Curriculum Reform In Ontario

This first full account of curriculum policy formulation in 1990s Ontario helps readers understand the real-life experiences of policymakers both within the province and internationally. Having worked as a policy analyst for the Government of Ontario, a public school teacher, and a university professor, author Laura Elizabeth Pinto is uniquely positioned to tackle the key issues of policy formulation: the politics and tensions among different policy actors; the relationships between democracy in education and in policy formation; and the hidden role of privatization. Based on interviews with key policy actors, including ministry bureaucrats, curriculum policy writers, stakeholder consultation participants, and political staffers, Curriculum Reform in Ontario provides a critique of conventional policy formulation processes. Pinto also suggests possibilities for more participatory approaches to policy formulation that can better support the critical role played by schools in creating democratic societies.

Based on interviews with key policy actors, including ministry bureaucrats, curriculum policy writers, stakeholder consultation participants, and political staffers, Curriculum Reform in Ontario provides a critique of conventional policy formulation processes.

This open access book is a comparative analysis of recent large scale education reforms that broadened curriculum goals to better prepare students for the 21st century. The book examines what governments actually do when they broaden curriculum goals, with attention to the details of implementation. To this end, the book examines system level reforms in six countries at various levels of development. The study includes system level reforms in jurisdictions where students achieve high levels in international assessments of basic literacies, such as Singapore and Ontario, Canada, as well as in nations where students achieve much lower levels, such as Kenya, Mexico, Punjab-Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The chapters examine system-level reforms that focus on strengthening the capacity to teach the basics, as in Ontario and Pakistan, as well as reforms that aim at building the capacity to teach a much broader set of competencies and skills, such as Kenya, Mexico, Singapore and Zimbabwe. The volume includes systems at very different levels of spending per student and reforms at various points in the cycle of policy implementation, some just starting, some struggling to survive a governmental transition, and others that have been in place for an extended period of time. From the comparative study of these reforms, we aim to provide an understanding of how to build the capacity of education systems to teach 21st century skills at scale in diverse settings.

Educational reforms have been introduced by the Ontario government since 1995, including a new standardized curriculum. This thesis examines the Ontario elementary curriculum for what and whose knowledge is being legitimized in schools. Using a critical anti-racism perspective, this study interrogates racialized power relations. A combined content and critical discourse analysis explores how the language of the curriculum is exclusionary, how Eurocentricism and Whiteness are propagated through the content, and how the history and knowledge of racial minorities is rendered inconsequential. This study finds that White bodies are privileged in schools while racialized bodies are disempowered and thus disadvantaged. Recommendations for curriculum reform are made, alongside broader action strategies for the inclusivity and empowerment of all students.

This well-researched resource draws on the collaborative work between researchers and school practitioners to offer teaching strategies that promote deep understanding and higher-order thinking in students.

The last twenty-five years have seen unprecedented growth in the application of science in critical areas of human endeavor. Explosive acceleration in the rate of growth of learning has created unquestioned benefits but it has also served as a catalyst for social, economic, and political changes of a disturbing nature. Too often there has not been time enough to assimilate the new learning or to reach agreement on the use of powerful new technologies. How have educators responded to the need to prepare young people to live with, create, and control change? In Ontario the response was unique and dramatic. Teachers and academics, school trustees, administrators, and inspectors as well as the provincial government and private philanthropy came together to create the Ontario Curriculum Institute, chartered as a non-profit organization in January 1963. Its objectives were to study all phases of the curriculum in the schools and universities of Ontario and to disseminate the results of their research and developmental work. Studies of course content, of learning processes and instructional methodology, of school and classroom organization were launched and new learning resources, experimental programs, and demonstration classrooms were designed and executed. Findings filled seventeen small volumes to September 1966 after which the reports of the study committees were issued by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education with which the Curriculum Institute had merged. In New Designs for Learning (which can be considered a sequel to Design for Learning, edited by Northrop Frye, University of Toronto Press, 1962) extracts from all seventeen reports, many now out-of-print, have been organized to deal with the most pressing and interesting aspects of educational reform. Selections were also chosen to provide for educator and layman alike the broadest possible grounds for assessment of the Institute’s work. Discerning introductions which set the book and its individual chapters clearly in the mainstream of the curriculum reform movement have been provided by the editor.

Presents a brief history of preservice teacher education as background to a description of present teacher education in Ontario, and a preliminary analysis of the major issues of the report. It also sets out a perspective for thinking about teacher education, and discusses the importance and characteristics of schools as places of professional development. Finally it presents the Steering Committee's proposals.