The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Rebecca Priegert Coulter

When the Alberta Teachers’ Association awarded an honorary membership to Donalda James Dickie in 1961, it was recognizing the accomplishments of an extraordinary woman who had given 60 years of service to education, 35 of them spent preparing teachers for the schools of a province born in 1905.

Dickie’s achievements had earlier been celebrated when she won the Governor General’s Award for Juvenile Literature in 1950 for her textbook The Great Adventure and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1952 for her many contributions to education. An editorial in the Edmonton Journal (June 10, 1952) observed that this latter award would “be acclaimed in Alberta and among teachers and educators in all parts of Canada, as richly deserved,” for Dickie’s services in Canadian education “have been outstanding.”

Dickie, herself, claimed to be “just a teacher,” but she was an Alberta teacher who became one of Canada’s most influential educators in the first half of the 20th century, not only developing new approaches to curriculum and pedagogy in her adopted province but also writing textbooks that shaped Canadians’ understanding of themselves as a nation. The intersection of her life with that of the new province of Alberta reminds us how important teachers and public education are in building strong and socially conscious societies.

Born in Hespeler, Ontario, in 1883, Dickie was orphaned at an early age and, while still in elementary school, migrated west with her grandmother, temporarily settling in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. In 1901, she attended Regina Normal School where, coincidentally, one of her classmates was H. C. Newland, who also went on to have an illustrious career in education, becoming an ATA president (1920–22) and, like Dickie, a leading actor in educational reform in Alberta in the 1930s. Dickie first taught in a small rural school outside Moose Jaw for two years to earn her permanent second-class certificate and then moved back to Ontario to complete university entrance requirements and enter Queen’s University. She graduated from Queen’s in 1910. One of her classmates, William Aberhart, was to become premier of Alberta in 1935. Dickie’s academic performance was so exceptional that she won gold medals in both history and English and was granted the advanced MA, rather than the BA.

Someone in Alberta must have recognized Dickie’s talents, for she was immediately recruited to work in the Practice School affiliated with the Calgary Normal School. Shortly thereafter, in 1912, she was appointed as one of two instructors charged with setting up the Camrose Normal School and then, for more than 30 years, she taught at one time or another in each of Alberta’s normal schools, preparing elementary school teachers in the areas of reading, composition, grammar, drama, geography and history. She was admired and respected by her students and extolled for her liveliness and sense of humour. One poem in the 1924/25 Calgary Normal School Yearbook, for example, talks about Dickie as a strict teacher but goes on to say:

Who gives us lessons in high glee
That in pleasure she may see
Our working hours swiftly flee?
Miss D.
Who calls us all children dear
Whose voice is it we love to hear?
To us it seems, ah, very clear.
Miss D. 

Certainly Dickie supervised a wide range of students’ extracurricular activities (most of the students were still in their teens). For example, at Calgary Normal, Dickie started a Speaking Club, where one highlight was a debate between the women and the men on the “doubtful subject, ‘Resolved that Men make better Teachers than Women!’” The female student reporter added, “Need I say who won? Ask the men.”

After graduating from Queen’s and while teaching at Alberta’s normal schools, Dickie continued to enhance her education by taking summer courses at Columbia University and the University of Oxford, where she began studies in the 1916/17 period and assisted with the war effort. Ultimately, she earned a PhD in history at the University of Toronto in 1930, one of only six women to do so prior to 1960. This made her one of the best-educated normal school instructors in Canada.

By the time she retired from teaching in 1944, she was widely recognized as a textbook author, an additional career that began after she returned from Oxford to her position at the Camrose Normal School. There she taught history and quickly realized that the history texts used in the schools were boring and “literally incomprehensible to most of their young readers.” Dickie resolved to remedy the situation and quickly produced a series of eight student-friendly history readers for use in elementary schools. Within a short period of time, she was also writing and compiling textbooks for use in teaching reading, writing, poetry, grammar and geography, an effort that continued into the 1960s. Over her lifetime, she produced more than 60 textbooks.

We cannot overestimate the importance of this work, for textbooks were and are the lifeblood of education, shaping what teachers teach and students learn in schools.

In the first half of the 20th century, when teachers had few resources beyond the texts and when most students left school early, textbooks assumed particular importance in shaping ideas about our country and the world. Hence, the popularity of Dickie’s texts, not only in Alberta but also in other provinces, gave her interpretations of the world special legitimacy. It is fair to say that Dickie’s openness to diversity and difference, her appreciation of the richness of multiculturalism, and her understanding of the contributions and strengths of Canada’s Aboriginal population encouraged attitudes of tolerance. She promoted cooperative community values and decried the negative impact of poverty and unemployment, arguing the case for a nation to look after its weak and poor. Indeed, through her writing for children, she was surely a significant actor in creating ideas about who we think we are as Canadians. 

In the 1930s, Dickie established Alberta as a recognized leader in the field of child-centred, activity-oriented education. She wrote the teacher education textbook The Enterprise in Theory and Practice, and, as D. J. Oviatt, a younger contemporary working in the Alberta Department of Education, observed, “did more than any other single person to make the implementation of the activity movement in Alberta education a reality” through her writing, her teaching and her speaking engagements at professional and community meetings.

This brief glimpse into the life of Donalda Dickie does not do justice to the life of a teacher whose contributions include the development of readers in the 1930s that positively feature Aboriginal children as protagonists, most likely the first example we have in Canada of such inclusive curriculum materials. She also prepared the remedial reading programs for Canada’s soldiers in the Second World War, edited a children’s magazine and wrote delightful children’s fiction.

Dickie may have been “just a teacher,” but the intellectual and practical leadership she provided in education from her position in one of Canada’s newest provinces made her an exemplar. She deserves to be remembered.

Rebecca Priegert Coulter taught in Alberta from 1966 to 1975 and was active in the Alberta Teachers’ Association before returning to university to complete an MEd and a PhD. She is now a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Western Ontario. Her more detailed biography of Donalda Dickie, entitled “Getting Things Done: Donalda Dickie and Leadership Through Practice,” will appear in 2006 in the Canadian Journal of Education 29.