The BC government announced it will fund 37 new French teacher education seats at UBC Okanagan (UBCO) and Simon Fraser University (SFU) to fill a growing demand for French education in the province.
The province will fund 20 seats at UBCO and 17 at SFU in partnership with the federal government, doubling the number of new seats from 37 to 74.
According to the BC government, French immersion students comprise roughly 9.5 per cent of the student population in the province, an increase of 26 per cent over the past 10 years. The total number of number of francophone students increased by 41 per cent over the same period.
Dr. Karen Ragoonaden, director of the Centre for Mindful Engagement at UBCO’s School of Education, said the school was “shocked” and “thrilled” to receive the additional seats. There are currently 104 seats in the program, and. Students who wish to specialize in teaching French must take two courses and complete a practicum and field experience work in French.
Ragoonaden believes there should be more of a focus on in-province recruitment of French teachers.
"What we’re trying to do is recruit from French immersion graduates here in BC, to grow our own population of French language teachers here and to work closely with faculties of arts and language departments,” she said.
Advocacy group Canadian Parents for French BC says the increase comes amidst a growing shortage of French immersion programs in the province as demand continues to grow. They estimate the shortage is anywhere between 100 and 150 seats.
"French programs in BC have been growing consistently for about 20 years now,” said executive director Glyn Lewis. “We’re seeing growth in almost every community around the province.”
“To match that growth and that demand, we have to have enough French teachers. And we definitely haven’t been graduating enough,” he said.
In a statement to The Ubyssey, Education Minister Rob Fleming said the BC government is working to meet the demand for French teachers through funding and teacher recruitment efforts.
“We have invested $180,000 in partnership with the Government of Canada to support SFU and UBC to implement initiatives to address French teacher recruitment and retention challenges,” wrote Fleming.
Fleming said his office sent a delegation to France and Belgium in April 2018 to address overseas recruitment and certified 15 teachers from France to work in BC. The ministry is also “streamlining” their certification process to make it easier for teachers outside BC and Canada to work in the province.
“Our government has been working hard to address this growing demand the previous government chose to ignore,” said Fleming.
The French teacher shortage has reached a “critical” stage, said Lewis, and parents face long waitlists and lottery systems as schools struggle to meet demand.
“We need to do a lot more in terms of increasing the training capacity and we need to do better to recruit these French teachers from other provinces and other countries,” he said.
It can be difficult to retain out of province and international teachers due to language and cultural barriers, said Ragoonaden.
“A lot of Québécois, a lot of French speaking teachers tend to go back home after two or three years,” she said.
She added that stressing the importance of a French education to middle and high school students could help pave the way for more students to seek careers as teachers in the future.
“We are finding that a lot of these students who are graduating from grade 12 are not heading into humanities or the arts....We really need to sort of reconfigure and change the mindset out there towards humanities,” she said.
The first graduates among the 74 funded seats will enter classrooms in September 2019.