizing job skills over critical thinking. In March 2014 the Edmonton Journal broke news that an advisory panel for the new K–3 curriculum would include Syncrude, Suncor and Cenovus. NDP MLA Deron Bilous compared this to Scholastic’s failed 2011 effort in the US to take money from coal lobbyists and publish pro-coal education material. The news only reinforced public skepticism. Alberta’s curriculum process was tainted.
When an NDP government came to power, its goal was similar to Hancock’s. “The world is changing,” said then-minister of education David Eggen, restarting the curriculum process in 2016. “We know that the 21st century career involves using critical thinking skills… to process information, to access it and make evaluations on those higher levels.” Eggen consulted with eight subject-area working groups of about 400 people. The opposition UCP, however, decried the government’s eventual draft curriculum for, among other things, its “political correctness” and “absence” of military history. Then-leader Jason Kenney said if he became premier he’d “put that curriculum through the shredder and go right back to the drawing board.”
In the past the process was generally straightforward. But today curriculum has become hugely contentious.
Alberta’s leadership soon changed again, and the curriculum process restarted again, then slowed to a crawl, bogged down in controversy and disillusionment. The working groups were abandoned. New consultants were brought in. In March 2021 Kenney unveiled a new curriculum for all K–6 subjects. His draft was widely criticized both for its content and the way it was created. The revised social studies curriculum, in particular, was pilloried. Large chunks of it appeared to have been plagiarized. The Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations called it a “Eurocentric, American-focused, Christian-dominant narrative” that “perpetuates rather than addresses systemic racism.” Almost every school board in the province refused to pilot any of the new curriculum. Once more we were back to the drawing board.
In April 2022 Alberta Education released revised K–6 curriculum for math, English language arts and literature, and physical education and wellness. In March 2023 the ministry followed up with revised curriculum for science and French. Some boards announced they were prepared to let their schools pilot these curricula over the 2023–2024 school year on a voluntary basis. But social studies remained under wraps, a work in progress being assembled by civil servants under the watch of UCP education minister Adriana LaGrange and, from June 2023 onward, Demetrios Nicolaides.
In the fall of that year Alberta Education set up three groups—curriculum development specialists (“the specialists”), curriculum content contributors (“content contributors”) and teacher curriculum consultation (“teachers”)—to “inform” the continued development of social studies. The specialists were academics with expertise in pedagogy and curriculum, including Kathryn Crawford, Ambrose University; Meyranie Giroux, Conseil Scolaire Centre-Nord; J-C Couture, University of Alberta; Pierre Rousseau, Campus St-Jean (U of A); Craig Harding, Mount Royal University; Amy von Heyking, University of Lethbridge; Yvonne Poitras Pratt, University of Calgary; and David Scott, U of C.
The content contributors worked in political science departments at either the University of Calgary or the University of Alberta, with the exception of Michel Kelly-Gagnon, a lawyer and former president and CEO of the Montreal Economic Institute. The final group was composed of 27 current or retired K–12 teachers. All groups were told the government’s goal was to get a draft ready in time for piloting in the fall of 2024.
What each group did that fall isn’t easy to discern. Terms of reference obtained through a freedom of information request showed the roles and responsibilities for each group were almost identical. All participants were asked to contribute social studies subject matter knowledge according to their particular expertise, review the draft curriculum and provide feedback, and engage in online and in-person “working sessions.” All group members were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. The teachers were given one additional requirement: “Be curriculum champions throughout the curriculum development and implementation process.”
Only after their engagement with Alberta Education was over and a revised draft had been made public in March 2024 did members of the specialists group speak out. In an open letter they said they were “deeply disappointed” to discover that their input had been ignored. They deplored the curriculum’s “failure to define key social studies concepts… such as critical thinking, citizenship, historical thinking, inquiry and multiple perspectives,” the limited opportunities it offered for critical thinking, and the tokenistic gesture made toward Alberta’s diversity generally and First Nations, Métis and Inuit worldviews and perspectives specifically. “An absence of clear purpose has created a random sequence of learning moments rather than a coherent animating vision,” they wrote. “Instead of a program that inspires hope and possibility for engaging the pressing issues of our world, this draft is an exhausting and unwieldy roadmap to a better version of yesterday.” In conclusion, they said the government must start over.
