Sticky Points: Teacher Educators Re-examine their Practice in light of a New Alberta Social Studies Program and its Inclusion of Aboriginal Perspectives

Source: Teaching Education, Volume 20, Issue 4 (December 2009), pages 343 – 355.

In this study, a group of teacher educators converse about their teaching practice in light of a new provincial K-12 program of social studies.

The most noteworthy feature of this new program is its explicit call for teachers to include Aboriginal and Francophone perspectives as they teach to the program's two central themes of “identity” and “citizenship”. The author reads teacher educators' conversations about their practice to identify a set of educational questions that the author argues speak both to and beyond this specific programmatic context.

These questions concern whose expectations should guide teacher education practices, the relevant role of dis/comfort in education, and the ways in which a “politics of clarity” shapes a particular understanding of both curriculum and practicality in the work of teacher educators.