Competing Conceptions of Competency: Epistemological Tensions in Ontario’s Grade 9 De-streamed English Curriculum

The con The competency literature does not speak with one voice. Weinert (2001) defined competency as the cognitive abilities and skills individuals possess or can learn to solve particular problems, together with the motivational, volitional, and social readiness to use them successfully and responsibly in variable situations. This definition integrates cognitive and dispositional dimensions. Rychen and Salganik (2003) similarly insisted that key competencies are more than discrete skills, encompassing the capacity to mobilize resources reflectively in context. Alongside these holistic definitions, however, runs a more functional, performance-oriented usage in which competency denotes demonstrable, often measurable, skills calibrated to economic and vocational demands. Westera (2001) traced the resulting confusion of tongues, observing that competency operates simultaneously as a theoretical construct and as an operational, assessment-driven category. Young and Muller (2010) sharpened the stakes by arguing that whether a curriculum treats knowledge as an end in itself or as an input to generic skills has major consequences for educational equity, since access to powerful disciplinary knowledge is unevenly distributed across social groups. The National Research Council’s synthesis of twenty-first-century competencies likewise distinguished cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal domains, cautioning that transferable competencies develop only through deep engagement with specific content (Pellegrino & Hilton, 2012). These distinctions matter for the present analysis, for they establish that a curriculum can inscribe more than one conception of competency at once and that such conceptions may rest on divergent assumptions about learners and knowledge.

The most widely used typology remains the one developed through the OECD project on the definition and selection of competencies, which grouped key competencies into three broad categories: using tools, including language, interactively; interacting in heterogeneous groups; and acting autonomously (Rychen & Salganik, 2003). Each category carries distinct pedagogical implications. The first maps onto cognitive and linguistic skill development; the second onto collaborative and culturally responsive practice; and the third onto the self-directed agency that competency-based reform most ambitiously claims to cultivate. Cutting across this typology is a more political division between a human-capital orientation, in which competencies are valued instrumentally as inputs to economic productivity, and a humanistic or democratic orientation, in which competencies are valued as constituents of reflective, participatory citizenship (Westera, 2001). The division is not merely terminological; whether a curriculum treats literacy as an employability asset or as a means of critical participation shapes which competencies it foregrounds, how it assesses them, and whose interests they ultimately serve (Young & Muller, 2010). ENL1W aspires to hold both orientations at once, rigorous foundational skill development together with the cultivation of critical and culturally grounded agency. This ambition is what makes it a theoretically demanding object of analysis.

The first tradition is the cognitive science of reading. The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) holds that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension, two components that are separable but jointly necessary, so that a reader strong in one but weak in the other will struggle. Since the relationship is multiplicative, a severe weakness in either component depresses comprehension regardless of strength in the other. Scarborough (2001) elaborated this into the Reading Rope model in which lower-level word-recognition strands, including phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition, and higher-level language-comprehension strands, including vocabulary, background knowledge, and verbal reasoning, become increasingly interwoven and automatic as skilled reading develops. The pedagogical insight of these models is that both the foundational decoding strands and the higher comprehension strands must be developed deliberately and in an integrated fashion, since neglect of either yields a malformed competency. Meta-analytic syntheses establish a strong consensus that explicit, systematic phonics instruction is the most effective route to early decoding, with benefits across socioeconomic and linguistic groups (Ehri et al., 2001; National Reading Panel, 2000), a body of work whose neurocognitive basis Dehaene (2009) has detailed and whose professional implications Moats (2020) has pressed. This tradition underwrites a functional-technical conception of literacy competency as the systematic acquisition of identifiable sub-skills.

