Vancouver Sun: 2008 July 26
It won’t just be teenagers reading Canadian literature this fall when a new curriculum requires B.C. high school English teachers to assign at least one Canadian book per year, says the new chairman of the Writers’ Union of Canada.
Wayne Grady, a much-published nature writer who lives near Kingston, Ont., says that when a book lands on a course reading list, “it stays in print longer, and so it’ll be available in bookstores longer. There are all kinds of spinoff effects.”
The 1,600-member writers’ union rallied behind Vancouver’s Jean Baird when she lobbied B.C.’s education ministry to make Canadian books a mandatory part of the English language arts curriculum in Grades 8 to 12. (The Sun reported on the success of her effort July 5.)
Grady notes that this was a battle Canadian authors fought in the 1970s, so when Baird started drumming up support for her campaign, the first reaction of Writers’ Union members was, Do we still have to do this?
“Apparently, we do,” Grady says, and Baird “did a great job.”
She’s the mother of a recent graduate of Lord Byng secondary school. She says her son got a great education there from passionate teachers but wasn’t assigned a single Canadian novel.
Instead, he read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and other British and American novels — books that baby boomers read long ago in school.
Baird is married to George Bowering, who was Canada’s first poet laureate, and she may well have wondered why teens aren’t given his books to read or those of their talented writer friends.
In work she did for the Writers’ Trust of Canada, she has been championing this cause — or, as she puts it, “pushing this boulder” — for years.
Recently, she refined the idea, deciding to focus on B.C. schools, rather than the whole country’s, and to push for a little CanLit in each grade, rather than a stand-alone course that would end up being an elective.
The literary establishment lined up behind her — her list of signatories “ran to over 50 pages” — and, with B.C.’s English language arts curriculum undergoing a review, the education ministry went for it.
“The original English language curriculum was revised in 1995 and it encouraged the use of Canadian literature,” Education Minister Shirley Bond said in an interview.
“What this has done is taken it one step further and simply said, ‘Now it is required.’ I do think that’s an important step forward.”
Bond said school districts should be able to afford new sets of Canadian books. “We make curricular change all of the time, and boards accommodate that within the funding they receive.”
Dave Ellison, who teaches in Surrey and is president of B.C. Teachers of English Language Arts, notes that “some of the fantastic [Canadian] literature that’s available is edgy” and, to be taught in schools, will have to go through an extensive approval process weighing swear words, references to sexuality, and so forth.
He believes one reason teachers have stuck with standards like Lord of the Flies is that “no one is going to dispute your right to teach it.”
Terry Taylor, who teaches in the West Kootenay village of New Denver, already emphasizes Canadian literature with her Grade 9 to 12 students.
You’ll find Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient in her school’s book room and Polite to Bees, by New Denver poet Diana Hartog.
Taylor says small school districts know how to stretch limited resources. “There are some amazing poets on YouTube — you can get everybody from Al Purdy to Shane Koyczan.” She also links with other B.C. schools so that her students reading Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces can discuss it online with kids in Nelson, Nanaimo and New Westminster.
