SOFA

The following letter was recently received from a concerned parent:

To Whom It May Concern:

I can’t imagine my oldest daughter, currently a 3^rd year fibre major at Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) gaining the required proficiency in drawing or other visual arts skills if she had had to start over as a beginner at the outset of every course throughout her junior and senior high school education. She possessed innate talent and gifting for the arts, for sure, but she credits what she began learning from teachers at École Elboya Junior High as the foundation for the rest of her public school learning. She achieved successive levels of experience, technique and training with each course she took from Grade 7 on, and then throughout her three years at Western Canada High School. She was accepted to ACAD based on the portfolio that her high school arts instructor helped her to populate and design.

So in the new Alberta Curriculum, everyone might get merely a taste of the arts, no one would be able to progress and fully develop their skills and techniques. On the surface, that sounds idyllic; in practice, nightmarish. A student would be unable to fit enough of the single topic modules into schedules already nearly full of basic courses required to graduate in order to get a well-balanced view of the arts.

The proposed Alberta Curriculum looks like a Continuing Ed calendar - ”Try your hand at Nuclear Physics!” What if we approached Language Arts that way? Learn your grammar and syntax every year! What an easy-to-develop curriculum – teachers will not have to anticipate a student’s growth or a student’s advanced skills. Let’s apply this formula to Math. With this kind of approach, students would never learn enough basic math to progress to Calculus if the schools kept offering only beginner-level arithmetic. Boy, would kids know how to add, though, by the time they graduated. Students will never get the chance to achieve proficiency in the arts if the Alberta Education is permitted to dumb down the curriculum this way. Only those who are driven to succeed in pursuing their craft or art in spite of Alberta Learning will emerge with any credible degree of skill.

Saves development time for teachers, certainly, there’s a cost saving. And furthermore, the teacher wouldn’t necessarily have to possess an arts background to teach it. So we produce fewer arts-literate high school graduates, and thin the arts applicants to post-secondary arts programs. Then the government could cut back funding to post-secondary arts programs. Then we have fewer teachers with the necessary depth of arts pedagogy. What a grim view of the future of the arts in Alberta.

But hey, we keep hearing how Alberta Learning values physical activity and education; so why don’t we open up all of the sports teams across the board to allow everyone who wants to play volleyball, basketball or football, regardless of skill level, to join the teams. Never mind our current system of inter-murals to encourage broader sports participation. Let’s just allow anyone who wants to play on the team.  Big team, lots of bench time, no pesky playoff schedules or costly awards – there wouldn’t be any achievement to celebrate. Save on afterschool facility and coaching costs. This is sounding just like the Alberta government’s foisting off recreational facility improvements to communities by the grants-on-a-stick, the same thing will happen to the arts. Only kids whose parents can afford and facilitate extra-curricular arts education will get a quality experience and the opportunity to pursue a vocation in the arts.

Ah, we have hit the nail on the head.  Love that Alberta Advantage

Respectfully
Heather T.