Month: February 2025

When I taught grade 6, my favourite subject to teach and co-teach was social studies. The focus on trade in the Geography curriculum was an area that I found particularly intriguing to teach. Topics like current events, fair trade, trade agreements, and Canada’s international relationships are exciting because the world is constantly changing.

The first Trump presidency gave me a good reason to revisit the content I had developed. In the past, the main trade agreement we focused on was the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was renegotiated into the USMCA or CUSMA.

More than a few years have passed since 2018 and in a dramatic start to 2025, so has Canada’s relationship with the United States. The American government’s decision to potentially tariff Canadian goods has become not only an economic decision with significant impacts to both sides of the Canada-US border, but a major shift in Canada’s relationship with its southern neighbour.

Whether or not these decisions are even implemented, the political turmoil that has made headlines in the early weeks of 2025 highlights reminds us of how important it is for kids to have a strong social studies education.

It is important for children to have a critical thinking skillset for the news stories and headlines they are bound to encounter on the internet or in family conversations. Students also benefit from understanding the importance of civic responsibility and the impact of elections. Social studies learning also helps students to build academic vocabulary skills in a meaningful way. Not only are they learning language in a more formal register, they will have increased opportunities to explore the new words they are learning because they will hear the same language being used in the media and family conversations.

Let’s take a closer look at these reasons.

Social Studies Learning Helps Children to think Critically about a Changing World

Quality instruction that teaches kids the fundamentals of inquiry, critical thinking, mapping, land formations, climate zones, colonization, international agreements, and economics – just to name a few social studies topics topics – helps children make sense of world they live in from a broader context.

In today’s world, where news travels quickly through social media channels and misinformation runs rampant, being able to make sense of it all in a balanced, reasonable way is critical. It is all too easy to adopt a perspective without hearing alternative viewpoints, and social studies is one of the best areas of curriculum to make critical thinking come to life.

Social Studies Helps Students to Understand the Importance of Civic Responsibility

Society needs people to take civic responsibility for their communities, whether it is organizing to improve neighbourhoods and regions or taking the role of a leader in different types of organizations. Strong instruction in social studies fosters a passion for civic responsibility in children and a drive to innovate and improve their town, city, province, or country.

Why might it be important to join a residents’ association? What are the reasons people seek political office? What can you do to improve your school community? When we teach children about how society works, we empower children to start improving their communities right away.

Social Studies Supports Academic Language Development

Finally, social studies learning is one of the best subjects for teaching academic language – the words and discourse we don’t use in everyday social language, but in more formal settings like school and work.

One of the biggest challenges I have had as an educator is helping students to communicate in different registers or discourses that are valued in academic settings and in the workplace. Teaching language through subjects like history and geography makes a high impact on learners, especially when they encounter that language in current events that are real and relevant to their families and communities.

Final Thoughts

It doesn’t take long to see how quickly the world can change, especially when we consider the headlines of the recent past. Helping children to think critically the slew of events and perspectives that accompany a major world event is essential to their growth as readers, consumers, and citizens.

Have you wondered how you can make change and learn about ETFO?  Standing committees are a wonderful way to get involved and make a difference.  In ETFO, there are over thirty standing committees to choose from – many of which have openings right now.  

A standing committee is a space for educators to make their voices heard.  Committees discuss so many different issues, from Indigenous Education to Library to Human Rights, you will be able to find your passion represented in an ETFO Standing Committee.  The role of a standing committee is to:

• To develop policy recommendations for consideration by the Executive and Annual Meeting.
• To develop program recommendations for consideration by the Executive and the Annual Meeting.
• To provide the perspective of the member on Federation initiatives and programs.
• To provide advice on the content, delivery, and design of Federation programs.
• To advise the Executive on matters relating to the work of the committee.
• To liaise when appropriate with other ETFO standing committees.
• To provide advice on issues as requested by the Executive.

