Teaching Financial Literacy: An Interview With Annie Savard

Annie Savard

Annie Savard is an associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. She taught for 15 years at the elementary level and still occasionally substitutes in elementary classrooms. She is also an international consultant in mathematics education for the World Bank. Annie is currently completing an MBA at l’Université Laval.

MARIAN: Can you tell us why you’re interested in teaching children about financial literacy?

ANNIE: When I was teaching at the elementary school level, financial literacy was not taught, but students were interested in the topic. They’d ask questions such as “Where does money come from? What is the difference between a credit card and a debit card? Who does the money in an ATM belong to?”

Students need to know about finance because they use it in their daily lives. Even young students are consumers because they influence the household buying; for example, they want this brand of cereal. And sometimes they have money to spend that they’ve received as a gift.

We need to teach students more than just adding and subtracting money amounts because we need to empower them as citizens to make informed decisions about what to do with their money. Some adults don’t even know that.

Sometimes, when I’m doing research with secondary school teachers, they tell me, “If I’d known more about money before I was an adult, I might have made other choices. I wouldn’t be in debt now.” So, for me, it’s logical that we should educate our students in the elementary years.

Some people aren’t comfortable talking about money, but it isn’t just about making more money. It’s about making informed decisions and helping your community. For example, you might decide to buy strawberries at your local market even though they’re more expensive than at a grocery store. You’ll make more of an impact with your money by supporting your local community.

One reason we need to educate students about this in school is that even though there’s a lot of material provided by companies, the banking system, and so on, this material may not have been prepared by educators. The values that they promote might not be what we emphasize in the school system. We promote values such as cooperation, helping one another, and belonging to a community. So, that’s why I think educators should be part of the conversation.

MARIAN: Some provinces have now put financial literacy in their math curriculum. That means they had to take something out of the math curriculum to make room for it because there are only so many days in the school year. Some of financial literacy has nothing to do with math, for example, what you mentioned about social issues and thinking about your community.

Do you feel that putting financial literacy in the math curriculum is a good decision? I can see why it’s good to teach it, but is it good to put it in the math curriculum?

ANNIE: My answer may surprise you. Finance is about managing resources such as money, and money is a unit of measurement. That is mathematics. It’s assigning a value to something. The problem with money is that the unit of measurement is not the same everywhere. In Canada, we have the Canadian dollar; in the United States, they have the American dollar; in Australia, they have the Australian dollar. There are different currencies.

So, it’s not the same case as length units of measurement where 1 cm is 1 cm everywhere. If I want to buy bread, it is not going to be the same price in different countries or even within the same country. That makes it difficult, but fundamentally, it is a mathematical process.

MARIAN: Okay, I get that. But when you’re talking about helping your community, which is a good thing to talk about, it’s not really talking about mathematics anymore, is it?

ANNIE: It’s about how you picture and contextualize things. In textbooks, there might be problems where students have to figure out how much it will cost to buy food, or they have to make a budget for a trip. Within those problems, you can make them about the community.

I think mathematics is needed for all citizens to be critical thinkers. I can provide a problem for students where they have to make a decision, and they have to justify their answer mathematically and socially. So, it’s really about fostering citizenship competencies and not just saying, “Okay, the answer is $17,” and we’re done.

MARIAN: British Columbia and Ontario have incorporated financial literacy in their curricula. Have any of the other provinces?

ANNIE: Yes, Alberta has launched a new program. Some of it is math, but they put some of it in physical education because it’s about well-being.

MARIAN: When would you advocate beginning these kinds of discussions? Is there a particular grade level?

ANNIE: I think we should start in kindergarten, where it’s really about community and socialization. It could be as simple as, okay, we need food. Where can we get food—from the farm, from the supermarket, from the market? Money is used in exchange for goods and services. We can start without numbers and with just this idea of exchange and comparison. We can do a qualitative comparison as we do with distance. You don’t need to use a number to say that something is far away. In the same way, I can say this car costs more than a piece of fruit. It’s comparison within a financial context.

MARIAN: Some of the curricula have students in Grade 5 or 6 or 7 starting to think about what they call “financial planning.” How do you feel about that?

ANNIE: We can start even earlier. I once met a student in Grade 4 who helped his parents deliver newspapers. He would wake up every morning to make some money. He lived in a low-income environment, and it helped his parents because he could buy some things himself.

MARIAN: That’s great. The curriculum wants children to figure out the change when you pay for something, but that doesn’t happen anymore. You tap a card and don’t get change, so kids might not understand this. I suspect we’ll have to adjust as we go.

ANNIE: I think you’re right. It’s a trend to not have physical currency. China and Sweden encourage people to always pay digitally. And the Bank of Canada wants to launch a Canadian cryptocurrency so that we no longer have physical bills.

MARIAN: Even now in Canada, we don’t have pennies, so the unit “cent” doesn’t mean anything because students don’t know what a penny looks like.

ANNIE: When I presented my work at the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group (CMESG) conference in Regina in June 2023, there were people who said we cannot use money as a manipulative the way we used to because we no longer have pennies.