The second tradition is sociocultural and critical literacy theory. Street’s (1984) distinction between an autonomous model and an ideological model reframed literacy as inherently social; an autonomous model treats literacy as a neutral, context-free skill, and an ideological model treats literacy as a set of practices embedded in relations of power. Gee’s (2008) concept of Discourse, the integration of language with identity, values, and ways of being, and Freire’s (1968/2018) insistence that literacy education is never politically neutral, extended the tradition into a view of becoming literate as identity formation and the development of critical consciousness. Culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy (CRRP) gave this tradition a pedagogical program. Ladson-Billings (1995) identified academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness as its defining commitments. Paris (2012) later reframed the goal as sustaining students’ languages and cultural practices, not merely drawing upon them. The New London Group’s (1996) pedagogy of multiliteracies broadened the object of literacy to include visual, audio, gestural, and spatial modes. Luke and Freebody’s (1997) Four Resources Model integrated the functional and the critical by positioning the competent reader at once as code breaker, meaning maker, text user, and text critic. From this tradition follows a critical-emancipatory conception of competency.

The distinction Street (1984) drew is consequential for an equity reform such as de-streaming. If literacy is autonomous, a context-free skill, then unequal outcomes invite a deficit reading in which some students simply lack the skill. If literacy is ideological, then what a school recognizes as competent reading and writing already reflects the practices of dominant groups, and students whose home Discourses differ are positioned as deficient by the standard itself (Gee, 2008). On this view, a curriculum committed to equity must do more than teach skills efficiently; it must make the social construction of literacy itself an object of study and must treat students’ linguistic and cultural resources as assets rather than obstacles. The critical-emancipatory conception therefore carries a built-in answer to the question of why outcomes have been unequal. That answer differs sharply from the one implied by the functional-technical conception.

The third tradition is Indigenous education scholarship. Responding to the TRC’s Calls to Action (2015), scholars have argued that meaningful change requires more than adding Indigenous content to existing structures; it requires interrogating the epistemological assumptions on which those structures rest (Battiste, 2013). The framework most directly relevant to ENL1W is Indigenous Storywork, articulated by Jo-ann Archibald (2008). It is structured around seven principles, including respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy. These principles collectively express an epistemology in which knowledge is seen as relational, experiential, community-held, and deeply tied to spiritual and ethical commitment. Tuck and Yang’s (2012) argument that decolonization is not a metaphor cautions against treating the incorporation of Indigenous perspectives as equivalent to decolonization, while Dion’s (2009) analysis of the familiar stranger names the tokenism that curricular integration risks. This scholarship informs a decolonial conception of competency.

What distinguishes this tradition from the critical-emancipatory one is the locus of its critique. Critical literacy interrogates power within a broadly secular and constructionist account of knowledge. Indigenous education scholarship, by contrast, questions that account itself, holding that knowledge is not only socially constructed but relationally and spiritually constituted, accountable to community and to more-than-human relations (Battiste, 2013). For this reason, the integration of Indigenous content cannot be assessed by the same measures used for other content. Battiste (2013) argues that adding Indigenous material to a curriculum whose underlying structure remains unchanged risks assimilating Indigenous knowledge to the very framework it should unsettle. Archibald’s (2008) insistence that Storywork is enacted through respectful and reciprocal relationship, rather than transmitted as information, places a demand on pedagogy that a content expectation alone cannot satisfy.

The study employs critical document analysis, drawing on Bacchi’s (2009) What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) approach. The premise of the WPR approach is that policy texts do not merely respond to problems that exist prior to them; they actively constitute problems through the solutions they propose. Applied to curriculum, this means that in specifying what students should learn and how, a curriculum document implicitly represents what literacy is, what counts as competence, and which educational problems warrant solving. The analytic task is therefore not to evaluate the curriculum’s effectiveness, which a document analysis cannot assess, but to surface the conceptions of competency the text presupposes and the assumptions about learners they carry.

The text analyzed is The Ontario Curriculum, Grade 9: English (ENL1W) (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2023). The analysis attends to its vision and guiding principles, the four strands and their overall and specific expectations, the achievement chart, and the appended Grades 1 to 9 Language Conventions Continuum. Where ENL1W cites external policy — most directly the OHRC Right to Read inquiry (2022) — such references are read as part of the document’s own self-understanding rather than as separate objects of analysis.

