7
of 8: Decreased Planning Time as a Barrier to Reconciliation Education
Susan Legge, Mount Saint Vincent University
Adrian M. Downey, Mount Saint Vincent University
Authors’
Note
Adrian M. Downey https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0838-0709
Correspondence concerning this article should
be addressed to Susan Legge at susan.legge1@msvu.ca.
Abstract
This article considers the way neoliberal reductions in teacher
planning time work to impede progress in reconciliatory education.
Methodologically informed by phenomenology, the study described here was
qualitative in nature and featured interviews with six Nova Scotia high school
teachers who were teaching the social studies course Mi’kmaw Studies 11.
This paper represents one consideration from the larger study. It focusses on
the ways participants pointed to the restrictions on planning time in their workload
as a direct impediment to actualizing reconciliatory work in education. Drawing
together the literatures of time and neoliberalism in education, the authors
argue that without time to engage with colleagues, to connect with students,
and to just think about the process of course building, teachers—both in Nova
Scotia and internationally—are being moved away from Giroux’s (2025) idea of
educators as transformatory intellectuals. Teachers need time and space to
think and feel their way through the complex histories and contemporary
contexts involved in reconciliation, and the data presented in this study
suggest that Nova Scotia high school teachers currently have neither. To
conclude, the authors call on governments, particularly those that profess a
commitment to truth and reconciliation in and through education, to make truth
and then reconciliation education more than a discursive shift by abating
policies that reduce teacher planning time.
Keywords: reconciliation, reconciliation education, teaching time, neoliberalism
7 of 8: Decreased Planning Time as a Barrier to Reconciliation
Education
The Time of Truth and Reconciliation
It has been 10 years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
of Canada (TRC) released its calls to action and final report (TRC, 2015). In
the ensuing decade, discursive shifts in the way Indigenous topics are discussed
in both K-12 and postsecondary education have been plentiful, including the
emergence of “truth and then reconciliation education” as a field of study
(Howell & Ng-A-Fook, 2023, title). Yet, the literature of truth and then
reconciliation education is often replete with descriptions of barriers to substantive
change. Indeed, teachers’ fears of trespass (Bascuñán et al., 2022), self-presumed
lack of knowledge (Dion, 2009), and moves to innocence (or movements in
thinking that assuage settler guilt; see Tuck & Yang, 2012) are all
commonly referenced as things that need to be worked through in order to
actualize meaningful reconciliatory education (Haige-Brown & Green, 2022). The
current article contributes to the literature by identifying more of these
barriers. Specifically, here we consider how, in Nova Scotia, neoliberal policy
in education has reduced teacher planning time, and in doing so impeded the
progress of teachers of Mi’kmaw Studies 11 toward creating models of
reconciliatory education. We suggest that without the necessary time to think,
learn, and reflect on Indigenous issues, efforts toward truth and
reconciliation in public education are truncated.
Our discussion of teacher planning time and reconciliatory
education emerges from interviews conducted by Susan and supervised by Adrian,[1] with
public high school teachers in Nova Scotia. As with all Canadian provinces,
Nova Scotia forms a unique curricular context within the landscape of Canadian
education. Specifically, in 2015, the government of Nova Scotia signed an agreement
with the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia on treaty education, which made a commitment to
“…teach Treaty Education in all classrooms, grades and schools across Nova
Scotia, not just in the Mi’kmaq ones” (Treaty Education, n.d., p. 2). This
commitment to treaty education was a major step forward for a province that had
long ignored and misrepresented Indigenous people within its public curriculum
(Peters, 2016). The exception to this systemic
erasure was the high school history course Mi’kmaw Studies 11, which was
originally introduced as Mi’kmaw Studies 10 in the early 2000s, then
rewritten as a grade 11 course in 2016. In its current curriculum document, Mi’kmaw
Studies 11 is described as,
a
course that . . . provides opportunities for learners to gain an understanding
of how they [students] are connected to the history and culture of the First
Peoples of the Maritimes… enable[ing] them to achieve
a greater understanding of, and respect for, both Mi’kmaw society and Mi’kmaw
contributions to Canadian society. (Nova Scotia Curriculum, 2016, p. 1)
The six teachers interviewed for this project were all teachers of Mi’kmaw
Studies 11; each of the participants commented on how important the course
was and how they often lacked time to do the course the justice they felt it
deserved.
