Alberta elementary schools will have to teach a new curriculum in science, immersion French language arts and Francophone language arts in kindergarten through grade 3 next year, the education secretary says.
The new material complements the new core English language maths and arts curriculum launched this school year, which will be extended to grades 4-6 this fall.
“We want our students to benefit from the absolute best curriculum possible,” LaGrange told reporters at a news conference Friday in the Legislature.
In addition to the new K-6 Physical Education and Wellness curriculum, which became mandatory in all elementary schools in the fall of 2022, some students and teachers will be exploring new programs in four or five subjects this fall.
The changes in French language arts only affect students enrolled in French immersion programs and those attending Francophone schools. These new curricula will also become mandatory for students in grades 4 to 6 from autumn 2024, the minister said.
The final versions are now available on the government website.
Officials say a new French language program for Anglophones will come later.
The minister said there was still no timeline for the government to release revised social studies or visual arts curricula, leading to a significant backlash when the drafts were released in 2021.
There is also no timeline for when the new curriculum will extend to junior or senior high grades.
The news prompted the Alberta Teachers’ Association to state that the introduction of the curriculum had been so bumpy that the government should pause the introduction of new subjects or grades.
“Everything everywhere at once may be an Oscar-winning concept for a film, but it’s a lousy way to implement a curriculum,” association president Jason Schilling said at a press conference.
LaGrange says there’s no point using a science curriculum that was written in the 1990s, before most people carried cell phones or had access to the internet.
The new classes will be compulsory for around 240,000 students next fall.
The province says 942 teachers are testing French and science curricula this year with 22,000 students in 240 schools in 47 jurisdictions, including public, Catholic, Francophone and private, charter and international schools.
These teachers provided feedback to refine the drafts released in May 2022. Technical documents from the Ministry of Education say changes to the science curriculum include the addition of more content related to agriculture and dinosaurs.
The bumpy road to the new curriculum
On Friday, LaGrange said the feedback from science and French pilots had been positive. She said school departments had not raised any concerns about adapting to the other new curriculum.
Schilling said the teachers disagreed: “It didn’t go well.”
Although the province has allocated about $100 million to schools to implement curriculum this year and next, Schilling said teachers are struggling to find replacements so they can make time for professional development or collaborate with peers.
Finding resources to meet the new expectations was also a challenge. He said some teachers paid for textbooks or programs out of their own pockets. Some math teachers say government-recommended resources aren’t working and are now looking at alternatives.
The association on Friday released the results of an internal online poll of nearly 1,000 of its members, in which the majority said they did not have the resources or training needed to roll out the new curriculum in fall 2022.
Alberta Teachers’ Association membership survey on curriculum implementation
Schilling accused the province of hate speech because a state election was scheduled for May 29th.
The new math expectations have been particularly frustrating because children lack the background knowledge to understand concepts that have been pushed to earlier grades, Schilling said.
Among those children are Adysson Yon, 12, and her brother Jaxson, 10, from Calgary. Her parents said they received a perfunctory note at the end of their final school year that grades 4 through 6 would be taking part in the optional pilot of the new math curriculum.
For the first time since they started school, the children came home saying they were having trouble understanding the concepts presented in math class.
“We heard, ‘I’m not smart enough. I don’t get it because I’m not smart,'” said Robyn Yon.
The Yons began talking to other parents whose children were also falling behind.
Jaxson will have new syllabuses in four subjects next year while his sister moves to junior high where she will return to the current syllabus.
The Yons say the rollout appears rushed and ill-planned.
“When you introduce a new curriculum, how do you do it in the best interest of the students?” said Robin. “None of that was raised or discussed.”
Teachers have also said the new curriculum tries to cram too much content into one year. Officials said on Friday they had slimmed down the content in both French and science from the last draft.
Francophone boards say the curriculum has improved
Francophone school authorities were also concerned about a lack of Franco-Albertan culture and history contained in earlier drafts.
Tanya Saumure, president of the Fédération des conseils scolaires francophones de l’Alberta, which represents the four francophone school boards, says the final version is better.
The panels are struggling with a lack of resources in French, but she hopes a government grant will allow them to quickly find or produce the right materials for September.
The new K-6 science curriculum introduces the concepts of indigenous peoples’ connections to nature and the use of natural materials in kindergarten. Indigenous critics have said that the inclusion of their language and culture in previous designs was symbolic and inappropriate.
The curriculum also prepares preschoolers for programming by teaching them the importance of a sequence of instructions. In the 2nd grade they are taught “debugging”.
While earlier grades relate to the environment and human impact on nature, grades 5 and 6 have units on climate change.
