Sticky points: teacher educators re‐examine their practice in light of a new Alberta social studies program and its inclusion of Aboriginal perspectives

Abstract

In this study, a group of teacher educators converse about their teaching practice in light of a new provincial K‐12 program of social studies. The most noteworthy feature of this new program is its explicit call for teachers to include Aboriginal and Francophone perspectives as they teach to the program’s two central themes of “identity” and “citizenship”. I read teacher educators’ conversations about their practice to identify a set of educational questions that I argue speak both to and beyond this specific programmatic context. These questions concern whose expectations should guide teacher education practices, the relevant role of dis/comfort in education, and the ways in which a “politics of clarity” shapes a particular understanding of both curriculum and practicality in the work of teacher educators.

Keywords:

• curriculum theory and change
• social studies
• teacher education

Notes

1. I recognize that there are difficult histories and politics involved in naming as it relates to Aboriginal peoples. Although it is not without contention, I employ the language of the program of studies here to inclusively include those with treaties as First Nations and Métis and Inuit peoples. On another note, it is interesting that to what these multiple perspectives are to be added remains unnamed in the program document.

2. For an inspiring and resonate exploration of the curriculum‐as‐encounter as it relates more specifically to memory, museum studies, and historical consciousness, see Simon (2005).

3. See, for example, “The Left’s Aboriginal blind spot” (Kay, 2008).

4. Although very similar notions in terms of the work they are meant to spur and justify, currere is an examination by the self of the social within. This process therefore differs in emphasis from curriculum‐as‐encounter as a social space created with others who question the forces and conditions that shape their mutual encounter and intelligibility.

5. Other factors also, of course, impact the degree to which student teachers may implicate their practicum environments; they have to do with (among others conditions) the unequal power relations among those established in teaching and the school and those who are hoping to start their careers. It also may be the case that these students have learned that school success requires that one not implicate or care too deeply about the content one is meant to acquire. After all, to implicate or to care too much creates unpredictable complications that potentially disrupt the scheduled time needed both to acquire and to demonstrate that acquisition through evaluation.