In the paper that follows, we present the findings of the
interviews in more depth, focusing on the ways that participants pointed to the
restrictions on planning time in their workload as a direct impediment to
actualizing reconciliatory work in education. To begin, in the next section, we
describe the Nova Scotia curricular context in more detail, offering something
of a cursory literature review in the process. We also describe previous
writings around the concept of time in education. Then, we outline the
methodology underpinning the larger study. Finally, we turn to the interviews
with participants, showing how all the teachers in the study pointed to the
lack of time as being a major restriction on their progress toward
reconciliatory action in education.
Nova Scotia Social Studies Curriculum, Neoliberalism, and Time
Before proceeding to discuss the methodological positioning of this
study and the interviews in more detail, three areas of research deserve some
attention: the Nova Scotia curricular context, neoliberalism, and time as
manifest in education. This section will discuss each of the above.
First, to contextualize the current education climate in Nova
Scotia, in 2018, the provincial government abolished English language school
boards and removed principals and vice-principals from the teachers’ union
(Doucette, 2018). The previously publicly elected school boards were replaced
with unelected regional centres for education, and the role of school
administrators morphed from one of curriculum leadership and teacher support to
that of educational management. A result of these changes is that it has become
“easier for a government to impose top-down curricula and directives” (Gillis
& Hurd, 2023, para. 9). Specifically, in the six years since Bill-72 (The
Education Reform Act) became law, teachers have suffered the consequences of a
system that has consistently underfunded and overtasked education support
workers (including educational assistants and substitute teachers) and expected
teachers to simply fill the gaps left when those workers leave the system
(Gillis et al., 2019). A tipping point for high school teachers occurred in
2021, with the imposition of an extra course of study, from six teaching
sections per year to seven. With a school day that contains four teaching
blocks, this means teachers are in an active instructional role for a full day,
at least two, and sometimes three, days per week. In the wake of those changes,
teachers have reported increasing workloads, feelings of being overwhelmed and
burnt out, and greater than expected numbers have left teaching through
retirement and attrition (Agyapong et al., 2024; Cooke, 2024; Laroche, 2022).
The study under consideration in this article looked at a specific
course within the Nova Scotia social studies curriculum. There have been a
limited number of studies within that specific curriculum context (e.g.,
Rogers, 2011, 2018; Tinkham, 2013; Tompkins, 2002; Peters, 2016). Despite this dearth, however,
it is widely and precisely acknowledged that over the last three decades, regardless
of the political party that has formed provincial government, the direction of
Nova Scotia educational policy has been toward neoliberalism (Campbell, 2024;
Rogers, 2018; see also Frost, 2020). In Nova Scotia, the high school
curriculum places a strong emphasis on students choosing courses that will
enhance their perceived economic futures, which forms a neoliberal logic that
devalues and draws learners away from social studies (Rogers, 2018). Indeed, as
discussed by participants below, the social sciences are often and actively
devalued relative to the hard sciences in Nova Scotia public schools.
In many ways,
the influence of neoliberalism on Nova Scotia’s education system mirrors its
influence on education globally (Kumar, 2019). Neoliberalism can be described
as the ramping up of capitalism, manifest in the removal of social safety nets in
favour of an unbridled free market. In education globally, neoliberalism
manifests as more teacher accountability measures, an erosion of the autonomy
of teachers, more standardized tests with higher stakes, attempts to privatize
public education, and a shift in curricular content toward those skills that
are most economically rewarding (Giroux, 2013, 2025; Kumar, 2019). In Nova
Scotia, many of the above are also true (Campbell, 2024; Rogers, 2018; see also
Frost, 2020), and recent research in the province has also pointed to massive
increases in teacher burnout and emotional exhaustion (Agyapong
et al., 2024; Ritchie et al., 2023). For us, the two are clearly linked: the conditions of
teacher work have become untenable because of the influence of neoliberalism on
education, and teachers are suffering as a result.
In this
article, we suggest that one precise moment when teachers can feel the effects
of neoliberalism is when their time for planning is replaced with more
instructional time. As such, time deserves some discussion here as well. While
time has not historically been a major focus of educational research, recent
work has brought it into the fold of educational thinking. Specifically, Rose
and Whitty (2010) argued that time could form something of a tyrannical control
over the way learning occurred in the early childhood classroom. In response,
Pacini-Ketchabaw (2012) pointed out ways of thinking with time rather than
against it. More recently, Saul (2020) has suggested that divergent experiences
of time, those that do not conform to the dominant expression of time in
school, can be a manifestation of oppression. Adrian has contributed to this
work on time as a dimension of education thinking, showing how the industrial
expression of time in schooling works against meaningful learning in Indigenous
education contexts (Downey, 2021) and through the expression of a lived
curriculum more broadly (Downey & Whitty, 2019). As discussed in more
detail below, the current research reinforces some of this previous literature,
showing that the lack of teacher planning time, as a result of the previously
referenced increase of teaching responsibilities from six to seven courses in
Nova Scotia high schools, directly impedes progress toward reconciliation in
and through education.
