Opinion: Why Alberta’s new social studies curriculum gets a failing grade

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Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides unveiled the new K-6 social studies curriculum last week, promising that it meaningfully incorporated feedback from over 13,000 Albertans.

By the next day, that narrative had unraveled; the government’s own curriculum consultant group released a statement documenting how feedback provided was routinely ignored. Unsurprisingly, the draft remains largely uninformed by educational expertise and fatally flawed in many areas that Albertans have repeatedly expressed concerns about, such as:

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Virtually no skill development: Despite lip service to developing skills, the curriculum lacks important skill development. In every other Canadian province and territory, social studies curricula require students to develop a variety of skills such as historical and geographical thinking, creative thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making.

In the latest draft released last week, these skills are virtually absent. For example, Albertan children won’t learn to make maps; they’ll get told about research skills that social scientists use to investigate an issue but won’t actually learn to do this research themselves; nor will they learn how to analyze media for bias.

The National Council for Social Studies argues that “students must have ample opportunities to practise social studies skills and concepts in multiple contexts.” In this curriculum, there are no building blocks for skill development — starting with the basics and moving to more complex skills as children grow older — because virtually no skills are present at all. In a time when skilled citizens are in huge demand, the resulting skills gap for Albertans will be enormous. 

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Long on regurgitation, short on thinking: Despite lip service to critical thinking, over 95 per cent of outcomes target low-level thinking, mostly recall of mountains of facts. While background knowledge is important, research is clear that young students benefit from learning disciplinary questions, including historical ones such as “How do we know what we know about the past?” political ones such as “What strengthens or weakens democracy?” and philosophical ones such as “How do we decide what is fair?”

In this curriculum, Albertan children never encounter such questions, likely leading to disengagement and surface-level understandings at best. In a time when mis- and disinformation is rampant, critical thinking is indispensable, and this curriculum falls drastically short.  

Ideologically skewed: Despite lip service to having students engage with multiple perspectives, the curriculum is replete with bias. We offer two examples; there are many more.

Across grades, the curriculum paints a fairy tale about a harmonious, positive relationship between colonists and Indigenous peoples. For instance, fourth-graders learn how “colonization benefited European countries and colonists,” but not a word about the displacement or violence experienced by Indigenous peoples.

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Students learn how missionaries provided “education,” but nothing about residential schools. The curriculum also includes an outsized, overwhelmingly positive focus on Alberta’s “natural resources,” a phrase which appears 26 times. While learning the benefits of these resources is important, it is unconscionable that not a single drawback (e.g., environmental damage or connections to climate change) gets mentioned. Instead, nonrenewable resources are simplistically portrayed as pivotal to the province’s “success.”

One-sided portrayals, regardless of which side, run counter to the goals of building robust understandings and nurturing citizens equipped to engage constructively with people whose perspectives may differ. In a time of increasing polarization, this lapse is inexcusable.

Unless there are extensive changes, the coming generation of Albertan students will sit in classrooms bored to tears. They will be forced to learn a distorted, biased curriculum made for their great-grandparents instead of one that offers foundational 21st century understandings to undergird well-informed citizenship in the present.

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There is still time to turn things around, but that would require doing what should have been done in the first place: giving educators a meaningful voice in crafting a new document truly reflecting both the concerns of Albertans and research-based subject matter expertise. Albertans have had it with lip service about “listening to feedback” that does not result in substantive change. 

Dr. Maren Aukerman, Werklund Research Professor in Curriculum and Learning, University of Calgary.

Dr. James Miles, assistant professor, Social Studies Education, University of Alberta.

Dr. Carla Peck, professor, Social Studies Education, University of Alberta.

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