5 The Role of Curriculum
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you will be able to
- Describe how Canadian curriculum was shaped by socio-historical processes from pre-industrial Canada to the present day.
- Identify the three influences on curriculum and describe how they influence what is taught in schools.
- Identify the two main ways that curriculum accountability is maintained.
- Compare how the different large-scale assessment practices in Canada vary by province and territory.
- Contrast the six arguments that are for and against large-scale assessments.
- List the five stages of multicultural education that have occurred in Canada.
- Identify two key conflicts in the implementation of multicultural curriculum.
- Identify two ways that multicultural education is being addressed in Canadian curricular practices.
- Describe how in some parts of Canada adjustments have been made to the curriculum to incorporate Aboriginal and ethnic minority perspectives.
- Define White privilege and how anti-racist pedagogies can be used to promote multicultural education.
Introduction
Curriculum is the content of schooling. It is that which is learned in the schooling environment. This is not limited simply to familiar subjects like mathematics, science, or reading. The curriculum is significantly more far-reaching. It also prepares students to become future workers and citizens. And it is because of this socializing nature of the curriculum that it is a topic of enormous sociological interest.
The curriculum is a social construction with many embedded and taken-for-granted assumptions about what knowledge should be transmitted to young people. Who decides what goes into the curriculum? What assumptions about knowledge are engrained in Canadian curricular practices?
Because education is under provincial and territorial jurisdiction in Canada, each province and territory has its own ministry of education that has an official curriculum guide for teachers to follow. These are official documents and the following of the curricular guides is mandatory for teachers. Curriculum guides tell teachers what should be taught and when (i.e., in what order and how much time to allocate to specific topics). The detail of the curricular documents, however, varies greatly from province to province. The method by which the teacher chooses to teach the topic is entirely up to them. Teachers learn about ways of teaching specific topics as part of their teacher training (which also follows curricular guidelines, but at a post-secondary level).
Historical Events in Canadian Curriculum Development
Developments in curriculum cannot be completely understood if the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they occurred are not taken into account. The context of what is taught at school has been an ideological battleground, with various religious, economic, cultural, and political advocacy groups playing major roles at different points in history. A thorough over