Drawing together the literatures of time and neoliberalism in
education, we argue that without time to engage with colleagues, to connect
with students, and to just think about the process of course building,
teachers—both in Nova Scotia and internationally—are being moved away from
Giroux’s (2025) idea of educators as transformatory intellectuals. Instead,
teachers are being tasked with more courses to manage every day, resulting in
“the devaluation of critical, intellectual work on the part of teachers and
students” (Giroux, 2025, p. 116) and reducing teaching to training. In more
traditional Marxist terms, when teachers’ planning time is reduced, they are
further removed from the “means of production” of knowledge, being treated as
trained technicians rather than sensitive and critical intellectual workers.
Throughout this piece, we argue that such an erosion of the intellectual
autonomy of teachers directly impedes meaningful work toward truth and
reconciliation education.
Having now offered some characterization of the curriculum context
in Nova Scotia through a discussion of the literatures to which we see this
article contributing, we now move on to discuss the methodology of the study.
Methodology
The research reported on in this paper was undertaken as part of Susan’s
master’s thesis (Legge, 2024), which was supervised by Adrian. The larger
project worked from the central research question, “What is it like to teach Mi’kmaw
Studies 11?”. The purpose driving this research was to learn what teachers
experienced when they taught the course as a way to learn about how
reconciliation was being taken up in K-12 education in the province.
Toward the goal of learning what it is like to teach Mi’kmaw Studies
11; phenomenology was selected as a guiding methodological framework—specifically, the
phenomenological research process described by Carl Moustakas (1994) in his
book Phenomenological Research Methods. Phenomenology is the
study of lived experiences; it is descriptive (about the experience), reflective (on what
has been described), and reflexive on the part of the researcher. The
phenomenologist focusses on the experiences of participants in order “to
determine what an experience means for the persons who have had the experience”
(Moustakas, 1994, p. 13). This reflection, as expressed by the speaker to the
researcher, forms the basis of an interpretation of that experience. From the
specific experiences of the individual may come “general or universal meanings”
(Moustakas, 1994, p. 13). It is through this lens of lived experience that
insight may be gained into larger systemic processes.
This study
reflected the lived experiences of six teachers of Mi’kmaw Studies 11
working in the public school system in Nova Scotia. Semi-structured interviews
of between sixty and ninety minutes were conducted with each teacher. Interviews
took place between April 1 and May 31 of 2024 and were often held in schools to
accommodate the teachers’ busy schedules. As part of the informed consent
process, each participant was provided with questions for the interview
intended to stimulate memories of teaching Mi’kmaw Studies 11.
Participants were also encouraged to bring topics and personal experiences
about teaching the course to share during the interview. During the interviews,
Susan posed the following question to each participant: “Can you describe any constraints on how you teach the
course?” In their responses to this question, a significant
portion of the participants reflected first on increased teaching assignments
and decreased preparation time as a constraint to their teaching. In addition,
as the final portion of each interview, Susan provided an opportunity for each
participant to reflect on topics they wished to discuss in greater detail.
Again, participants returned to concerns about the lack of time available to
learn from Mi’kmaw Elders and Knowledge Keepers, to create a relevant,
anti-colonial curriculum for the course, and to support students as they
grappled with the idea of reconciliation in their learning.
Ethics approval for the project was granted by both the University
Research Ethics Board and the Regional Centre for Education’s Research
Department. Because of the tangential relation between the topic of study and
the local Indigenous population (i.e., the Mi’kmaq), an exemption was also
sought and received from Mi’kmaq Ethics Watch, a committee that reviews
research pertaining to Mi’kmaw peoples, knowledges, arts, treaties,
spiritualities, and cultures. As per the
conditions of participation in the study, each of the six teachers was assigned
a pseudonym to ensure the protection of their identity. This
was felt to be necessary because participants shared information and
experiences that sometimes showed colleagues and
administrators in an unfavourable light, and they also spoke frankly about
community experiences and political issues.
Generally, the participants’ responses fell into two overarching categories
that together formed an answer to the research question: the experience of
teaching Mi’kmaw Studies 11 felt constrained and contested (Legge,
2024). It felt contested in the sense that reconciliation is both important and
politicized, and non-Indigenous teachers often grappled with their
positionality in doing this work. It felt constrained by bureaucratic pressures
emergent from the neoliberal education policy described above. In the current
article, we focus on one dimension of the constraints teachers faced: time. Although
other constraints, such as financial and material support, were mentioned
frequently by participants, it was ultimately time that all the teachers asked
for repeatedly.