The three conceptions of competency derived, the functional-technical, the critical-emancipatory, and the decolonial, served as deductive categories against which the curriculum’s expectations were read. Each overall and specific expectation was examined for the conception or conceptions of competency it encodes, with attention to the language of the expectation and its placement within the strand structure. The analysis proceeded in two passes. The first, immanent pass asked how each conception is constituted within the document and what view of literacy, learning, and human capacity it presupposes, thereby addressing the first research question. The second pass examined the relations among the conceptions, asking where they reinforce one another and where their underlying assumptions diverge, thereby addressing the second research question. Findings are reported by conception in Section IV and their coherence is assessed in Section V.

The three-conception framework is an analytic lens, not a claim that the curriculum’s authors consciously held three theories. The conceptions are reconstructed from the text’s expectations and principles, in keeping with the premise of the WPR approach that the assumptions structuring a policy are often implicit in its proposed solutions.

The functional-technical conception is most concentrated in Strand B, Foundations of Language, and in the curriculum’s framing principles. ENL1W states explicitly that foundational knowledge and skills must be taught through evidence-based systematic and explicit instruction, often referred to as structured literacy, and that learning to read does not happen naturally but involves specific skills that must be taught (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2023). The curriculum defines structured literacy as the systematic and explicit teaching of reading and spelling, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and written expression, and frames its vision around the conviction that all students can succeed when they develop solid foundational knowledge and skills. Strand B operationalizes this conception across its three overall expectations. The B1 expectations treat oral and non-verbal communication as foundational, asking students to apply listening, speaking, and non-verbal strategies in formal and informal contexts. The B2 expectations turn to word- and text-level reading. B2.1 requires students to use consolidated morphological knowledge to read and spell complex words with accuracy and automaticity; B2.2 expects them to deploy explicitly taught vocabulary flexibly and the use of morphological knowledge to analyze unfamiliar words; B2.3 calls for fluent reading with accuracy, appropriate pacing, and prosody. The B3 expectations specify the syntactic, grammatical, and punctuation conventions that the appended Language Conventions Continuum tracks developmentally from Grade 1 to Grade 9. The continuum is theoretically significant; by situating Grade 9 expectations within a cumulative trajectory from initial development through consolidation to refinement, it encodes the assumption that literacy competency is built through sequenced, hierarchical skill acquisition, in close correspondence with Scarborough’s (2001) account. The same logic governs the curriculum’s tiered approach to instruction, in which increasingly intensive, explicit support is layered onto universal classroom teaching according to assessment data, on the premise that skill gaps can be diagnosed and remediated through more of the same systematic instruction. The curriculum’s principle that an effective English curriculum is grounded in evidence-based research, framed as a response to the Right to Read inquiry, anchors this conception in the cognitive science of reading (OHRC, 2022; Dehaene, 2009).

The conception thus presupposes a particular view of competency. Literacy is a structured set of hierarchically organized cognitive sub-skills; learning is the systematic acquisition of those sub-skills toward automaticity; and human capacity is broadly uniform and reliably developable. When given evidence-based instruction, virtually all students can attain foundational literacy. This assumption is what allows the structured literacy mandate to support the equity ambition of de-streaming, for if competence is trainable in nearly all learners, then maintaining high expectations for all becomes defensible.

