School Curricula and How it is Developed
According to the Levin article, school curricula are primarily developed by the provincial government in consultation with different groups. Often teachers make up the majority, with experts in each area, usually from post-secondary institutions. This group would look at the existing curriculum to find what is working and what is not working. They then suggest changes and try to agree on what should be recommended in the new curriculum. This process can take many years to implement. The process of creating curricula involves two levels of objectives; first, very general goals, and then specific learning goals. The debate comes over what content should be in each subject and each grade level. A new perspective on curriculum development is how much power governments can have over the curriculum. For example, the article states that “a powerful cabinet member or political advisor may be able to insist that a particular element be added to or dropped from a proposed curriculum.” This information concerns me because crucial issues could be omitted from the curriculum based on government officials’ decisions. Courses such as Sex Education could be omitted because of personal beliefs.
One thing that surprised me that I had never thought about before was the input from experts and its impact on the curriculum. As the article points out, “the product will be something that can be used effectively
only by people with high levels of expertise, but the reality of almost all schools everywhere is that most teachers of a subject, especially in elementary schools, will have only a limited background in that subject.” I had never thought about this too much, and considering once you have a teaching degree, you can teach anything in schools, many teachers may not have the skills to teach such challenging concepts in the curriculum. During my schooling, a physical education teacher was teaching art, and this curriculum may have been more difficult for him because of expert advice in the curriculum.
In the Treaty Education document, I noticed that very few people consulted in the document were teachers. This is a stark difference from the Levin article that said most of the members advising curriculum are teachers. This could create problems of teachers not knowing how to implement Treaty Education into the classroom and feeling underrepresented in the development process. I also think that the public, especially in rural Saskatchewan, would have been opposed to this being created and pressured the government not to make this document. Other tensions I imagine come from Indigenous groups and the government about what the government wants to omit in the document, and how their official wording may change meanings.
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Hi Brooke,
Great job answering all of the questions! I like what you had to say about Treaty Education. I wrote an essay last year about Indigenous vs Western Knowledge and I was astonished about how little I knew about Indigenous knowledge. Yes there was a sudden change in Treaty education in my elementary school and this may have been because of the implementation of the document but it might have also been because my teacher was Indigenous and our intern was Metis so this was something they wanted to teach. Either way, we learnt a lot about Treaty education from then on out. One thing we never did learn though was Indgienous knowledge. So when I wrote my essay last year I learnt a lot about how to teach it and how to talk to Elder about how to learn more. Many teachers are scared to teach Treaty education because they do not know how. One of the best things I learnt was to talk to an Elder. How would you go about teaching Treaty Education in a rural school where either most or none of the students are Indigenous?
I also remember having a sudden shift to Treaty Education in elementary school, and I remember it being something we read did once and then forgot about it. I would make sure this does not happen in my classroom. I would start by introducing Indigenous literature into my classroom and classroom library and have conversations about how Treaties still impact us today. I would also like to bring up current events, such as water problems on reserves. We live so close to reserve communities that do not have access to clean water, yet I did not learn about this until my Indigenous 100 class in my first year of university! In high school we read Halfbreed by Maria Campbell and it was a great novel that offered a perspective we had not read before. I would like to teach this novel to my future students.