Findings
Having thus discussed the methodology of the larger study and the
relationship of the current article to that larger work, we now proceed to
discuss the participants’ comments about how time prevented progress toward
reconciliatory education.
Seven
of Eight
In the interviews, I (Susan) was curious to find out if time and
money for curriculum development and teacher education connected to
reconciliation education and treaty education were being provided in an
identifiable way for these teachers. I was disappointed but not surprised by
what they told me. The participants spoke about the education system they work
in, providing less and less time for them to create curriculum as opposed to
more. They spoke of their workload increasing yearly and of planning time being
excised from the teaching day (see also Cook, 2024; D’Entremont, 2022, 2024;
Kelloway et al., 2015; Lau, 2024; LaRoche, 2022; News-NSTU, 2021; Pacaol,
2021). According to the study participants, the breaking point was reached in
September of 2021 when their workload was increased from six of eight teaching
sections to seven of eight (see also Nova Scotia Parents, 2021; Frost, 2021).
As I listened to the lived experiences of these teachers, a common concern
emerged: they were not receiving either the time or the resources needed to
plan, to learn, or to work together to create the curriculum called for by the
TRC. The phrase I kept hearing that encapsulated this lack: “seven of eight”.
As described above, “seven of eight” refers to the increase in the
high school teachers’ workload from teaching six courses per year to teaching
seven. This amounts to a 12.5% increase in teaching time annually. It is
another full class (usually between 25 and 30 students) to be planned, taught,
evaluated, and reported on for teachers. Depending on whether the additional
course is a duplicate of one already on the teacher’s course assignment, it may
also mean developing plans for an extra course of study. Three years into the
change, a high school teacher in this system is teaching four out of four
periods of the day (i.e., all day with only a lunch break) between two and
three days a week. One participant expressed specific concerns about the effect
of the increased workload, saying, “I think it’s scary… doing seven of eight
[courses]. If I were teaching five new courses a year… and I was trying to come
up with this [Mi’kmaw Studies curriculum] on my own, I just feel like I
wouldn’t do it justice”. Each participant in the study acknowledged that the
curriculum document produced in 2016 by the Nova Scotia Department of Education
provided a starting place for curriculum development but also pointed out that
assignments and support material for teaching had to be sought out from
external sources. A majority of teachers understand that creating classroom
material is an expectation of the job. Nonetheless, being given the
responsibility of teaching between twenty and thirty additional students over
the school year and then being expected to create a curriculum from scratch is
a significant increase in workload. During the 2022/23 school year, the second
when this increased workload was in place, Agyapong et al. (2024) collected
data from Nova Scotia teachers that revealed 77% of the respondents to the
survey felt emotionally exhausted by their current working conditions. This
statistic lends support to the experience of the study participants, one of
whom told me as she reflected on her own increased course load, “I’m so tired,
Susan, I’m just so tired… [I need] time, time.”
The impact of this increased workload on the teachers I spoke to
was profound and complicated. Five of the six teachers interviewed had worked
in the Nova Scotia education system before the change, and they felt and saw
the effects of having substantially less time to spend developing curriculum,
working with students, and being involved with the life of the school. The
sixth teacher, who was new to teaching, simply felt overwhelmed by the workload
but had no experience of teaching before the addition of the seventh course,
and thus did not refer directly to the change to seven out of eight. Looking
more specifically to developing education for reconciliation, the teachers were
concerned that they were not working toward an anti-colonial pedagogy in their
classrooms in large part because of the time constraints and mental fatigue
created by their increased workload.
Time
Constraints and Developing Anti-colonial Classrooms
All six teachers in the
study felt Mi’kmaw Studies 11 was a useful starting place to teach
students about reconciliation and the role that Canadians must undertake in
this process. One participant reflected on both the process of reconciliation,
as she perceived it, and how the course provides a beginning step of
understanding, and perhaps action, for students. She said,
You can’t
have reconciliation without understanding, and you can’t have understanding
without the truth, right? So, I see the Mi’kmaw Studies course as being part of
the truth-telling that has to happen. I see it as
being a door to the conversation of reconciliation for a lot of young people… They
are open and want to learn and understand and are primed and ready in a lot of
ways… Reconciliation is the end that we hope for, but there’s a lot that has to
happen in between the truth-telling and the reconciliation, too. I think
justice is like the missing word from this conversation; it’s that you tell the
truth, and then there has to be justice. And there has to be restitution. You
can’t have reconciliation without restitution… we talk a lot about how messy it
all is… reconciliation is messy, and painful.
