The Canadian Landscape

In a country that is as geographically and socially diverse as Canada, it is a daunting task to outline “the” landscape within which teacher education curricula have evolved. Canada’s provinces and territories span a landmass of almost 10 million square kilometers covered by various geographic and climatic zones ranging from forests and grasslands to desert and tundra. No less diverse are the languages, ethnicities and cultural traditions of Canada’s inhabitants. At the point of European contact, the nearly half-a-million Indigenous peoples living across what is now Canada belonged to almost a dozen linguistic families consisting of scores of languages and dialects. Settlers and immigrants later brought with them such wide linguistic and cultural diversity that Canadians now identify with more than 200 languages and cultures. ¹