The critical-emancipatory conception is distributed across Strands A, C, and D, as well as the curriculum’s pedagogical principles. These principles commit teachers to culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy and to building on students’ lived experiences, identities, and linguistic resources, including through translanguaging (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2023). In Strand A, expectation A1.1 asks students to analyze how transferable skills support communication across cultural, social, and linguistic contexts. A1.2 then has them to evaluate how those skills help them express their own voice and take ownership of their learning, framing competency as agency. The digital media literacy expectations extend this stance. A2.1 positions students as digital citizens with rights and responsibilities. A2.3 calls for research that weighs accuracy, credibility, and perspective, with explicit attention to misinformation and disinformation — an expectation responsive to evidence that adolescents struggle to evaluate digital sources (Breakstone et al., 2021). Expectation A3.2 invites students to explore identity, self, and belonging through culturally responsive and relevant texts. In Strand C, the conception intensifies through the progression from comprehension to critique. Its grip on the C2 expectations is, admittedly, lighter than elsewhere in the strand. Many of these expectations — prediction, ongoing monitoring, and synthesis (C2.1, C2.3, C2.6) — are cognitive comprehension strategies that sit closer to the functional-technical conception. Even so, C2 does not treat comprehension as neutral information retrieval. It asks students to engage texts by creators with diverse identities, perspectives, and experiences (C2), and to connect their own knowledges and lived experiences with the ideas in those texts (C2.5), positioning the reader as an active maker of meaning. This is a more muted version of the agency that Strand A makes explicit and it sets up the sharper critical work of C3. The C3 expectations then ask students to analyze literary devices (C3.1), examine cultural elements in texts (C3.4), evaluate explicit and implicit perspectives and the bias they may carry (C3.5), and respond to how topics such as diversity, inclusion, and accessibility are addressed (C3.6). This sequence corresponds closely to Luke and Freebody’s (1997) movement from code breaker and meaning maker to text user and text critic. In Strand D, expectations that students establish an identifiable voice (D2.3) and explain the points of view and bias conveyed in their own texts (D2.4) position students as agentive producers of meaning, consistent with process and sociocognitive accounts of composition (Flower & Hayes, 1981; Graham & Perin, 2007). Across these strands, the curriculum’s commitment to CRRP as its overarching pedagogical stance signals that literacy learning is understood as culturally situated.

The view of competency here diverges sharply from the functional-technical one. Literacy is not a neutral skill but an ideologically inflected social practice; learning is identity formation and the cultivation of critical consciousness; and human capacity is agentive but culturally situated. On this view, what counts as competent reading or writing cannot be specified independently of the reader’s or writer’s social and cultural position.

The decolonial conception is expressed through the structural integration of FNMI perspectives, texts, and epistemologies across all four strands. Its policy warrant is the TRC’s call to make Indigenous histories, contributions, and ways of knowing a mandatory part of the curriculum (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015). In ENL1W this integration is not confined to a discrete unit but embedded as formally assessed expectations. A3.3 calls for analysis of themes in FNMI cultures to understand varied identities, perspectives, legacies, and ways of knowing, being, and doing; C1.7 asks students to make meaning through Indigenous Storywork across a range of FNMI text forms; and C3.7 requires comparison of how historical and socio-political conditions have shaped texts by FNMI creators in relation to contemporary lived experience. The reach of the conception extends even into the assessment framework, where the achievement chart names connections to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit perspectives and ways of knowing among the criteria for the Application category. Engagement with Indigenous knowledge is built into how achievement is judged, rather than left to teacher discretion. The curriculum’s glossary defines Indigenous Storywork by reference to Archibald’s (2008) seven principles, consisting of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy. Its account of cultural texts further signals that some Indigenous text forms are protected, requiring direction from the originating communities before use (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2023). The integration thus advances beyond the essentializing, discrete-unit treatment that Dion (2009) critiqued, and gestures toward the deeper epistemological engagement that Battiste (2013) argues genuine decolonization requires. Whether such engagement can be realized within the structures of provincial schooling, or whether institutionalization domesticates it, remains, as Tuck and Yang (2012) insist, an open and serious question.

The view of competency carried by this conception is the most divergent of the three. Knowing is relational and experiential, not the individual possession of decontextualized skills; learning is grounded in community relationships and in spiritual and ethical commitment; and human capacity is situated within particular epistemic communities instead of being treated as a universal attribute. The conception does not merely supply new content but it also implies a different account of what it means to know and to learn.