Negotiating and Implementing the 1951 Federal Integration Policy in British Columbia, 1946-1956.

Principal Investigator: Helen Raptis
Collaborator: Anne Marshall
Research Assistants: Ma Xiangyu (Shelley)
                                     Sheila Simpkins

Canada’s 1951 decision to move away from segregated, residential schooling to the integration of aboriginal children into regular public schools represented an historic policy shift. Despite the major significance of this policy shift, no historical research to date has examined how the federal government negotiated the Master Tuition agreements with the provinces, nor how the agreements were implemented by provincial governments and school districts. This research project addresses a critical gap in historical scholarship by researching how the federal government’s integration policy was negotiated with the province of British Columbia and implemented by the Prince Rupert School District — one of the first districts in BC to integrate aboriginal children into public schools. It builds on the principal researcher’s work in the area of historical/ policy studies and establishes the platform from which the university-based collaborators (Helen Raptis and Anne Marshall) will develop partnerships with aboriginal community researchers to produce future research on the impacts of the 1951 policy shift on the lived experiences of aboriginal students and their teachers.

The gap in the historical literature is partially due to the fact that few historians have traditionally attempted to “bring history and policy together.” Increasingly, however, contemporary educational historians are acknowledging the significant contributions that historical analysis can make to educational policy study. Despite growing acceptance of this view, historical scholarship pertaining to policy processes has remained sparse. In particular, historical researchers have largely neglected the implementation phase of policy study. This is due, in part, to the complex social environments in which policies unfold, leading one researcher to characterize implementation as the “Achilles heel” of the policy process. Some historians believe that the dearth of historical policy scholarship has confounded the development of conceptual frameworks, since “present actions and plans for the future flow ineluctably from beliefs about what went before.” According to Silver (1995, p.40) policy models — and reforms that are often based on them — tend to be ahistoric, rejecting the past “by their silence about it.”
This study is contributing knowledge about a period in Canada’s educational history that has generally been neglected. Furthermore, since conceptual policy frameworks have tended to be ahistorical, it is providing much-needed descriptive data from which to build on current theoretical conceptions of educational policy-making. Finally, it sets the groundwork for a collaborative research undertaking between aboriginal community-based researchers and the university-based principal researchers. The focus of this latter study will be on examining in detail the impacts of the integration policy on the lives of the students and teachers who experienced it first hand.

Timeline:

Articles and presentations to date:

Raptis, H. Implementing the 1951 Federal Integration Policy in British Columbia, 1948-1981, presented at the joint conference of the Canadian History of Education Association and the American History of Education Society, October 27th 2006, Ottawa, Ontario.

Raptis, H. Aboriginal Education and the Shifting Discourse of Citizenship. A paper presented at the Canadian Society for the Study of Education conference, May 27, 2007, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Raptis, H. Three Decades of Aboriginal Education in British Columbia's Public Schools. A paper presented at Connections Research Conference, Wednesday, May 2, Victoria, British Columbia.

Raptis, H. Implementing Integrated Education Policy for On-Reserve Aboriginal Children in British Columbia, 1951-1981. Historical Studies in Education, 20,1(2008):118-146

Raptis, H. Integration by Accretion: The Public Schooling of On-Reserve Aboriginal Learners in British Columbia, 1951-1981. To be presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, March 24-28, 2008, New York.