Reflecting on her words,
creating a curriculum to help students understand what it means to live as
treaty people is a complex undertaking, and Mi’kmaw Studies 11 is a
resource that can assist in that process. Mi’kmaw Studies 11 was created
by a joint committee of Mi’kmaw and settler educators and has been available to
high school students in Nova Scotia for almost ten years in its current form.
Although the present curriculum document is strong in terms of historical
knowledge and cultural practices, there is much work to be done to
update the course as we move toward models of anti-colonial education and
reconciliation. As above and below, a major impediment to that work is the
demand on the time of teachers who are tasked with ever-increasing numbers of
courses and students.
The majority of teachers currently teaching Mi’kmaw Studies 11
in Nova Scotia are not Mi’kmaq, and as a result, are faced with a huge learning
curve of both content and pedagogical philosophies as they work to implement
this course for students. Within this study, every participant expressed a
desire for professional development specifically targeted at the Mi’kmaw
Studies 11 curriculum, anti-colonial education practices, and ways to teach
about reconciliation. They were interested in time for teachers of the course
to work together to share and create resources, and to read, think and learn
about reconciliation education. In the words of the participants: “there’s so
much to learn”. All the teachers I spoke to understood that curriculum
development will necessarily extend beyond the teaching day, no matter what
course is being taught. However, with two to three days of the teaching week
without any preparation time to even arrange peer-to-peer consultation or make contacts
outside the school environment, more of the workload is shifted to post-work
hours. This is compounded by the addition of more students that each teacher is
responsible for as a result of the increased course load.
The two participants who were new to teaching the course related
that they spent inordinate amounts of time just locating resources. Although
there is a course document available, unless a mentor teacher for Mi’kmaw
Studies 11 is on staff and willing to share their own course material, the
expectation voiced by the teachers I spoke to was that they were responsible
for creating their own instructional materials. When asked about potential
support at the board level for a teacher new to the course, one participant
responded that she didn’t even know who to contact.
Additionally, the teachers in this study, recognizing the
limitations of their own knowledge and experience, expressed a desire for
opportunities to be taught by Mi’kmaw Elders and Knowledge Keepers. Such a
desire is reasonable given the ways that Indigenous people have often been
misrepresented in settler-run education systems (Peters, 2016). Indeed, Newhouse
and Quantick (2022) note that “the Indigeneity of the instructor is critical
for courses that deal explicitly with Indigenous culture and Indigenous Knowledge”
(p. 275) in the context of their university courses, and similar sentiments
were held by some participants about the Mi’kmaw Studies 11 course—that
it would be best taught by a Mi’kmaw person. While recognizing this desire to
learn directly from Mi’kmaw Elders and Knowledge Keepers comes from a good
place, it must also be acknowledged that such a desire can put an undue burden
on Indigenous people to educate non-Indigenous people. In reconciliatory work,
settler folk, thus, have some obligation to educate themselves and their kin with
publicly available resources and events before looking directly to Indigenous
people for significant education pieces that require explanation,
demonstration, or discussion from the community (Toulouse, 2016; see also Atho, 2019; Chapman & Whiteford, 2017; Ducharme, 2013).
For the participants, however, there was no budget or time commitment available
from the teacher’s school administration or centres for education to support
connecting with Elders or Knowledge Keepers, and so their learning was limited
to secondary sources.
Only two of the six participants had their own connections in the
Mi’kmaw community that they could contact with
questions about the curriculum. The participant who was brand new to the Nova
Scotia education system explained that a timetable where he taught all four
periods of the day for three days of the week meant that there was literally no
time in the school day for him to meet with mentor teachers or other support
staff (including the Indigenous student support worker[2] based
in the school). He said, “Often I’m busy throughout working hours, and then,
like at 3:30, okay, I’m finally free, but the support staff are already gone.” Many
support staff positions in Nova Scotia high schools are either part-time or
split between more than one school, and so not being able to meet with these
staff members during their actual work hours meant that there was no way to
meet at all. Mentor teachers are also in the same position with workday time
challenges, and so scheduling professional development with other teachers did
mean looking to the pre- or post-school day, which also presents challenges.
