Ontario teachers could be the ones doing the learning as cursive makes a mandatory return to the curriculum
While many in Ontario have welcomed the reintroduction of cursive to the province’s curriculum, some educators say it’s easier said than done to translate that into the classroom for a generation of teachers who may have mastered the handwriting skill themselves. missed.
While most provinces require students to learn cursive, some regions do not require it. For example, in British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Northwest Territories, and Yukon, it’s up to teachers to decide whether or not to include it.
Last week, Ontario announced that cursive, which became an optional part of the province’s curriculum in 2006, would again become mandatory. The new curriculum, which goes into effect this fall, includes many recommendations from a 2022 Ontario Human Rights Commission report which examined the problems faced by public school students with reading difficulties.
Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce says the changes were prompted by evidence calling for an emphasis on basic skills.
“The Ontario Human Rights Commission and so many others have called on us to be really informed about what works, and what clearly works is the return to phonetics, the use of cursive writing, the embrace of digital literacy and critical thinking skills,” he said Thursday in an interview with CBC News.
Benefits of italic
Hetty Roessingh, emeritus professor of language and literacy at the University of Calgary, sees great benefits for students learning cursive writing.
“There’s no substitute for turning on the hand brain complex,” Roessingh said, referring to the neural pathways created when humans write by hand.
She says it’s an undervalued skill because people don’t understand its contribution to cognition, and points out that note-taking is an area where cursive has advantages over a keyboard.
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“People who write fluently and take notes, say for an exam, generally do better than those who just type their notes,” she said.
“When you’re typing your notes, you’re just transcribing. When you’re handwriting your notes, you’re generating text, and that has a processing advantage.”
Kids can get the same benefits from printing, says Lizette Alexander, a Toronto-based occupational therapist, but she told Piya Chattopadhyay on Metro Morning earlier this week that it’s not as efficient.
“In printing, letters start everywhere,” she said, noting that some are formed by starting at the bottom, while others start at the top and sometimes require backward movement.
“In cursive, it’s a constant forward movement. The letters are connected…there are actually three strokes you need to know to learn cursive.”
Alexander says children referred to her often have not been diagnosed with any kind of learning disability, but find the work involved in putting pen to paper difficult.
“Every time they write, if they’re not learning letter formation specifically, they’re reinventing the wheel to [the letter] A, and it’s not consistent,” she said. “And then that becomes work.”
Fundamental shift in curriculum
Dyslexia Canada executive director Alicia Smith says the comeback of cursive in Ontario needs to be discussed in the context of a larger shift.
“Making cursive a required part of the curriculum is actually part of a much broader focus on bringing back explicit instruction to basic skills,” she said.
Smith says the previous curriculum failed to meet the needs of students with dyslexia, who she says need instruction in “explicit basic skills” in order to successfully learn to read.
“It goes beyond handwriting, but that’s part of it. They have to have phonetic instruction, they have to have phonemic awareness instruction. They really have to practice a lot working on the very small units, like working with letters and sounds,” she said.
“The new approach starts with those little bits and helps kids learn how to put them together and master those strong bits, little bits, so they can build up to the more complex layers of language.”
Smith thinks cursive writing has caught people’s attention among the other changes because it represents a generation gap.
“It’s sort of a pet peeve of my parents’ generation,” she said. “If they write letters to my children, my children cannot read them.”
Teachers can lack skills
Roessingh says some elementary school teachers who will be required to teach cursive may not have learned it themselves.
“You can put this on the curriculum, but if teachers aren’t willing to teach, if they don’t have proper resources to teach, I’m afraid this will just go off the radar again.”
She says cursive tends to “fall by the wayside,” even in counties where it’s a required curriculum element.
Teresa Rothwell, a teacher in Caledonia, Ontario, says she’s taught cursive in the past when it was optional, but thinks most teachers haven’t included it in their classes. She says it’s important that teachers are given time to adapt and develop materials for a new curriculum, which includes changes beyond italics.
“It’s not a handbook where you just open it up and tell it what to do,” she said of the curriculum. “You really have to be familiar with it to do a good job.”
Years after several provinces removed cursive writing from school curricula, Ontario is making it mandatory again.
Lecce says he is confident teachers will rise to the challenge.
“We’re talking about literacy, we’re talking about the ability to communicate confidently, it’s something worth investing in,” he said.
“And if it means we all have a little more work to do over the next few days and weeks to get ready for September, then I know. [educators] will, because I think they care a lot about young people’s success around those fundamental skills.”