Your perspective and experience is valued in this space.  Through advice and recommendations, you can help to shape the direction of our federation. Many of the resolutions put forward at the annual meeting each August come from the hard work of standing committee members who identify issues and ask the delegation for support. It’s a truly grassroots movement with member experience and engagement at the centre. 

Working on a team of four to five individuals from across the province, you will have a chance to discuss with one another and a staff liaison to help guide you through the process. Most committees meet together in person twice per year.  If selected to be part of a standing committee, you will serve a two year term before re-applying for a second term. After serving two consecutive terms, committee members take a minimum of one year break before applying to serve another term.  

While there are a number of different options for standing committees from curriculum to awards there are also some that are identity-based.  To be respectful of authentic lived experiences, these committees require applicants to self-identify.  For example, the Indigenous Education committee requires members to identify as First Nations, Metis, Inuit, in order to provide advice on issues that pertain to Indigenous Education.  

This year there are a number of vacancies on standing committees.  If you are interested in getting more involved with ETFO and letting your voice be heard, simply log in to the ETFO secure site and find the link in the top left hand corner of the screen named Standing Committee 2025-2027 Vacancies and consider submitting your application by March 1st, 2025. 

With the release of the revised Grades 1 – 8 Language curriculum (2023) and the addition of more explicit instruction in the language conventions needed to write, I began reflecting on my own educational experiences related to learning language conventions, particularly the one on grammar.

When I reflect on my educational experiences as an elementary student in Alberta and Ontario’s publicly funded school systems, I can recall no moment when I received explicit instruction in grammar. This is not to say that I didn’t receive explicit instruction in grammar from competent teachers, it’s just to say that I cannot recall any. If I speculate, my inability to recall explicitly learning grammar may be for several reasons. Some of those reasons may include sparse grammar lessons, studying grammar in siloed lessons that didn’t help me to understand the direct connection to writing, other areas of language and literacy being prioritized over grammar instruction, or perhaps a combination of these or a list of entirely different reasons altogether. Instead of accepting any of these speculations, I’ll just share what I’ve come to accept which is I don’t know why I can’t remember learning grammar.

What I find interesting is that I can vividly recall receiving explicit instruction in other areas of language and literacy. When I was in kindergarten, I remember reciting the alphabet with my peers and teacher, identifying upper- and lower-case letters, and explicitly learning letter sounds. In grades 1, 4, and 7 I recall learning transcription skills. First print, then cursive, and finally keyboarding. In primary and junior grades, I remember my teachers modelling then instructing me to use my knowledge of phonics to blend letter sounds together to decode unfamiliar words then segment letter sounds apart to encode and spell words. There are other foundational language and literacy skills I can easily recall explicitly learning from skilled teachers however, the absence of grammar from the above examples leads me to wonder if I received explicit instruction in the discipline, shouldn’t I be able to remember it.

Further thinking about my educational experiences as an adult student enrolled in an Ontario teacher preparation program, I recall receiving no training on how to explicitly teach grammar to elementary students. Again, I have no definitive reason to explain why grammar instruction was missing from my pre-service teacher program despite the presence of specific grammar expectations in the 2006 iteration of the revised Grades 1 – 8 Language curriculum. However, I can recall explicitly learning instructional approaches to support teaching other expectations found in language curriculum.

From the absence of explicit grammar instruction in my formal schooling experiences, it seemed of minor importance in comparison to other perhaps more major areas of language and literacy learning such as phonics, transcription, and spelling. As I continue to think about these collective schooling experiences, I’ve deduced that I must’ve developed an implicit knowledge of grammar at some point because I applied it throughout my elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education to write.

Yet, what I learned from my experience working overseas in the role of English as a foreign language teacher, is that I need an explicit knowledge of grammar to teach it because I need to able to explain to students how a competent knowledge of grammar supports their writing compositions. I also accepted that my lack of explicit grammar knowledge did not absolve me of my responsibility to teach it when the school curriculum mandated it.

In my next post, I’ll share the approaches I used to close the gaps in my grammar knowledge so I could better teach students the discipline.