The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Ida Beltran, ATA archives, sorts through ATA membership cards.
The cards, housed in their original cabinet, identified teachers
J.W. Barnett had signed up to join the Alberta Teachers’ Alliance.
—Photo by Yuet Chan

ATA archives preserve teachers’ storied past

Stewards of the evidence of human endeavour

Our digital age facilitates opportunities for expression and connection unprecedented in human history. The annual production of newly generated, original information is measured in exabytes, a volume of data equal to one quintillion (10¹⁸) bytes. Keeping pace with production is the availability of cheap and efficient memory capacity. The human record made a leap from print to digital in a single generation. Archival practices, developed over centuries, were ill equipped to apply the careful preservation of context, structure and content to the outpouring of digital production. Although archival practices are catching up, there are two important consequences to the onset of digitization. First, a sudden and deep chasm in the cultural record has opened up—some refer to it as a “digital dark age.” Second, a renewed call is being sounded for the preservation of personal, handwritten and heartfelt records by a generation eager to encounter its past.

An encounter with original historical records remains a compelling experience, especially so when the artifact at hand is personal, handwritten and heartfelt. We are fascinated by the character of a great-grandparent’s flourished script. We notice the stains of coffee or tears that have seeped into paper’s very fibres. Such pages speak to us in ways that do not survive digitization or typesetting so their archival value needs be preserved in its original state. We are temporally bound creatures tracing our existence through the inheritances of our children and in the records we leave behind. In the first instance, our genes escape at least our own generation.  In the second, our ideas and utterances persist beyond our time in the sun. Archivists, therefore, maintain a deep respect for a record’s lifecycle as it will exceed our own. We are the stewards of the evidence of human endeavour, and all of its ideas, visions, delusions, catastrophes and triumphs. Archival materials, preserved in their original context, lead us to a personal relationship with our past, encourage appreciation of their contemporary moment’s potential and safeguard the future from hardships born of avoidable mistakes.

The ATA Archives captures the voices of those early teachers who first recognized the value of collective endeavour. The Historical Letters Collection, for example, preserves correspondence between teachers and the nascent Alberta Teachers’ Alliance beginning in 1918. Those pages hold poignant suffering and joyful triumph told in teachers’ own words. Even the stationery speaks to the times: high-quality linen-fibre paper in the first decade that gave way to repurposed scraps of foolscap as the Great Depression deepened. Every page reveals the evidence that those conditions of professional practice that gave rise to the Alberta Teachers’ Alliance in 1918 persist today. 

When researchers have the opportunity to hold the linen-fibre paper or foolscap in their hands, they have a uniquely archival opportunity to draw their own conclusions about the artifact’s meaning and intention. There is no intervening intellect of an editor or commentator shaping their understanding or opinion of the content. What we hold in our hands has escaped the “tooth of time” (Young 1798); it exists because its creator took pen to paper and petitioned for advice, reassurance or succour, often in desperation, frustration or despair. A young teacher in a one-room school house is heartbroken and helpless to act over what she suspects is syphilis in two young students. Another teacher is respected and effective in his students’ learning but is cast aside by a board chair’s overt act of nepotism. Roads are impassable for months at a time and a teacher goes unpaid. Teachers become concerned for their safety working alone in remote locations. Classroom conditions range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Teachers’ professionalism is routinely undermined. Stakeholders demand that teachers undertake ever-expanding duties without adequate funding or support. John Walker Barnett gave Alberta’s teachers then, and all teachers since, an organization dedicated to the protection of their practice and careers. Barnett’s own language in this respect can’t be improved upon. In a letter to the Ridge Park School District, dated July 1, 1919, Barnett articulates a philosophy that informs Association practices to this day:

The Alberta Teachers’ Alliance exists not only for the benefit of the teaching profession but for the good of education generally. We have no desire to stir up trouble or wantonly interfere in any matter between a School Board and its teacher: we are not prepared to support any of our members if it is proven that they are enefficient [sic] or indiscreet, but on the other hand, if it is proven that injustice is either done or contemplated the Alliance is prepared to resist to the extreme limit of its power.

Improving conditions for classroom teachers also took the form of constant advocacy for the collective interests of a profession. And to this latter case, we turn our attention to what archival materials reveal about the content of the first Teaching Profession Act.

Teachers’ own words formed basis of Teaching Profession Act

In April 1935, the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) government enacted the Teaching Profession Act (TPA), whereby Alberta teachers achieved long-sought and hard-won professional status under the law. With the stroke of Lieutenant-Governor William Walsh’s pen, the Alberta Teachers’ Alliance was transformed into the Alberta Teachers’ Association. That September, the Social Credit government of William Aberhart came to power and in April 1936 amended the act to include mandatory ATA membership for all teachers. Members’ fees were deducted from salaries but could be deducted from grants paid to the ATA and recovered from teachers. So the legislative history goes. 