One of the authors of that letter was Couture, an adjunct lecturer of education at U of A. “The current programs bolted together just don’t work,” he said in March 2024. “The idea under Minister Hancock in 2010 was ‘less is more.’ We need to cut down on the content [i.e., facts] and focus on skills and competencies. That never happened.”
In an interview that March with CBC, Couture said it looked like the government had made token attempts to integrate pedagogical and curricular experts’ feedback. “Unfortunately, it’s a case of lifting key words and phrases and inserting them into what the government was planning to do anyway, which is still a very knowledge-based curriculum,” he said. “Knowledge-based” might sound good—but the approach, he said, is overwhelming. “How can you claim that you’re going to have time to do critical thinking and inquiry… when I am, as a Grade 6 student, being trotted through 100 knowledge items on the history of democracy, going back to ancient Greece and Rome and the evolution of the Magna Carta?
Carla Peck, a professor of social studies education at the U of A, says she spoke with Jennifer Cassidy, assistant deputy minister for Alberta Education, in October 2023, and was told that the draft curriculum was already complete. Nevertheless, that fall the ministry conducted a general survey, eventually completed by “more than 12,800” Albertans, about what people would like to see in the new social studies. The fact that a draft was complete wasn’t explained. From September 2023 to January 2024, ministry officials met with teachers, multicultural organizations, Indigenous and francophone communities and other education specialists for a series of curriculum consultations to supplement feedback from the three working groups. Yet very few of these people were actually allowed to see the draft. It’s unclear what their advice was, or whether it was taken into consideration.
At a glance, draft curricula from different Alberta governments generally have a common look. All subjects, from social studies to math to physical education, are presented in the form of a table. In the NDP government’s 2018 draft, for example, the table was organized into guiding questions, learning outcomes, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and competencies. An “essential understanding” spans Kindergarten to Grade 4. The UCP government’s drafts are similarly organized, with slightly different categories: organizing ideas, guiding questions, learning outcomes, knowledge, understanding, and skills and procedures.
The criticism of Alberta’s recent social studies drafts generally starts with their framework. Lindsay Gibson is an assistant professor of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Back in 2017 he was an assistant professor in social studies education at the U of A and part of Alberta Education’s curriculum-writing group—until he resigned in November 2018. His resignation letter to minister Eggen was critical of many aspects of the draft curriculum, but particularly the framework, also described as the “architecture.” “Alberta Education has been unwilling to make even the slightest changes to the framework even when presented with evidence that it isn’t helping teachers write learning outcomes that are clear and purposeful,” he wrote.
Gibson argued that the 2018 framework failed to present a “coherent understanding of history and geography,” adding that Alberta’s existing K–12 curriculum was already ranked last among all provinces and territories by Historica Canada for how well it addressed Canadian history and citizenship. (Historica is a national charity best known for its “Heritage Minute” ads and for publishing The Canadian Encyclopedia.) Eggen’s revised curriculum was unlikely to fare better, Gibson wrote, describing it as “far too present-focused.”
His criticisms echo how Alberta’s specialist group in spring 2024 decried the UCP government draft’s lack of an overarching vision. In their case, however, they saw in the framework too much emphasis on the past and too little on the present—a focus “largely on learning outcomes that do not ask students to think critically about events and issues in our world today.”
The main difference between NDP-era and UCP-era curricula is perhaps hinted at by these overarching frameworks. Eggen’s draft, for example, contains this high-level “essential understanding”: “Active citizenship contributes to the vitality of communities that can promote pluralism among diverse people in a democratic society.” In the UCP government’s 2021 draft, “essential understandings” had become “organizing ideas,” and many of them are longer, for example: “Understanding the history of our province, nation and world and developing cultural literacy allow us to appreciate the varied richness of our shared human inheritance of original writings, artifacts, stories, beliefs, ideas and great cultural and artistic achievements from different times and places. Lessons of the past and knowledge of diverse experiences help us overcome ignorance and prejudice and recognize our common humanity and dignity.”