A related issue is the lack of support by the Nova Scotia Board of
Education for learning experiences for students beyond the typical western
classroom. Each of the participants who had taught Mi’kmaw Studies 11
before 2020 recalled how resources, like field trips and guest speakers, did
seem more available then but were noticeably absent now. In their words, “[Now]
buses are not available; money is not available… there’s no coverage [for
classroom teachers] because of seven of eight [courses being taught by high
school teachers]. It used to work, but not now…” One teacher recalled
pre-pandemic times at her school: “[One year] I had seven, I think, guest
speakers… We went to a powwow at Dalhousie, we went to Millbrook cultural
centre, we took a bus to Debert and did the Debert walking trail… It was
amazing.” A second teacher spoke about feeling stymied by board policy and lack
of administrative support at her school,
To
bring in guest speakers now, the board has made that almost impossible. I tried
to have one last year… It has to be approved by the principal… and, when I
tried last year, it was just like I’m [the principal] too busy, I don’t have
time for that right now, and it didn’t happen.
A third teacher mused on what is missed as a result of these
policies and the new time constraint:
And
you can talk about those things in a classroom, but it’s not nearly as
impactful… [Now], those things are expensive, hard to organize, hard to make
work logistically… even something as simple as going to Millbrook to the
cultural centre… Even something that should be pretty simple is difficult to
arrange.
These teachers understood what was possible and yet found
themselves increasingly frustrated with the continued neoliberal erosion in the
system where they work of a basic teaching resource: time.
Effects
of Neoliberalism on the Education System
The teachers I spoke to offer a window into an education system
they see as less and less supportive of teachers. Twenty years after the
publication of Giroux and Giroux’s (2006) “Challenging Neoliberalism’s New
World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy”, it is clear that the authors’
worries about an education system fallen victim to a neoliberal agenda, where
students are simply a convenient product and teachers are the widget makers
tasked with their creation, has come to pass in Nova Scotia. The stressor that
continues to build for teachers is the ever-increasing speed of the assembly
line on which these student “products” are expected to be “manufactured”.
As alluded to above, participants discussed their experiences with
lack of support for teacher professional development and course funding of Mi’kmaw
Studies 11 as tied to the perception within their schools and centres for
education that Mi’kmaw Studies 11 is a social science course and, as a
result, not worthy of any extra expenditures to support either new or
experienced teachers to deepen their understanding of the course material and pedagogies.
In their experience, the Nova Scotia education system is marginalizing its
investment in both the course and its teachers because there is no perceived
economic gain for students flowing from the credit. Ironically, the
environmental science course called Netukulimk 12, currently being
piloted in Nova Scotia public high schools, is an Indigenous knowledge course
that is receiving large amounts of government funding and release time for
teachers involved in the pilot (CBC News, 2024; Nova Scotia, 2024). Why are
these funds available for one course and not another? One study participant
opined that Netukulimk 12 is a senior-level science course and Mi’kmaw
Studies is a grade 11 social studies course, so “make the connection”. An
examination of the difference between who is expected by the system to be in a
senior science class (Netukulimk 12) versus an open social studies class
(Mi’kmaw Studies 11) points to a bias of resources being made available
to a university stream science course rather than an open-level social studies
class. As Rogers (2020) puts it, “Nova Scotia demonstrates the neoliberal
education reform pattern perfectly: consult, reform, dismantle, and repeat” (p.
8). There’s no easy solution for teachers when the government that controls
education funding appears to dismiss the value of the course (Mi’kmaw
Studies 11) you are teaching.
All six participants referred to constraints on their time for
curriculum development and student contact, and even their personal health and work-life
balance, as a result of their current workload. One participant’s reflection
was particularly poignant, as he delineated the effects for both teachers and
students of increased teaching time and decreased time to prepare for classes
and interact with students:
We
need to know our kids in order to teach them. And yet we are not given the
opportunity to know them. If this [Mi’kmaw Studies 11] is truly going to
be a success, if the message of what happened to the Mi’kmaw people and the
importance of the culture itself surviving is going to be taught, we need to
know our kids. We need to be given the opportunity. And seven out of eight
don’t allow that. Not being able to do things with our kids outside of the
classroom doesn’t allow that because we don’t have the time to do it. We don’t
have the time to improve our teaching methods, and we don’t have the time to
learn the things we need.
