NEWS FILE PHOTO
Grade 10 students at Crescent Heights High School pitched their business ideas they've been working on throughout the semester to a panel of judges in April 2019. The province's curriculum advisory panel has submitted its recommendations to the Alberta government.
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel
Education Minister Adriana LaGrange released the curriculum advisory panel’s recommendations at a Wednesday morning news conference, touting an “exciting new milestone” she contrasted with the previous government’s purportedly “secretive, closed-door” review.
The panel, which was convened four months ago and has no active teachers on it, made a series of broad recommendations, for which the public can provide feedback until Feb. 24 on the ministry’s website before the recommendations are incorporated into a ministerial order.
“We will be more specific when we take the recommendations at a later date,” LaGrange said.
Medicine Hat Public School Division superintendent Mark Davidson told the News he doesn’t anticipate the UCP’s curriculum will be markedly different from the NDP’s, but said he finds it “interesting” and “unusual” that no teachers sat on the panel.
“We expect there will be a great deal of alignment between what the current government puts out and what had been prepared,” Davidson said, adding that he doesn’t find the lack of specifics surprising nor troubling, since it’s only a series of recommendations that have yet to be implemented.
Davidson added that despite the panel’s composition, “there were many teachers engaged in the process of developing the curriculum in the first place and still more teachers will be involved in the field testing process that follows.”
Panel member Glenn Feltham – president and CEO of the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology – also spoke at the minister’s announcement.
He said the former government’s draft K-4 curriculum – unveiled in late 2018 and shelved last summer – had some “great work” with “solid elements,” but “could be further strengthened.”
“This would include enhancing clarity and strengthening areas of content to support the teaching and learning of the new curriculum,” said Feltham.
Davidson says the panel’s recommendation “to bring the needs of Alberta’s employers into the curriculum development process” is not much of a departure from previous practices.
“Industry has been part of the conversation around what schools do, what the education system writ large does, for a very long time,” he said.
Davidson said he doesn’t regard this as a “repudiation” of an emphasis on the liberal arts and critical thought.
He said MHPSD administrators “will be eagerly watching” the panel’s recommendation that formative standardized testing begin in Grade 1.
“Our hope certainly is that those assessments are structured in a way so as not to be terribly onerous for very young students, and that they are constructed to provide teachers with data early in the year that allows them to form their programming to the needs of their students,” Davidson said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Another recommendation calls for a “balance of perspectives with respect to the importance of Alberta’s resource-rich economic base in relation to the impact on the economy, families, services and government.”
During the news conference, LaGrange emphasized she believes “climate change is real,” but must be taught in a “balanced” fashion.
She also vowed the concept of consent will be “taught as an essential part of an age-appropriate sexual health and wellness” program.
In a statement provided to the News, Medicine Hat Catholic Board of Education senior administrators say they are “optimistic about the future of education in Alberta.”
They added that they are in the process of “unpacking the results of the curriculum review, as well as the curriculum advisory report’s review.”
Barbara Silva, the Calgary-based spokesperson of public education advocacy group Support our Students, calls the entire curriculum re-write process a “colossal waste.”
“It’s been at the expense of Alberta students who are sitting in under-resourced classrooms, working with an outdated curriculum to have spent all of this time and money for recommendations that focus on Alberta’s resource-rich economy, standardized testing and really seeing children as end products,” she said. “Albertans should be absolutely outraged.”
Silva says the UCP is “creating an alternate purpose for education.”
“Education should be about developing a love of learning, being inquisitive, understanding the environment around us and relationships. Of course, it’s about numeracy and literacy, but it cannot be with the end goal of employment and supporting the economy in mind,” she said.
The 32-page report with its recommendations can be read at https://open.alberta.ca/publications/curriculum-advisory-panel-recommendations-on-direction-for-curriculum.