Peck shared the specialist group’s concern about the UCP draft’s overarching emphasis on lessons of the past. “In this curriculum, ‘knowledge’ just means facts,” she wrote on her blog. “In history education… powerful knowledge means more than the mere accumulation of facts and dates… It also includes helping students learn how knowledge is created.”
Other criticisms of the curriculum rewriting process have included how one subject integrates with others taught at the same grade level. Peck, for example, argued that the April 2024 Social Studies draft won’t inform other subjects. “The argument behind having a common architecture [across curricula] is that it’s supposed to make it easier for teachers to do cross-curricular planning,” she said in an interview. “When they’re looking at the science [curriculum] and they’re looking at social studies, they can see connections.” But the authors of this draft “haven’t actually done a comparative analysis of what students are being asked to learn in math in Grade 3 and social studies in Grade 3 to make sure that the concepts are actually aligned.”
As an example, Peck referred to the learning outcome in the draft that requires Grade 2 students to “explore ways trade and taxation support local communities.” Specifically, the “knowledge” section expects students to learn that governments collect money through taxes, which is used to provide services such as police, healthcare and education. Peck argued this isn’t an age-appropriate expectation. “In math, they haven’t yet developed the number sense to make sense of these things.” She added, on her blog, “The concept of ‘government’ is too abstract for kids of this age.”
John, an assistant principal and teacher at a southside Edmonton K–6 school (who asked that I not use his real name), agreed. “To talk about the specifics of taxation policies and what the municipal government is responsible for—that’s stuff I’m having problems with [in] Grade 6 every year,” he said. When asked if the revised curriculum has an overall coherence, John laughed. “I think [we] used to have that in the old curriculum.” He says topics have become “mixed up” and “moved all over the place.”
This latter criticism seems borne out by comparing UCP drafts. The 2021 curriculum, for example, asked that Grade 2 students learn about the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who went from Italy to China, visited the court of Kublai Khan and travelled along the famous Silk Road, a vast trading route. This was listed in the “knowledge” column of the table, underneath a heading called “encounters with other worlds.” Over in the corresponding “skills and procedures” column, students were asked to “retell the story of Marco Polo’s journey to the Orient and back, and what he discovered in the Far East.” But in the 2024 draft the story of Marco Polo had disappeared entirely. This invites the question: If Marco Polo’s voyage had been considered essential content just a couple of years before, why was it now omitted? It gives credence to the charge that this curriculum lacks a guiding rationale.
Peck also worried the revised curriculum left little room for student inquiry. The government “has clearly [indicated] whatever answer they think is the most appropriate for the guiding question and the learning outcome,” she said. Because of that, the curriculum “is very prescriptive.”
In 2021 Jason Kenney’s new curriculum was widely criticized both for its content and the way it was created.
Much criticism of the UCP’s March 2024 draft curriculum and earlier drafts alike involves their treatment of First Peoples. The 2018 version unveiled by Eggen, for example, with mandatory lessons on residential school history, colonialism and treaties, was dismissed for its “political correctness”; the 2021 draft issued by Kenney was deemed dismissive of Indigenous people and was at worst “racist.” Dwayne Donald, the Canada Research Chair in Reimagining Teacher Education with Indigenous Wisdom Traditions, said the process has been frustrating. “The way in which we argue about what should be in there is a distraction that serves the needs of the government,” he says. “We need to create a vision… about how to understand ourselves in relation to each other, how to understand ourselves in relation to the life all around us.”
Donald believes the latest curriculum continues to lack a unifying vision for how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people could live together. “We have treaties, and they’re sacred covenants, and they have been a massive curricular omission in our country.”
On April 26, 2024, minister Nicolaides held a press conference to announce that the curriculum had been revised yet again. The previous draft had been criticized for its reliance on lower-order verbs in the skills and procedures category, which Peck had argued encouraged less cognitive complexity and demanded less intellect and creativity of students. Among those verbs, many fell into the category of “remember.” Peck had found numerous verbs in the March 2024 draft that were stand-ins for “remember,” in particular “describe” and “identify.” But this revised draft had higher-order verbs including “evaluate” and “create,” indicating skills of greater complexity. In a briefing following the press conference, Alberta Education said that “verbs used in skills and procedures have been strengthened to encourage critical thinking.”