This experience is reflected in the literature, which comments on
the trend toward educational systems directing resources primarily to
skill-based education:
Everywhere
we look these days, there is evidence of education being understood as an
economic good. Parents navigate ‘education markets’ in the hope of choosing
‘the best’ school for their children. Policymakers talk about the economic
benefits of increasing young people’s literacy and numeracy skills… public
schools increasingly operate like private businesses. More than ever before,
school principals are positioned as managers, accountable to the needs and
wishes of ‘clients’ (parents and students). The content of school curricula is
also being reimagined in line with changing economic demands... and a focus on
science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). (Savage, 2017, p. 143)
This dilemma of more students and less time is premised on a
capitalist business model of neoliberal ideals that value most “efficiency and
accountability through measurable performance standards and extensive
standardized testing” (Scheutze et al., 2011, p. 79), demonstrating the change
in school culture(s) from “a collectivist and public orientation to norms of
individualism and… parental choice that is the result of neoliberal economism”
(Scheutze et al., 2011, p. 79). While the education system in Nova Scotia
today, like many across the world, was built on an industrial model of
production, the neoliberal push in the last three decades has intensified the
system, pushing it to its limits on the backs of a teacher population that is
increasingly burnt out.
Without the time to work with colleagues, to connect with students,
and to just think about the process of course building, the teachers in this
study are being moved away from their status as intellectual workers who work
with students to think about why things are not just “how to”. The participants
in the study recognized Giroux’s (2025) concern that being tasked with more
courses to manage every day is resulting in “the devaluation of critical,
intellectual work on the part of teachers and students” (Giroux, 2025, p. 116)
and that as a result “teaching is reduced to training” (Giroux, 2003, p. 2). These
teachers were frustrated by a system that viewed time as a precious resource
only when it pertained to direct instruction. With that in mind, the notion of
rebuilding a curriculum to reflect the expectations of the TRC’s calls to action
62 and 63, which deal with making age-appropriate curriculum around residential
schools and supporting Indigenous education more broadly, is being subsumed
into an education machine focussed on students as products rather than critical
thinkers.
The
Dream of Time to Read and Think
This growing lack of time during the school day for high school
teachers in Nova Scotia to think, create, and connect heightens a fear in the
participants about presenting culturally specific subject matter and pedagogies
that, coming from a non-Indigenous person, might appear appropriative or
disingenuous as a result of ignorance or incomplete knowledge. The
non-Indigenous participants talked about being so taxed by student needs and
increasing amounts of administrative paperwork that they simply had no energy
left for deeper dives into curriculum. For example, they expressed trepidation
about teaching Mi’kmaw vocabulary as they worried about creating unintentional offence
with mispronunciation or incorrect translation. One participant’s reflection
encapsulated the feelings of most, saying,
I
have qualms about being the person passing on this knowledge to people who
again are essentially outsiders as I am... it is a bit of a dance because I am
not [Indigenous], but I'm gonna share what I know and have come to understand
with you because that’s my job and that’s what I’ve been hired to do. But I
need you to know why I shouldn’t be and why I am and why there’s no alternative
here at the moment.
This worry about making mistakes is addressed within the literature
(Downey, 2018; Bascuñán et al., 2022; Carroll et al., 2020; Koops, 2018; Rice
et al., 2022); the overall conclusion of the researchers is that mistakes are a
part of learning and that fear of getting something wrong isn’t a sufficient
reason for not teaching it (Bascuñán et al., 2022). Further to that is an
understanding that neither learners nor teachers are perfect and that the work
toward anti-colonial education and reconciliation will be imperfect:
Moving
from anxiety and feelings of discomfort to action is necessary for educators in
all settler colonial contexts […] Although we can
never be ‘perfect’ as settlers, we can aim to be imperfect accomplices – always
striving to work with and for Indigenous peoples on their lands. (Carroll et
al., 2020, p. 17)
The literature does support that a greater good is accomplished for
reconciliation education through educators who are willing to take the chance
of making mistakes, and that this is preferable to being Dion’s (2007) “perfect
stranger,” too nervous to even try. But this knowledge is presented in academic
scholarship, and it is not readily available to classroom teachers whose
available time is spent, according to the study participants, just fulfilling
the demands of the day. This paralysis of teachers as “perfect strangers”
without the time to even find these academic conversations, let alone engage in
peer discussions around them or work through their own discomfort, is precisely
illustrative of the problem under discussion. Teaching well cannot be rushed,
least of all when the topic requires a high level of reflexivity.
It is worth noting, briefly, that in recent years, faculties of
education in the province have begun offering pre-service teachers’ courses in
Indigenous education, with some including them as mandatory in their programs.
Those courses offer an initial space for a deeper consideration of Indigenous
topics, including but transcending the teaching of Mi’kmaw Studies 11,
but given their relatively recent inclusion in B.Ed. programs,[3] many
teachers in the province have not had coursework in Indigenous education as
part of their primary teacher certification.
