Framing the Social Imaginary of Citizenship: Ontario’s Canadian and World Studies 9 & 10 Curriculum Policy Document in Retrospect and Prospect

Abstract

In Ontario, as in many other provincial, state, and national jurisdictions, the government has come to play a significant role in shaping the curriculum taught in public schools. The curriculum, in this sense, is a matter of public policy. In educational research, however, there is a surprising lack of literature analyzing the curriculum as policy. This thesis engages with this gap in the literature through a multifaceted analysis of four successive versions of Ontario’s key curriculum policy document on the education of public secondary students as citizens. In analyzing this document, my emphasis is on how it frames citizenship, which I understand here as the desired relationship between the individual, the society, and the state. Methodologically, this thesis is a hybrid of deductive and inductive analytic approaches. The deductive element consists of an analysis of theoretical literature to develop a typology of the dimensions of citizenship—political, public, juridical, economic, and cultural. The inductive element consists of qualitative analyses of both the four versions of the curriculum policy document and a selection of interviews with teacher candidates who taught courses from this document. My findings reveal a gradual shift in the framing of citizenship in the curriculum over a twenty-year period, with active participation in local or national public life becoming eclipsed in favour of an individualized emphasis on economic participation and juridical responsibilities. While the teacher candidates interviewed reveal a willingness to creatively reinterpret the curriculum, they also describe how they are constrained by a network of other policies that effectively discourage active forms of citizenship. In conclusion, I suggest that future revisions of the curriculum policy document should place greater emphasis on active forms of citizenship in order to bring greater balance to citizenship education policy in Ontario.