The revised curriculum had other tweaks. The changes reduced what some critics had seen as a too-heavy load and too much focus on memorization, and rearranged content to be more age-appropriate. Taxation, previously introduced at Grade 2 in the draft released just one month previously, would now be discussed for the first time in Grade 5.
Among the notable changes revealed in April were additional First Nations, Métis, Inuit and francophone histories, contributions and perspectives. But while the curriculum’s focus on First Nations, Inuit and Métis had expanded from the 2021 draft to the 2024 version, omissions remained. Nowhere in the new curriculum are K–6 students expected to learn about residential schools. This is despite the Truth and Reconciliation’s Call to Action 62(i), which calls on provinces to “make age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade 12 students.” Nicolaides said that some apparent omissions “relate to content in junior high and high school. So obviously, we haven’t developed that content. [But] I’m sure we’ll be able to address that.”
The Alberta Teachers’ Association had panned the March 2024 draft and wasn’t reassured by the April revision. In May the ATA called for the curriculum process to be paused. “We welcomed the opportunity to provide feedback… unfortunately, teachers’ recommendations aren’t reflected in this most recent draft,” said ATA president Jason Schilling. “Rather than proceeding to pilot a curriculum that we know is flawed, let’s take the time needed to get it right.” Among teachers’ unresolved concerns, he said, are a still-unrealistic number of concepts, some of which remain “developmentally inappropriate and conceptually inaccurate,” as well as a persistent failure to engage higher-order thinking skills.
Paul (not his real name), an elementary school teacher in Grande Prairie, is concerned that the latest revision still provides no guidance on how social studies classes should approach current events. This is quite unlike the 2005 program of study, which states that “the infusion of current events, issues and concerns is an essential component of social studies.” That version describes how to use current events as a teaching tool.
Paul speculates that the omission of current events from the 2024 draft is a result of a new code of professional conduct for teachers that took effect in January 2023 (and is now enforced by the Alberta Teaching Profession Commission, not the ATA). Under this code, a teacher may not teach in a manner that exploits their “ideological advantage.” By this, the government says, it means “perspectives taught to students in a biased manner with the intent to take advantage of a student’s uninformed or under-informed opinions.” Ministry staff say a similar provision is in effect in BC, and that the intent is “to make sure teachers and teacher leaders do not exploit students for material, ideological or other advantage while in a position of authority.” In Paul’s view, with the new code in effect and no guidance from the curriculum, “teachers could be nervous” about using news stories as opportunities to make learning more relevant.
A lack of clear purpose in 2024 “created a random sequence of learning moments rather than a coherent animating vision.”
Minister Nicolaides seemed to believe the 14-year process of revising Alberta’s social studies curriculum was finally making some headway. “I think our approach has been to take politics out of the classroom and give students a deep understanding of history, to understand an evolving and complex world, and give students the skills that they need to be successful,” he said at the April press conference.
He may have been too optimistic. A week later, at a May 3 debate in Edmonton between the (then) five candidates seeking the NDP leadership, all said the UCP government had irrevocably politicized the development and content of social studies. All five pledged to start the process over if they become premier. “We’ve got to ditch this curriculum,” said Naheed Nenshi. “You have my pledge that I will put experts back at the front of that process,” said Sarah Hoffman. The way we should rewrite curriculum, said Gil McGowan, “is by handing it over to professionals, including teachers, doing it on a regular cycle instead of all at once, providing a proper amount of time for piloting and development.”
Alberta’s new social studies curriculum will be piloted in nine school boards in September 2024. While it’s possible that more tweaks will have been made, the April 2024 version is likely the one that will be rolled out provincewide in fall 2025. That is, until it’s scrapped, and we start the process all over again.
Laurence Miall is the author of Blind Spot (NeWest Press, 2014) and writes on politics and culture for various publications.
____________________________________________