A related desire/dream expressed by the study participants was to
have time to read widely, think deeply, and work together to learn about
reconciliation and anticolonial education models. In the words of the
participants: “I want some time to be able to sit down and collaborate with
many different people about how to do this [teach Mi’kmaw Studies 11]
and how to do it well” and “If they [centres for education] really care, we
need time for more teachers to work together.” Unfortunately, this dream was
being set aside as a result of the ever-increasing workload demanded by
neoliberal policy reforms, which left no time even to search out relevant
materials. Classroom teachers are too often expected to create student
materials “right now” and then catch up with the research literature when (and
if) they can. Their curriculum becomes a surface pedagogy with little
opportunity for deep reflection or sometimes even awareness of exactly what is
being talked about in the wider academic community. The teachers I spoke to
want more than this. They identify with Carolyn Roberts’ description of what it
means to be an accomplice to Indigenous people, to be
someone
who is always learning more, asking more questions, and always taking it upon
themselves to do better in the spaces they are in. Knowing that in education,
the narrative is always shifting and it will always be
a learning journey, not a destination. (Roberts, n.d., para. 8)
This vision of education as a process of continual learning was a
dream for the participants, one that had continually been stifled by the
increasing demands of their jobs.
Conclusion
In this paper, we have highlighted the myriad ways in which public
high school teachers in Nova Scotia point to time as being a limiting factor in
preventing them from doing more meaningful reconciliatory work in education.
While specific to the context of Nova Scotia curriculum, this finding is
anticipated by earlier work on time in education (e.g., Rose & Whitty,
2010; Downey & Whitty, 2019). While some argue that time is something that
can be worked-with (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012), there remains a tyranny about the
way time is operationalized in schools for both students and teachers.
This tyranny is felt acutely as neoliberal education policy, the
presence of which has been well-documented in the context of Nova Scotia (e.g.,
Campbell, 2024; Rogers, 2018), restricts teachers’ time for reflection and
planning in favour of classroom instruction time. In many ways, the change from
six to seven out of eight identified by these teachers is a precise
manifestation of what Giroux (2025) might call the erosion of the intellectual
status of the teacher. Rather than being viewed as sensitive, thoughtful, and
reflective intellectual workers, teachers are treated as cogs in a system, who
are only useful to that system when they are actively engaged in the act of
teaching. Their mere presence becomes more important than their actual work.
These conditions are untenable for teachers, as has been shown by
the research pointing to the extensive emotional exhaustion teachers experience
these days (Agyapong et al., 2024; Ritchie et al., 2023). Here, the
intensification (but also routinization and bureaucratization) of teacher work
manifests in the decrease of planning time, which not only results in teacher
fatigue and burnout as suggested by previous research, directly impedes the
work toward reconciliation being done in classrooms. Teachers need time and
space to think and feel their way through the complex histories and
contemporary contexts involved in reconciliation, and the data presented here
suggest that teachers currently have neither.
To conclude our paper, then, we call on governments, particularly
those that profess a commitment to truth and reconciliation in and through
education, to make truth and (then) reconciliation education more than a
discursive shift by abating policies that reduce teacher planning time. We
recognize that our call may well go unheeded in the context of Nova Scotia, as
a current shortage of teachers has spurred the progressive conservative
government to propose drastic decreases in the requirements for teacher education
in the province (Ayers, 2024; Henderson, 2024). Yet, even in the face of
neoliberal policy, we remain heartened by teachers’ commitments to
reconciliation. The teachers interviewed for this study want to do more to
actualize meaningful reconciliatory education with their students, and every
day, they make incredible things happen, even as their working conditions
deteriorate. In short, teachers want to do this and do it well, and it is time
that government, administration, and society more broadly give them the time
and space to do so.
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[1] Susan is a settler-Canadian. Adrian
has Indigenous and settler ancestry, and his maternal family are all members of
the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation.
[2] The job description of
Indigenous student support workers in Nova Scotia is to work directly with
Indigenous students in the school to “ensure improved achievement and a
positive school experience” (Halifax Regional, 2024, Scope of Responsibilities
section, para. 1) for Indigenous students. Assisting teachers to create
relevant programming is not part of their job description. Nonetheless, the
experience of the study participants was that the Indigenous support workers in
their schools did take time from their already oversubscribed daily schedules
to help Mi’kmaw Studies 11 teachers with curriculum development and
Indigenous pedagogies.
[3] As an example from the experience
of the Authors, our university first offered a course on Indigenous education
in 2015 as an elective. It was made mandatory for secondary education students
in 2021-2022 and mandatory for elementary education students in 2024-2025. It
is, of course, possible that our university is an exception in the region.
Future research may be warranted in teacher education’s role in reconciliation
education in Nova Scotia.