As legislation looms ordering striking Alberta teachers back to work, Jennifer Black is bittersweet about returning to class to teach English to dozens of anxious Grade 12 students while feeling hopeless herself.
“I’m happy to return because I know the kids need me,” Black said in an interview from her Calgary home.
“But I’m unhappy to return because nothing has changed.”
Black is among 51,000 teachers and about 750,000 students in public, separate and francophone schools who face the possibility of soon returning to the classroom.
With legislature back in session, will the province legislate teachers back to work?
The provincewide teachers’ strike is now into its third week. Premier Danielle Smith says the standoff is becoming an intolerable hardship for students and families and has indicated her government expects to introduce back-to-work legislation as early as next week.
Black says if that happens, everyone will return to a learning environment worse than the one before.
“Teachers will go back very demoralized, very worried about their students. [The government] has created this feeling of helplessness and hopelessness,” she said.
“It’s really hard to continue to do work that is denigrated and not valued. If things aren’t going to get better, [teachers will ask], ‘Why am I killing myself doing this?”‘
Black said the ripple effect will still hit students. She said many of them have lost the opportunity to submit early university applications due to the strike because they didn’t have their grades or support from guidance counsellors.
And students don’t know if they can catch up fast enough to be ready for the next round of application deadlines early next year.
“We’ll have to be very serious. Very focused. It’s going to be very utilitarian,” Black said.
She said prepping lessons has also been difficult. She has several students with complex needs, including a 16-year-old student who became homeless this past summer and depended on her teachers for support.
“I bought her a rice cooker. We bought her bus tickets to go back and forth from school,” Black said. “We did what we could to make sure that she’s OK.
“I have no idea what’s been going on with her for the last four weeks. I think about her every day.”
Education professor Maren Aukerman said if teachers are ordered back, both they and their students will be challenged.
“It’ll be like starting the school year all over again,” said Aukerman, with the University of Calgary.
“Research shows that kids who come back after having been gone for a while don’t come back at exactly the point academically where they were when they left.”
Aukerman said the learning environment is also set to be more difficult, as striking teachers will be forced to return to school without having had the government address the issues they went on strike to improve in the first place.
Teachers, through the Alberta Teachers’ Association, have demanded in bargaining the province do more to address overcrowded classrooms and provide more support to address classroom complexities.
“There’s actually quite a lot of research that teachers who are under stress and burnout are not able to support kids as well as teachers who are well supported,” Aukerman said.
“And there’s evidence that there’s worse academic achievement when kids are in classrooms with teachers who are under enormous stress.”
She urged teachers to be communicative and understanding.
“Making a space where the teachers can answer questions about the strike will be important because kids are not going to understand what happened,” she said.
“Making sure that kids don’t get lost in that frenzy to catch up is something that I’m very concerned about.”
