‘Ditch the Draft’ rally protests province’s new K-6 curriculum

By Lethbridge Herald on April 4, 2022.

Herald photo by Justin Seward A crowd turned out to the ‘Ditch the Draft’ curriculum protest at City Hall on Saturday. The protest was in hopes of a having a voice heard about the current curriculum that will be implemented on September.

Justin Seward – Lethbridge Herald

A crowd protesters showed up in front of City Hall on Saturday for a province-wide ‘Ditch the Draft’ Curriculum rally.

The focus of the protest was to hear the concerns about Alberta’s K-6 draft curriculum.

In March the provincial government announced that it would be implementing the new K-3 Mathematics, English Language Arts and Literature as well as a new Physical Education and Wellness curriculum starting in September.

A new curriculum for Grades 4-6 will be implemented for Math, English, Language Arts and Literature in September 2023.

“While I have been involved in different types of education with my work, I’m not necessarily involved in school education,” said Jayne Werry, a protest organizer. “I work with the kids a lot but I’m not an educator. But I can see there are problems with this and it needs to change.”

Werry’s feeling is he would like to see the curriculum scrapped.

“There have been some edits,” she said. “There has been lip service paid to consultation and it actually hasn’t seen a lot of improvements. While they have agreed to delay parts of it, it’s insufficient and the draft needs to go.”

Mel Lefebvre was a speaker at the protest and is a parent of two students at Ecole Agnes Davidson School.

“It’s scaled back and it’s like they put everything in a barrel and shook it,” she said.

“And like, ‘OK, Grade 3 is going to learn how to estimate land mass across the ocean. Grade 5, that’s when you learn about decimal points.’ So, they’re not taking into consideration how children develop learning. 

It’s very much like layering tiny stacks of paper on top of each other and building all that knowledge and revisiting that and a lot of repetition.”

Lefebvre knows her own kids’ challenges and she says this curriculum will make school harder for them.

“They’re just going to be frustrated,” she said. “They’re not going to understand what’s happening after all the changes they’ve been going through.”

University of Lethbridge Faculty of Education instructor Aaron Stout said the conversation around curriculum should reflect the values around society.

“And really what we’re seeing around the current drafts that are being put forward is the understanding that content is really important,” said Stout. “And the idea of content — students learning different facts or certain information — but there’s less evidence of real theory around how kids learn and how kids engage and how kids construct an understanding of the world around them. I think this curriculum defaults to the idea of absorbing information instead of constructing information in a meaningful way.”

Postcards were available for the public to send to Education Minister Adriana LaGrange.

The final curriculum will be available this month so teachers can prepare for implementation in September.