The TPA’s beating heart was (and remains) the language describing the Association’s objectives.  Bound up in those words are the ATA’s raison d’être. But who owns those words? Where did they originate? The answers are preserved in two ATA archival resources: Executive Minutes of 1917–1921, and the only known surviving complete copy of volume 1, number 4 of The ATA Magazine (September/October 1920).

On the morning of December 22, 1917, three men named to the first executive of the Alberta Teachers’ Alliance met amid the bustle of holiday shoppers in the Hudson’s Bay Smoking Room. They were G.D. Misener, president; C.E. Leppard, vice-president; and John Walker Barnett, secretary-treasurer. The minutes record that among the first item of business that day was consultation with local teachers on the matter of an ATA constitution:

Item 5: That the Secretaries of the Local Unions be urged to call a meeting immediately for the purpose of discussing any desired changes in the tentative constitution, and to forward copies of resolution[s] recommending such changes without delay…

Over the course of the next 18 months, teachers met in committee, in school rooms, in teacherages and in church basements to articulate a guiding, principled document making manifest the Alliance’s policies and practices. This was all-important work. They were self-consciously and with deliberate care laying the foundation for a professional association aimed at the betterment of the education of a young province. 

By April 9, 1920, with the task completed, the executive authorized the printing and distribution of about 3,000 copies of the Constitution of the Alberta Teachers’ Alliance. In the fall of 1920, volume 1, number 4 of The ATA Magazine was ready for print and it was thought advisable to include a copy of the constitution for the benefit of all members. The 1920 constitution gave pride of place to its Objects—a series of five statements grown from the grassroots of the organization, debated and approved, enshrining with authority the purposes to which the Alliance would dedicate its resources and efforts.

Between 1918 (the year of the Alliance’s incorporation) and 1935, two men, each bearing legitimate authority, engaged in vigorous debate over the future of the teaching profession in Alberta. They were John Walker Barnett and Perren Baker, long-serving minister of education in the UFA government (1921–1935). The two men never engaged in acrimony and rubbed along in the cordial, professional manner of the day. It is not surprising that Minister Baker was unable to endorse fully Barnett’s relentless brand of advocacy and activism on behalf of teachers. In later life, he described Barnett as “a doughty defender of the rights of the teacher, as many an inconsiderate Rural School Board found out to its chagrin, but he [Barnett] was rarely able to see that there was more than one side to any issue” (Baker 1968, p. 3). Nevertheless, it was the UFA, with Baker at the helm of the education portfolio that introduced and passed the Teaching Profession Act in April 1935. And it is in that act, written 15 years after the ATA’s first constitution, that the archival researcher discovers something inspiring—the language of the act through which Alberta teachers achieved legal professional status was actually a repurposing of teachers’ own words.

Following is a comparison of the two documents:

Alliance Constitution, 1920 

Objects

The purpose of the Society shall be:

1. To advance and safeguard the cause of education in the Province of Alberta.
2. To raise the status of the teaching profession in the Province of Alberta.
3. To unite the members of the Society in an association for their mutual improvement, protection and general welfare.
4. To bring about united action on any matter of common interest to the teachers…
5. To co-operate with teachers’ organizations in the other Provinces of the Dominion having the same or like aims and objects.

Teaching Profession Act, 1935

The objects of the Association shall be:

1. To advance and promote the cause of education in the Province of Alberta;
2. To raise the status of the teaching profession…
3. To promote and advance the interests of teachers and to secure conditions which will make possible the best professional service;
4. To arouse and increase public interest in educational affairs;
5. To co-operate with other teachers’ organizations in the provinces in the Dominion of Canada and throughout the world, having the same or like aims and objects.

In other words, when the UFA government finally accepted and legislated teachers’ professional status, it couldn’t improve on teachers’ initial, carefully-debated, consensus-sanctioned and principled language. Such insights are supported and made possible by purposeful preservation of ATA archival artifacts like the ATA Magazine and executive minutes.

As you will see in the following articles and archival materials, by preserving our past we enliven the present and, ideally, inspire future.

References

An Act Respecting the Teaching Profession (SA 1935 c-81). Edmonton, Alta: Barnett House.

ATA Archives. 2013. Historical Letters Collection, 1918–1946. Edmonton, Alta: Barnett House.

Baker, Perren. 1968. Letter to L.J. Wilson, p 3, November 14. Perren Baker, Minister of Education (United Farmers of Alberta, 1921–35), L.J. Wilson Fonds, Provincial Archives of Alberta, object no. PR0542.

Executive Council of The Alberta Teachers' Alliance. 1920. September/October. The Alberta Teachers’ Alliance Constitution. The ATA Magazine 1, no. 4: 15–16. Edmonton, Alta: Barnett House.

Executive Council of The Alberta Teachers’ Alliance (1917–1921). Minutes of the Executive Council. Edmonton, Alta: Barnett House.

Young, E. 1798. The works of Edward Young LL.D. in three volumes. To which is prefixed the life of the author. London, England: J. Dodsley.

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Margaret Shane is the ATA’s records and information manager, privacy officer and archivist.