Curriculum draft cannot be salvaged By Heather Ganshorn, Research Director, Support Our Students Alberta (https://www.supportourstudents.ca/)
T
he United Conservative Party (UCP) government’s draft K-6 curriculum has been roundly rejected by a wide
swath of Albertans, including 57 of the province’s 61 school boards, the Alberta Teachers Association (ATA), various Indigenous groups and the 40,000plus members of the Albertans Reject Curriculum Draft Facebook group. This draft was developed in haste after the UCP scrapped a previous draft, the product of years of work by hundreds of teachers and other experts under the previous NDP and PC governments. My organization, Support Our Students Alberta (SOS), advocates for inclusive and equitable public education. We have partnered with the Albertans Reject Curriculum Draft Facebook Group to create a website, Students Deserve Better, where we call on the government to take the following actions: 1. Reconvene the curriculum working groups from the previous rewrite that began under previous governments (and was scrapped by the UCP despite being almost ready to pilot) and to fully respect the professional expertise of these groups. 2. Commit to the longstanding, apolitical curriculum development process, and dissolve the appointments of advisors selected at the recommendation of UCP politicians. 3. Restore the curriculum development partnership with the ATA, as without
18 Alberta School Counsellor / Fall 2021
