(In response to “More edu-babble than substance in new B.C. curriculum”, printed in the Vancouver Sun, November 4th, 2013.)
Katy Best is a teacher candidate in the Middle Years program at UBC. Her specialization is Social Studies.
It is not every day that I come to the defense of the provincial government’s decisions about education. There have been some travesties committed in the name of education in the last decade from the (mis)execution Planning 10 to the stripping of class-composition agreements in teachers’ contracts. However, I write today in indignation towards Michael Zwaagstra’s article in the Sun attacking the new curriculum drafts, namely for Social Studies in this province.
Zwaagstra’s problem with the new curriculum is rooted in the apparent lack of specific content knowledge. His concern is that learning the new content, which focusses on overarching themes like “imperialism” and development of skills like critical thinking, will be impossible without the knitty-gritty details of “specific historical events and dates”. Of course we need historical facts in order to understand umbrella themes like “imperialism”! Of course we need content to wrestle with in order to develop skills like thinking critically. Any teacher worth their salt will provide this content as the equipment needed to meet bigger goals, but that doesn’t automatically warrant giving the minutiae a sacrosanct place in the curriculum documents.
What Zwaagstra fails to discuss is whether or not the content-heavy Social Studies curriculum that we have had up until now has been effective. There is much debate about the aims of Social Studies, but whether you believe the goal should be to encourage the development of critical, informed, thoughtful students or to program students with an encyclopedic knowledge of confederation dates, the old curriculum is failing us. I will tell you why. While the new curriculum’s big picture goals demand the content be there to facilitate them, the old curriculum, full of dates and events, could be simply memorized with little or no understanding of the more meaningful themes. Zwaagstra fears that Googling will eliminate engagement with facts, but memorizing facts sans Google does not mean engagement either; neither way guarantees the safe passage from data to knowledge.
How can you understand colonialism without the details of historical events? You cannot. However, it is quite possible for students to memorize dates and facts long enough to spit them out onto a standardized provincial exam without ever understanding how those events connect. I am reminded of an “A” student according to the current BC curriculum and performance standards who emerged from Social Studies 11 with an ability to recount the date and location of dozens of WW2 battles and no idea who won the war. What the old documents were good at was preparing students for exams that made it possible to rank students according to a cocktail of their ability to memorize, the amount they bought in to the worth of the system, and their ability to write tests. Even if data recital is the sole goal of education, content heavy PLO’s do a poor job achieving it. How many people after they leave SS11 ever refer back to that factoid about the Halibut Treaty? Do you, dear reader, even remember what that was?
Not only does the new emphasis on big-picture learning make better sense for content knowledge, it makes better sense for learning diverse content. In the past, following the rigid PLO’s meant teaching a stagnant and structurally uncritical version of history. While there was space for students to evaluate evidence and events, that evidence and those events were hand-picked to portray a certain view of history. What the new curriculum allows for is a dynamic, inquiry-based, and more inclusive approach to Social Studies. Why the filles du roi made it in and not anything on the Canadian eugenics movement is something that I do not understand. Why Oliver Cromwell and not residential schools? The new curriculum leaves space for teachers to teach what matters, and yes that may mean that students do not come out with the same cookie-cutter (mis-)understanding of history, but maybe that means that more of our students will be able to find relevance to themselves in their history classes, making that data to knowledge leap more likely.
What is funny about this whole thing is that in the end Zwaagstra, the BC Ministry of Education, and I all share a common hope for Social Studies students: the development of critical, analytical skills through engagement with history and geography. What Zwaagstra is nobly but rashly doing is defending a system that has been failing to do this for decades. I for one feel that the PLO’s ought to serve as more than a programming language for a generation of automatons. If “critical thinking” is “edu-babble”, then so be it. The real neck on the chopping block here is not substance, it’s standardized tests!