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Another issue has been that the textbooks at the high school level are unusable, Robinson said. “They are basically paperweights. You spend money for a book that nobody can read or will read.”

The Alberta government also tried to push a “radical constructivism,” Robinson said, which essentially plays out as a major focus on group and project work in the classroom.

“A little bit of constructivism could be OK as one approach, but they made it the whole approach of everything,” he said. “What you get is a textbook where nobody wants to define a term because the students should come to their own meaning of it. So a whole (Grade 10) book that doesn’t really define and tell you what globalism is, that is a real problem for teachers and their students.”

In opposition to Robinson’s view is John Tidswell, a longtime social studies teacher and president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association Social Studies Council. Tidswell defended the move to what he describes as “critical inquiry” in the current curriculum.

“What we’re really most interested in as social studies teachers is engaging in activities that are going to make our students learn ideas deeply … I think if they’re sitting in class and they’re having the teachers use the direct teaching methods, which is typically what happened in schools in the 1990s, it’s really a one-way thing, where you’re taking notes. If they’re just sitting their listening to lectures, they’re not learning it deeply, they’re learning it for the test.”

As for the new curriculum, it’s Tidswell’s preference for more constructivism that is winning the day.

This has Robinson worried: “Social studies was a fairly popular course, but now, and it’s not this way in all schools, generally it is the subject that kids hate in Alberta. This (new curriculum rewrite) is going to finish off the job.”

I’ll dig deeper into the new curriculum next week.

dstaples@postmedia.com