The Alberta Teachers’ Association

November 3, 2009

Shelley Svidal

I had the opportunity to attend the provincial fall forum of Inspiring Education: A Dialogue with Albertans, held October 18–20 at the Northlands AgriCom in Edmonton. As a participant in the Inspiring Education community conversation in Edmonton in June, I welcomed the chance to participate once more in the dialogue in order to consider the results of those conversations and online discussions and to continue to help shape the future of education in Alberta. I attended both events as the parent of students in kindergarten and Grade 4.


Singers perform at the provincial fall forum of Inspiring Education: A dialogue with Albertans.
—Photo by Yuet Chan

Unlike the June conversation, the forum was shadowed, to some extent, by what could best be described as an elephant in the room. That elephant is the $80 million that was cut from the education system in 2009/10 and the $340 million many believe will be cut from the system in 2010/11. Also clouding the forum was the School Act review, which, while it was supposed to flow out of the dialogue, was initiated in advance of the culminating event. Although Minister of Education Dave Hancock tried to dispense with such questions in his introductory remarks, the elephant remained in the room during the group discussions, at least at my table. I believe that the minister’s intentions are entirely honourable, but he is only one member of the Agenda and Priorities Committee, the Treasury Board, the cabinet and the government caucus, where the budgetary decisions will be made.

My table included at various times several school trustees, a superintendent, a retired teacher and a central office administrator, in addition to facilitators from government ministries. With the exception of the facilitators, who guided rather than influenced the discussions, we agreed unanimously on the importance of restricting public funding to the public education system rather than fragmenting that system by subsidizing private education. Technology also found favour at our table, albeit as an instructional tool rather than as a substitute for face-to-face teaching. Speaker Daniel Pink’s suggestion that arts education be infused throughout the curriculum, moving the arts from “ornamental” to “fundamental,” was also well received, as was his and speaker Jennifer James’s condemnation of high-stakes external assessment, such as provincial achievement tests. The only area of apparent disagreement was the fallacious expression teacher tenure, which some at my table sought to eliminate. Not wishing to attempt an explication of practice review, I pointed out that speaker Indira Samarasekera, president of the University of ­Alberta, had emphasized the importance of academic freedom within the university community (which constitutes the main argument for tenure within that community), before letting the issue drift away.

The distinguished speakers and young performing artists were certainly inspirational, as were the group discussions on the final afternoon of the forum. However, some of the earlier discussions seemed hamstrung by the paucity of time allotted for their completion and by an apparent narrowing of the framework for those discussions, presumably on the basis of the results of the community conversations and online discussions.

In contrast to the education round tables of the early 1990s, which were staged public ­relations events designed to achieve ­predetermined objectives, the Inspiring Education forum was a free-flowing dialogue aimed at stimulating the best of what the education community has to offer. In the end, we did our best to try to imagine what an educated Albertan would look like in 2029. As Pink pointed out in quoting an American superintendent, “We need to prepare our kids for their future, not our past.” Unfortunately, our recent past, occasioned by the province’s seeming inability to save for a rainy day and the global ­economic downturn, remains the indomitable elephant in the room.


Also In the News