By Paul Bennett, January 28, 2025
Should prospective teachers have expertise – or at least, some solid training – in core subjects like mathematics? Education experts say yes… but the Government of Manitoba says no.
Something doesn’t add up – and it could spell disaster for students who are already struggling in many core subjects.
Most Canadians know little about teacher qualifications or Faculty of Education admissions policies. However, a seismic shift occurred last November in Manitoba that should worry parents across the country. The Wab Kinew NDP government removed “minimum subject knowledge” requirements from the admissions process for Faculties of Education in the province. The move greatly concerned mathematics professors and subject specialists who saw it as a declaration of war against what remained of subject specialization in the preparation and certification of teachers.
Manitoba’s amendments to Teaching Certificates and Qualifications Regulation under The Education Administration Act stirred considerable public opposition. University of Winnipeg mathematics professor Anna Stokke and a vocal group mathematics professors objected to amendments that lifted subject-specific admissions qualifications and significantly reduced the subject-area expertise required for teacher certification.
Mathematicians shred math education research claims
The educational controversy erupted when Mathematics Education professors came out in favour of relaxing subject knowledge requirements. Dr. Martha Koch, an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba, claimed that teachers’ college admissions should be based upon research in a field known as the Pedagogy of Math Knowledge. Her brief in defence of the changes buttressed her claims with the familiar line “research shows” or some variation on that point repeated 15 times in a commentary.
A subsequent detailed critique of Koch’s research synopsis, conducted by Stokke and eight other Winnipeg Math professors shredded her claims and revealed holes in the supporting research. Challenging the legitimacy and value of undergraduate math courses provoked outrage, especially so when it came with a highly contentious supporting brief. That short document included the outlandish and unsubstantiated claim that teachers in Grades K–8 who have taken “more undergraduate university courses in mathematics are not more effective teachers of mathematics.” A call for a retraction or rebuttal from the education professor elicited no response.
It is preposterous to deny that “mathematical subject content knowledge” is not “a necessary component” and pre-condition for “Mathematics Teaching Knowledge.” In fact, it’s completely at odds with the latest “science of learning” research. Indeed, cognitive learning studies conclusively demonstrate the vital importance of “prior learning” and subject-specific knowledge, particularly in mathematics, science, languages, history and geography.
Unpacking the complexities
Mastery of subject knowledge and cognitive science research all but disappeared from faculties of education over the past few decades. A whole generation of education faculty and administration, mostly trained in the child and social psychology fields and often drawn from elementary schools, espouse “progressive” (student-centred, minimally guided) education theories and impart “constructivist” (grow your own understanding) approaches in their pre-service teaching programs.
Faculties of education evolved out of “normal teacher training schools” as a world apart from academe, dominated by social process theories and teaching methodologists. Professionalization advanced as teachers’ colleges integrated into undergraduate universities. Today it is all buttressed by a new brand of scholarship in “pedagogical knowledge,” which devalues or brushes aside core knowledge, foundational skills, and most forms of testing and accountability for student progress and measurable learning outcomes.
What is truly bizarre about the Manitoba debate over teacher preparation is the binary thinking that pervades and limits the scope of education research. Knowing your subject or “Subject Knowledge in Mathematics” and teaching that subject “Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching” belong together, in that order, and that’s the consistent evidence to be gleaned from properly structured, validated and reliable research on what exerts the greatest effect upon the quality of teaching in the classroom.
In this instance, the weight of evidence favours the mathematicians and subject specialists. Knowing how to teach is not sufficient in providing high-quality instruction and improving student achievement. In the case of mathematics education, leading researchers Deborah L Ball and Liping Ma do not support Manitoba’s recent policy change. In Ma’s seminal book comparing elementary mathematics teaching in China and the United States, she says that “in order to have a pedagogically powerful representation for a topic, a teacher should have a comprehensive understanding of it.”
What the research says – follow the evidence
“Research says” is perhaps the most widely used and abused phrase in government-funded policy research, much of it conducted by education professors undertaking “side-gigs” for ministries and regional school districts. Abandoning academic subject mastery requirements for admission to faculty of education programs in Manitoba brought the issue, once again, to the fore.
Teacher education programs without requirements for subject specialization (i.e., a minimum number of university course credits, known as “major” and “minor” teachables) flies in the face of evidence-based research and will have a detrimental and ripple effect in further weakening the academic standards of teacher training institutions.
It should not take an uprising by a very enterprising group of University of Winnipeg mathematicians inspired by Anna Stokke to block such initiatives. Following the evidence, in this case, demonstrates that the best preparation includes both mathematical subject knowledge and a facility in delivery enhanced by the pedagogy of math education. Without subject knowledge, teachers are essentially limited to guiding socialization projects in the classroom.
Paul W. Bennett, EdD, is the director of the Schoolhouse Institute, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and chair of researchED Canada. He is the author of the MLI commentary “Dumbed down math – California’s ‘math lite’ debacle and how to avert the misadventure in Canada.”
