A curriculum is “an official statement of what students are expected to know and be able to do” according to the levin article. I had never thought too much about how a curriculum was established, all I knew was that it took a lot of people and a lot of work. The first step in creating a new curriculum is bringing groups of people and representatives together in order to decide and compose a draft of what has to be changed or revamped. This often takes a couple of years to decide what needs to be changed. Education governance involves national, local, and school participation.  The next step is for districts to decide what subjects they want to include in their schools as well as how they want to teach those subjects and how long they will have to teach. Once this is completed, the education stakeholder groups take it from there where they will begin to review the new curriculum and make any necessary changes. It surprises me how much of these decisions that are involved in making changes to the curriculum come down to government officials. These government officials are not teachers or students or anyone who may use the curriculum so why do they get so much say in what goes into it.

The Government is one major connection between the treaty article and the curriculum. Both the curriculum and treaty education have to go through the government, and are implemented by the government, as well as they have to be seen and approved by many people. Both treaty education  and the Saskatchewan curriculum include goals, outcomes, and indicators that are expected to be met as well as instructions that must be followed in order to meet these goals. I can imagine that tensions may arise because the treaty education is approved and being implemented by non-indigenous people. Indigenous have different values that most of the rest of Saskatchewan’s population, and it may cause tension when their specific values do not get included in their education.

Levin, B. (2008). Curriculum policy and the politics of what should be learned in schools. In F. Connelly, M. He & J. Phillion (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of curriculum and instruction (pp. 7 – 24). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. (2013). Treaty education outcomes and indicators. SK: Author.