A History of “Francophone Perspectives” in Alberta's Social Studies Curricula (1993–2024)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2005, Alberta’s ministry of education introduced a mandate to learn about “Francophone perspectives” in its social studies curriculum, from kindergarten to grade 12. This curriculum, which is now under reform, failed to define the terms “perspectives” and “Francophone perspectives;” in addition, it neglected to outline the historical and constitutional reasons that justified their inclusion. This article considers how and why the term “Francophone perspectives” found its way into the Alberta curriculum. I analyzed the draft and final versions of the social studies curriculum since the term first appeared in a 1999 draft, as well as related government consultations and the testimonies of curriculum authors. I argue that Francophone perspectives were recognized and kept their place, despite criticism, due to: 1) unprecedented partnerships between Canadian ministries of education as well as Indigenous, francophone, and anglophone curriculum authors; 2) their mobilization of James Banks’s transformative approach to multicultural education; 3) an underlying pluralist vision of Canada as a partnership between francophones, Indigenous peoples, and anglophones; and 4) the authors’ protection of Francophone and Indigenous perspectives amidst negative feedback. This article illuminates the advent of the now-popular multi-perspectival approach to social studies in Western and Northern Canada as well as the crafting of new ways to write curriculum in partnership.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".