MARIAN: You can use paper pennies, but they’re right—it’s different. I was talking to a Grade 8 teacher who works in a community where, in a lot of homes, they don’t have much money. This teacher sometimes finds it difficult to talk to her students about money issues that might be sensitive. How would you advise teachers to deal with those worries?

ANNIE: Those worries are real, and I am sensitive to them because I taught in a low-income environment as well. But this is why we should talk about it, because students will learn from their parents, and they will learn from their environment.

If students don’t learn about financial literacy in school, they might not be able to make informed choices. And I’m not saying that it’s because of their parents that they might make poor choices. Everyone has made bad financial choices. It might be that someone is sick or has lost their job. It’s difficult, so I don’t put the responsibility on the parents. But it’s beneficial for students to have the information so that they can support their parents.

Let’s talk about the idea of living with credit card debt. If a student knows how that works, they might think “I want to avoid that; saving money is another option.”

I think it’s nice for students to have goals. Many people, as soon as they have $20, want to spend it. But what if they learn that they could put that $20 aside and accumulate more money to help them achieve a goal?

Secondary school teachers have told me that students are motivated when they talk about money. They want to learn more because money is necessary for survival.

MARIAN: Maybe 25 years ago, I was in Fredericton, and I was presenting a talk to the community. I talked about some math issues, and I used some problems about money.

After the talk, a man was angry with me for talking about money. He said I was promoting consumerism. I still remember this 25 years later. It really hit me that he viewed money as a bad thing to talk about. I still kind of play with that, and it worries me a little. Where is the line? How can you be careful?

ANNIE: In some cultures, talking about money is not well received. From some points of view, having money is suspicious. What did you do to get that money? In other cultures, you’re blessed if you have money, so there’s a lot of value associated with it. We should present teaching financial literacy as a way of developing citizenship—it could be the local community or the national community—and it’s up to students to make informed decisions about how to spend their money.

MARIAN: Most of what you’ve been talking about has been qualitative rather than quantitative. One thing I wonder about is whether it should be more qualitative or more quantitative. Should children in Grade 8 talk about simple and compound interest when they don’t really know about exponents? We could talk about it qualitatively for sure, but should it be quantitative? Where do you see all that happening?

ANNIE: I will make an analogy with probability, which is often taught in Grades 5 and 6 at the beginning of the year. In some countries, probability is taught around Grade 8, and in France, they start around Grade 9. I think these ideas should be introduced in Grade 1 to develop this probabilistic thinking so that when students reach a certain age, they already have a foundation.

To start talking about interest in Grade 8, without having done any work with money, can be hard for students. Even though you present them with the concept of interest in Grade 8, that doesn’t mean you cannot revisit it in Grade 11 with exponents.

Right now, what I observe is that teaching about money is only quantitative. So, it’s arithmetic—$3 plus $2 or 3 apples plus 2 apples. The dollar sign means nothing. It’s just something to attach to a number to make a certain context. We don’t question it—we don’t say, “Is this a lot of money? Are these goods worth this amount of money?”

I think both should be present. Like any concept we present in math, you present something, you revise it, and you complexify it. It should be the same with money. You have a foundation, and then you attach more ideas, like exponents, for example.

MARIAN: What kind of feedback did you get at CMESG? Were most people positive about your message, or were there some who expressed concerns?

ANNIE: People were happy. They said to me, “This is important. We should start to develop this as math educators.” Alexandre Cavalcante (of OISE) and I launched a book in 2021 about financial numeracy, and we continue our work because there is a need—financial numeracy is imposed on math curricula around the world. This is the market system we’re in; let students learn about it to know how it works, and then they can change it. They can be creative. If you don’t know what you’re talking about and what’s going on around you, you may not be empowered and make a strong impact.

MARIAN: Is the stuff you’ve written for teachers, the community, or researchers?

ANNIE: Right now, it’s more for secondary school teachers. I’ve done some writing for elementary teachers, but I’m going to write another book. There’s a need for that in elementary because we need to attach a progression. It’s nonsense to me that students in Grade 8 learn about interest out of nowhere.

MARIAN: Is there anything else you think would be valuable for our readers?

ANNIE: When I was teaching, I was open to letting students ask me questions, but that didn’t mean I had all the answers. Some questions about finance are difficult. I think it’s fine for a teacher to say, “That’s a good question. We’re going to look for the answer together because I’m not sure.”

Some teachers might not be comfortable talking about money because they might be struggling with money themselves. So, we need to put the subject on a neutral plane so that it’s not about your finances or how you manage your money.

Students sometimes ask personal questions. They might ask, “How much money do you have? Are you rich?” I’ve heard these questions from students, and it’s uncomfortable. You can say, “I’m not talking about my personal finances” and redirect them, but don’t close the discussion. They might talk about their parents’ income. I wouldn’t go too far in that direction either. I would redirect the discussion to famous people or hypothetical situations.

MARIAN: Thank you for your time, Annie.

ANNIE: Thank you, Marian.