Alberta’s Minister of Education will continue with the development of the new social studies curriculum

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After a UCP election campaign that saw little or no talk of K-12 education, Alberta Prime Minister Danielle Smith is directing attention back toward the province’s curriculum.

However, the province does not have a timeline for when new drafts of the most controversial primary school subjects may be published.

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In a mandate letter to education minister Demetrios Nicolaides released on Tuesday, Smith calls on him to work with “parents, teachers and stakeholders to continue to implement curriculum K through 12 and apply additional basic life and housekeeping skills as well as financial literacy training to the secondary school curriculum where appropriate.”

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Nicolaides told Postmedia that he did not see it as Smith trying to put its stamp on the curriculum, but a continuation of the work already ongoing.

“It’s about helping to make sure we set students up for success,” Nicolaides said.

After the first drafts of the K-6 curriculum were published in 2021, it was slammed for being age-inappropriate, lacking the proper perspectives and ways of First Nations, Mantantis and Inuit to know, and for being unrealistically contented-heavy and too focused on memorizing the facts. Since then, some have been renewed and topics like social studies have returned to the drawing board.

“There have been some significant changes in social studies over the past few years and I will continue to move forward in engaging with parents and teachers and other groups to continue to get their feedback,” Nicolaides said.

‘There are a lot of them out there that need to be unpacked’: they

Alberta Teachers Association president Jason Schilling told Postmedia on Tuesday that with few messages during the May election campaign on K-12 education from UCP, the mandate letter provides some useful suggestions on what to expect from Smith’s government.

However, he said questions and concerns remain.

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“There is a lot out there that needs to be unpacked,” he said, adding that he is encouraged by language promising cooperation. While the province is still working through the implementation of K-6 coursework, the mention of additions to high school teaching raises questions, Schilling said.

“We haven’t even had any initial discussions or any kind of thoughts or ideas about where they plan to go with the curriculum for high school,” he said, noting that teachers, along with LGBTQ+, francophone and Indigenous communities have previously been shut out of discussions shaping the curriculum.

However, long before Smith was elected, they were pushing to slow down the implementation of the new curriculum.

“Taking a slow approach to social studies for K-6, and Fine Arts, for that matter, is not necessarily a bad thing. However, the letter is lacking in terms of how they actually plan to do so,” Schilling said.

The mandate letter instructs Nicolaides to review the funding of the program unit (PUF), although when speaking with Postmedia, Nicolaides did not commit to restoring the PUF to the way it was before it was changed in 2020.

The UCP cut child funding roughly in half for many pre-school children in language therapy and some medical therapies, and imposed stricter age restrictions on when aid could be achieved, among other changes.

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“I think the government should always review programs and initiatives to explore their effectiveness and ensure that they are meeting their intended goals,” Nicolaides said.

In the February budget, UCP promised to hire 650 teachers and 1,375 educational assistants and other support workers.

NDP education critic Rakhi Pancholi said in a statement that the letter effectively removes Smith’s promise to hire educational workers and replaces it with vague language about “exploring incentives”.”

“Nothing in this mandate letter addresses this ongoing and challenging problem, which will only escalate as we continue to welcome new families to Alberta,” said Pancholi, who noted there are no guidelines to build schools in specific communities.

“The PUF review is the least the UCP can do. It was a heartless decision in the first place to sit it out and many of our younger students are still paying the price for it,” Pancholi said.

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