Both of the readings that I chose look at responses to changes in the school curriculum. The first, Wien and Dudley-Marling’s “Limited Vision: The Ontario Curriculum and Outcomes-Based Learning” looks at the shift from the Common Curriculum to the Ontario Curriculum. This shift was supposed to improve the learning experience, but it was actually a step backwards for teachers and the curriculum. The new Ontario Curriculum tried to move away from “Students will” as the focus of grade outcomes, which “set up an authoritarian series of commands for teachers and school boards.”[1] Instead of improving the curriculum and learning outcomes for students, the Ontario Curriculum put a different stress on teachers to use a fixed amount of time to teach content.[2] The second reading that I chose, Nancy Janovicek’s “The Community School Literally Takes Place in The Community,” looks at alternative schools in British Columbia from 1959 through the 1980’s. Instead of focusing purely on academics, these schools also taught skills that were essential for living in rural communities.[3] Part of what drove these families to create these communities and schools was the direction that public schools were going in with education. Public schools were emphasizing science, technology, and math instead of the humanities, which not everyone agreed with.[4] These rural schools, like the Argenta Friends School, “sought to develop the whole person.”[5]
The third reading that I chose is Agnes Grant’s Finding My Talk. Instead of looking directly at life in residential schools, Finding My Talk looks at the lives of women after residential school. I read the chapter on Shirley Sterling, a Nlakapamux First Nations woman from a reserve near Merritt BC. Sterling spent eleven years in Kamloops Residential School, and moved on to take grade thirteen in Kamloops.[6] The chapter goes on to describe Sterling’s life after Residential School and her academic success. A quick search on Google shows that Sterling completed her Ph.D. in 1997, and as stated in the chapter she did started university after her own children had moved out, which means she likely attended Residential School in the late 1950s and 1960s. I think her pursuit of further education and her success in doing so shows that her Residential School experience was not entirely negative. While the chapter does not go into detail, she must have done well in her classwork to finish the final high school grade and continue on to university later on in life. What I like about Finding My Talk is that it shows readers examples of life beyond Residential School.
Works Cited
Grant, Agnes. Finding My Talk: How Fourteen Native Women Reclaimed Their Lives after Residential School. Calgary: Fifth House, 2004.
Janovicek, Nancy. “‘The community school literally takes place in the community’: Alternative Education in the Back-to-the-land Movement in the West Kootenays, 1959 to 1980.” Historical Studies in Education, 24, 1 (Spring 2012): 150-169.
Wien, Carol Anne and Curt Dudley-Marling. “Limited Vision: The Ontario Curriculum and Outcomes-Based Learning.” in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 400-412.
[1] Carol Anne Wien and Curt Dudley-Marling, “Limited Vision The Ontario Curriculum and Outcomes-Based Learning.” in Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012: 402.
[2] Wien and Dudley-Marling, “Limited Vision” 405.
[3] Nancy Janovicek, “’The Community School Literally Takes Place in the Community’: Alternative Education in the Back-to-the-Land Movement of the West Kootenays, 1959-1980,” 151.
[4] Janovicek, “The Community School Literally Takes Place in the Community,” 152,
[5] Janovicek, “The Community School Literally Takes Place in the Community,” 160.
[6] Agnes Grant, Finding My Talk: How Fourteen Native Women Reclaimed Their Lives after Residential School, Calgary: Fifth House, 89.