First Nations issues to get second look in schools
Education Minister Bronwyn Eyre wants to have a discussion on how certain subjects — including First Nations issues — should be taught in Saskatchewan schools.
On Indigenous education, Eyre said Tuesday, “it is certainly broadly and extensively infused beyond treaty education, and ... that’s something we should talk about.”
Infusion — which, according to the minister means incorporating a subject into other classes already being taught rather than introducing an entirely new class — has “come to be more the norm in recent years.”
She said the province is at a bit of a crossroads in how it is “developing curriculum” and that she might want to discuss having a specific course on Indigenous history in high school “as opposed to maybe more infusion.”
Saskatchewan was the first province in Canada to mandate students learning about treaty education in 2007 and a K-12 continuum for treaty education was put in place.
Its goal is to teach students in Saskatchewan schools about treaty relationships, the spirit and intent of treaties, the historical context of treaties and the promises and provisions of the treaties.
Eyre was responding to questions from reporters on the issue after the NDP Opposition raised concerns with a speech she recently delivered in the legislative assembly.
In that speech, Eyre said, “there has come to be at once too much wholesale infusion into the curriculum, and at the same time, too many attempts to mandate material into it both from the inside and by outside groups.”
NDP education critic Carla Beck said she had “serious concerns” about Eyre’s speech because educators in the province she knows thought Eyre’s comments on infusion were aimed at how First Nations issues are taught in classrooms.
Eyre also delivered an anecdote about her son’s homework.
“He was asked to outline nothing less than his vision of his collective past, his country, and his world. As background, however, he’d copied from the board the following facts which were presented as fact: That Europeans and European settlers were colonialists, pillagers of the land who knew only buying and selling and didn’t respect Mother Earth,” she said in her speech.
Beck also took issue with Eyre using the personal example to “single out individual teachers” and “make large policy decisions across education in the province.”
Eyre said she saw the question for her son as “potential infusion” and she was just, “trying to highlight ... that we’re perhaps afraid to love the story and our families and for him too, to love the story, without excluding anybody else.” she said she is, respectfully challenging “some of the curriculum and development we’ve had to this point, and I think that’s my job.”
The education minister said she has a “lovely relationship with the school” her son attends.