SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - A national organization has given the NWT a failing grade on its history curriculum.

The Northwest Territories, along with the rest of the provinces and territories, was graded by the Dominion Institute on how it teaches Canadian history. The report card, published on the Institute's website, gives the NWT an F.

The Dominion Institute, co-founded by Ontario MP Michael Chong, is a charitable group whose purpose is to promote Canadian history throughout the country.

"The reason why the Northwest Territories and Alberta (with which the NWT shares much of its high school curriculum) finished with an 'F' is that there isn't a mandatory course in Canadian history to graduate from high school in the Northwest Territories," said Marc Chalifoux, spokesperson for the institute.

"It's actually a social studies course that takes place in each year of high school. Really, they contain very, very little Canadian content, and particularly very little Canadian history content. Probably the course that had the most Canadian history content is the Grade 11 course called perspectives on nationalism but even then it's very, very weak in terms of talking about Canada's past."

The Dominion Institute calls for each province and territory to adopt two mandatory Canadian history courses. The only province that currently has this is Quebec, which consequently scored the highest in the national grading with a B+.

According to the NWT Department of Education, Culture and Employment, the institute didn't do enough research.

"No jurisdiction likes to see a national organization say that they get an 'F' on their report card. I would question the basis upon which that mark is given. I think it is not as informed as it could be," said John Stewart, the department's social studies co-ordinator.

"The report card is based on Grades 9 to 12, and we do follow Alberta for grades 10 to 12. We, however, have an NWT-developed history of Canada course in Grade 9 which they make no mention of in their report card."

The NWT has a social studies program that Stewart considers to be just as effective, if not more so, at engaging students in Canadian history.

"And I guess these are two different ways of approaching some of the issues that are explored in either social studies or history classes," said Stewart.

"One is the discipline of history, and the other is through an inter-disciplinary approach, which really looks mostly at issues and draws in historical components in as much as they're related to the issue that is being explored."

Stewart said the new Grade 10 globalization course, which both Alberta and the NWT have implemented into their curriculum, is a good example of this.

"You can't understand globalization without doing some of the background, which might be imperialism or colonialism, or you might get into things like residential schools," said Stewart.