Becoming Albertan

How do youth fit into Alberta's wild west culture?

by Marta Dvuliat, Rissa Reist, Jinx Simmonds, and Jared Wesley

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

If pictures are worth a thousand words, a thousand drawings speak volumes about politics in Alberta. 

For four years, our Common Ground team has been asking members of our community to “draw me an Albertan.”

Our studies with adults have found that there is incredible consensus about what it means to “be Albertan.” When asked to draw the typical member of our provincial community, an overwhelming majority depict a farmer, a cowboy, or an oil worker — predominantly conservative, male, middle-aged, white, blue-collar workers. Studying the extent to which this stereotype differs from the actual average Albertan is the main thrust of our Common Ground study.

However, little is known about the ways in which youth understand the Albertan identity.  That is why we launched the parallel Becoming Albertan study, which asks how children and teens view the “typical Albertan.” By engaging grade school students in the same sort of drawing and storytelling exercises, our goal is to determine how, when, and where children absorb common conceptions of what it means to “be Albertan.” 

When Kids Draw Albertans

This research engages students of various grade levels in schools across Alberta. An instructional video and supplies are provided to all participating teachers, giving directions to students on how to participate. The activity involves each student “drawing an Albertan” and providing some details about the character they have imagined, such as gender, age, occupation, and anything else they think is relevant to understanding their character. Students are then asked to write a brief story about the persona they’ve drawn, including details about where they are from, what they do during the day, what their family is like, and so on. The activity takes about 30 to 45 minutes of in-class time, plus a brief follow-up discussion in the days following.  Drawings are collected and submitted to the research team for analysis. The study is approved by the University of Alberta Research Ethics Board and involves the free and informed consent of parents and assent from students to participate.

Our Participants

To date, our sample has contained over 300 youth. Of those in the study,  45 percent identified as male, 42 percent identified as female, 3 percent marked non-binary as their gender identity; the remaining 10 percent opted not to report their gender. Two-thirds of the student participants were born in Alberta, while the remainder have lived most (13%) or some (6%) of their lives in the province or identify themselves as newcomers (3%). The students came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. While 57% identified as white or Caucasian, 21% indicated they were First Nations, Metis or Cree, and 30% reported having another non-white identity. In terms of regional dynamics, 46% of the students who have completed the Becoming Albertan exercise have been from Edmonton, with the remainder drawn from communities including Spruce Grove (29%), Athabasca (9%), Leduc (6%), Maskwacis (6%), and Andrew (4%). Our team aspires to expand this research to include communities in Central and Southern Alberta in the future.

Our Findings to Date

From their drawings, we can make four key observations about the ways in which youth understand what it means to be Albertan.

1. Younger children are more likely to draw themselves.  

Young children are more likely to see themselves when they think of the ‘typical’ Albertan. In grade three, nearly a fifth of students drew themselves, a share that dwindles to zero by grade 6 before increasing again in grades 7 and 8. Interestingly, we have yet to see a high school student draw themselves as part of the exercise. Additionally, Figure 1 shows that very few adults (3%)  draw themselves when given the same prompt. These findings highlight how younger children are more likely than any other group in Alberta to understand the Alberta identity in relation to themselves.  They also show that, overall, within Alberta, there is a strong disconnect between personal and collective identities. Most Albertans don’t picture themselves when asked to draw an Albertan. 

2. Older students are more likely to see the average Albertan as a man. 

We also observe clear gender dynamics at play. When asked to draw an Albertan, an overwhelming majority of male youth (94%) drew a man, while the majority of females (63)  drew a woman. One-third (33%) of female students drew a man, which is still a larger percentage than the 4 percent of males who drew a female Albertan (Figure 2). However, a small portion of students after grade 6 chose to draw a non-binary person as the typical Albertan, something that adults do not appear to do (see Figure 3). 

Additionally, the older students are, the more likely they are to draw a male. Figure 4 illustrates that while in grades 3 through 7, the perceived gender of the typical Albertan is more equally divided between males and females, there is a clear dominance of men being drawn by students in grades 8, 10, and 12. This suggests that “a quintessential Albertan” is often seen as a male, particularly among boys, young men, and older students in general. These findings correspond somewhat with Common Ground’s parallel study of Alberta adults; the vast majority (77%) tend to draw men. 

3. By middle school, students have absorbed common stereotypes about the Albertan identity.  

Among our entire sample of 300 youth, only 20 (7%) of their drawings featured cowboys. There is a significant jump in grade 8, however, when wild west imagery more than tripled compared to the lower grades. By grade 12, more than one in five youth draw cowboys, only slightly lower than the proportion of adults who do the same (see Figure 5). 

Farmers were drawn with very similar frequency as cowboys. Again, there is a change in students’ understanding of a typical Albertan in grade 8, which results in a significant increase in the number of farmers in the drawings (Figure 6). Like the use of the cowboy hat, the image of the farmer highlights Albertan’s tendency to see the Albertan identity in relation to rural and agrarian ways of life.

The same pattern has also been noticed regarding oil and gas workers. There is a substantial spike in grades 10 and 12, with over a tenth of students including pro-oil-and-gas slogans as part of their drawings, while there were little to no mentions of the fossil fuels sector in younger grades (Figure 7). 

Our parallel study of adults finds that a quarter of all drawings featured farmers (25 percent), cowboys were drawn 19 percent of the time, and oil and gas workers were shown in 18 percent of all drawings. These findings highlight how stereotypical understandings of the Albertan identity seem to solidify by the time Albertans reach grade 8. 

4. Some students gravitate towards Canadian stereotypes as opposed to Alberan stereotypes  

Some students opted to include references that reflected broader Canadian symbols as opposed to stereotypically Albertan symbols. These references included the additions of the Canadian flag or hockey gear. In particular, almost 10% of the drawings had a Canadian flag, and 5% of the characters were either hockey players or hockey fans. This finding reflects similar priorities of Albertan adults where little evidence was found of a strong “Alberta-first” mentality.

Future Research

These drawings will help contribute to a broader understanding of what it means to be Albertan. The study will help improve the way we teach identity in our classrooms. So far, the Common Ground research team has found that the older Albertans get, the more narrow their understanding of the Albertan identity becomes. However, further research is needed to understand the nuances in the perceived Albertan identity. For instance, do students in northern Alberta tend to understand the Albertan identity differently than those in southern Alberta? Does the urban-rural divide impact the times who is and is not perceived as the average Albertan?  And what mechanisms and forces are at play that guide students toward stereotypical understandings of Alberta’s political culture as they age? 

We need the community’s help to expand this research. Teachers who are interested in participating in the initiative can visit the Becoming Albertan website for more information and to register.