Ontario revises science curriculum, destreams Grade 9

Ontario elementary students will learn coding starting in Grade 1 science class and will no longer be split into applied and advanced streams in Grade 9, the province’s education minister said on Tuesday.

Ontario’s science curriculum was last updated in 2007 and Minister Stephen Lecce said the update was required to account for technological changes since then, such as self-driving vehicles.

“We want students and educators to embrace a modern curriculum that aligns with where the economy is going when it comes to disruption, the emergence of AI (artificial intelligence), robotics,” Lecce said while unveiling the changes at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto.

The Grade 9 changes — all students will attend science classes that prepare them for advanced subjects in later grades and teach them about applied job opportunities — follow a similar move in math that was introduced last summer for the 2021-22 school year.

Streaming has been blamed for tending to push more Black students and other racialized students away from higher education and ultimately into lower-wage labour.

“We want to ensure that no student is prematurely cut off from exploring potential pathways, and this is especially critical in a changing world where technology is enabling global interconnectedness,” Lecce said.

But education unions and critics were quick to point out the limited support offered so far for implementing the math changes and concerns that insufficient resources were again being offered this time.

“Similar to the flawed rollout of Ontario’s revised math curriculum, school boards are left, once again, to deliver insufficient professional learning on new curriculum on a compressed timeline,” said the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO), which represents more than 83,000 Ontario education workers.

The Opposition NDP’s education critic, Marit Stiles, said the move to destream Grade 9 science was welcome but that Lecce had missed the opportunity to provide other important elements, namely smaller class sizes, more teachers and other education workers, and collaboration with and support for educators implementing it.

The new curriculum adds a strand connecting science, technology, social, economic and environmental issues to existing strands on life systems, matter and energy, structures and mechanisms, and Earth and space systems.

A policy document about the changes said students will design, build, prototype and test innovative solutions, use coding to model concepts and assess the impact of emerging technologies, learn about practical applications and the contributions of people with diverse experiences.

Morgan Sharp / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer