Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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Are STEM Games Intended To Be Educative?
Get PDFOur research aimed to expand perceptions of learning in school science and mathematics as relational and dynamic selves and experiences in the making. We grounded our work in Ellsworth’s (2005) notion of pedagogical pivots, thus recognizing STEM board games as texts that propel learning and learners forward through affective and aesthetic experiences, interaction as relationality, and boundaries as porous and fluid. To animate our theoretical framework, we held participatory review groups and reported on a group of eight pre-service teachers who played Santorini (mathematics) and Evolution: The Beginning (science). The results indicate that participants engaged in substantial moments of becoming across all three pedagogical pivots, which were made apparent in numerous ways through game play and interaction with the game, specifically exemplified through four emergent themes: 1) engrossment and presence both inside and outside of the game; 2) a becoming-play (about the process of play) and a becoming-game (bound by rules, security); 3) a becoming-community (collective learning, reciprocity, relationality); and 4) a becoming-self (as identifies are (re)forming). The data that emerged is a confluence of connections that produce a “becoming-with-ness” of the game itself and are described through participant statements, displayed through bodily reactions and interactions with space (relational or architectural), with the game itself, with other players, and which are shown through field notes, video and audio recordings of game-play observations. Data from the observed “in between” spaces—moments where
learning or thinking might occur—allows for an identification of games as rich “texts” for mathematics and science education
Francopass, une nouvelle application mobile pour développer le sentiment d’appartenance à la communauté francophone en Alberta
Get PDFLors de cette communication, nous présenterons une nouvelle application mobile développée par une équipe interdisciplinaire de l’université de l’Alberta regroupant des chercheurs du Département de Département des langues modernes et des études culturelles (MLCS), du Département des sciences informatiques et du Campus Saint-Jean (éducation), en collaboration avec l’Association Canadienne-Française de l’Alberta (ACFA) et Canadian Parents for French-Alberta. Le but de cette application est d’encourager les futurs enseignants à assister à des activités dans la communauté francophone à Edmonton. Dans un premier temps, nous présenterons l’application elle-même en mettant l’accent sur ses aspects innovants. Dans un second temps, nous verrons comment cette application permet aux étudiants du programme de formation à l’enseignement du Campus Saint-Jean (Université de l’Alberta) de renforcer un sentiment d’appartenance culturelle. Nous nous appuierons sur des résultats obtenus dans le cadre d’un sondage que nous avons mené auprès des utilisateurs du Francopass. Dans un troisième temps, nous ferons part de quelques pistes pour optimiser les bénéfices du Francopass
Unpacking the Code: Exploring Teachers’ Professional Development in Reading
Get PDFTeaching reading requires considerable knowledge and skill acquired over several years, and while communities and families contribute to students’ reading success, teachers are the most influential forces for delivering high-quality reading programs. Professional development opportunities in reading enable teachers to augment their current curriculum content and pedagogical knowledge and can have a powerful effect on their practice and, ultimately, on student learning. We conducted a qualitative study exploring teachers’ perceptions of reading development and instruction with nine elementary educators enrolled in a targeted professional development course. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted: once prior to the start of the professional development course and once following the professional development course. An inductive approach to analysis resulted in four main themes: seeking out new knowledge, evolving definitions of reading, transformative learning moments, and increases in self-efficacy for teaching reading. This study illustrates the transformative power a targeted professional development course can have on teachers’ perceptions of reading. Professional development in reading that is relevant and properly resourced can significantly impact teachers’ perceptions of their practice, their self-efficacy for teaching reading and, ultimately, have a positive effect on their students’ growth in reading development. Additionally, understanding teachers’ perceptions of their professional development in reading can contribute to the development and refinement of professional learning experiences
In Between Familiar-Unfamiliar: Research Travel as Arts-Based Research
Get PDFArtists, researchers and teachers often find their work positioned in-between the familiar and the unfamiliar. The arts linger in-between such familiar-unfamiliar events, objects and places, unfolding new understandings and potentialities by making the familiar strange and the unknown familiar. Through a collaborative arts-based educational research project conducted in Japan, we address the following question: How can artistic practices lend to pedagogical possibilities when we attend to new things in familiar ways, and when we situate familiar things in new ways? Through a combination of a/r/tography and walking method, we engage in a series of walks, conversations and creative practices that explore layers of relationality through research travel. Walking as an arts-based research practice emphasizes the physicality of our nature as an embodied being grounded in movement; “walking is not just what a body does; it is what a body is” (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008, p. 1). Working together from different perspectives troubles a binary understanding of the insider-outsider relationship, focusing instead on the “-“ as a site of a hyphenated positionality. The walking sessions form a relational correspondence with each other that reveal rhythms of our walks, relationships and experiences while we attune ourselves to ways of lingering in-between familiar and unfamiliar places. Through the embodied and metaphorical walking in-between the familiar-unfamiliar, we consider the pedagogical implications of research travel as site of collaborative arts-based inquiry and what further questions they may raise
Et si changer le monde passait par l’éducation à la citoyenneté?
Get PDFMalala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, Emma Gonzalez, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez et Michelle Obama constituent peut-être actuellement les figures les plus marquantes d’un changement de société qui se dessine à l’échelle planétaire. Sans nécessairement être les architectes des changements qui se dessinent, elles en sont néanmoins les porte-étendards. Une équité absolue, le respect des droits des personnes et des enfants, la protection de l’environnement sont au cœur de leur message. A contrario, il y a aussi leurs détracteurs, nombreux, qui usent de paralogismes et autres sophismes pour confondre les faits avec la fiction, le vrai avec le faux. Ils le font aussi, du moins en façade, au nom de la liberté de parole, de pensée, voire d’opinion. Et pourtant, les deux côtés ont leurs inconditionnels et parfois même, leurs partisans. La communication posera un regard philosophique sur la question suivante : quelle éducation offrir à nos enfants dans un contexte qui dépasse la simple évolution sociale? L’hypothèse qui sera explorée sera celle qui consiste à concevoir la citoyenneté comme étant au cœur de l’acte d’éduquer. Car, en fait, ne serait-il pas possible que les problèmes et enjeux les plus criants de notre époque seraient le résultat de déficits démocratiques causés par une éducation à la citoyenneté déficiente
Living Curriculum Shifts in Arts Education: From Knowledge Transmission to Worldview Sharing
Get PDFDrawing upon narrative inquiry into the lived experience of an artist becoming an arts teacher, this research investigates curriculum in arts education. Its focus is the teaching experiences of a professional photographer in the process of becoming a photography teacher. This research began with two teaching assumptions about curriculum. The first was an acquisition-orientation to teaching; knowledge transmission that changes students’ state from unknowing to knowing. The second was a making-orientation to teaching; methods and techniques training that allows students to replicate or produce knowledge. The first emphasized content while the second emphasized how students apply it. These assumptions eventually changed until they emerged as a communication-orientation to teaching that focuses on interaction with students and a sharing-orientation to teaching that engages dialogue between teacher and students instead of teacher monologue. With a communication-orientation and sharing-orientation to teaching, students became curriculum makers rather than curriculum receivers. These shifts in orientation meant students could share “their own stories” together with their own photographs, thus composing valuable narratives for the study—narratives that provided insight into how they see the world. Arts education is not only about transferring knowledge from teacher to students, but about sharing feelings with students. A communicating and sharing curriculum makes possible an encounter of minds between teacher and students, which was conceptualized as “relationship of minds” in this research. It enables us to better understand teaching and curriculum
Teachers and Teacher Candidates Learning Together: Reported Ideas Regarding a Co-Teaching Model
Get PDFA recurring issue in science teacher education is how to support teachers using student-centred scientific inquiry projects. This study investigates the first year of a three-year project (Inquire Together) that aims to support teacher candidate/teacher mentor teams using student-centred scientific inquiry projects while co-teaching during practicum. Co-teaching involves two or more teachers working together, co-planning, co-instructing and co-reflecting, for the benefit of students and to support each other’s development as teachers. The steps in the first year of the Inquiry Together project involved the following: a) developing a co-teaching model for our practicum in a two-day workshop, follow up focus groups and interviews; b) modelling student-centred scientific inquiry opportunities for teacher candidates and teachers; and c) supporting two teacher candidate/teacher mentor co-teaching teams implementing this pedagogy with practicum classes. The Covid-19 pandemic led to co-teaching teams moving to online teaching part-way through practicum, and students continuing their projects at home. We used a case study approach to investigate the affordances and constraints of Inquire Together for supporting teachers using student-centred scientific inquiry projects. Data included video and audio recordings of the workshop, focus groups, interviews, co-teacher planning meetings, high school classes and co-teacher reflection meetings, as well as co-teachers’ unit and lesson plans and online communication. Our initial findings from thematic analysis indicate the importance of the following five elements: time together for co-teaching teams outside the classroom (for planning and reflection); co-teachers developing mutual understanding; making equity between co-teachers visible for students; communication; and both teachers’ engagement in all activities
Practicing Professional Discomfort as Self-Location: White Teacher Experiences With Race Bias Mitigation
Get PDFThis study is among the first in Canada to research implicit race bias mitigation in secondary teacher practice. The findings emerge from data collected from a ten-month engagement period with 12 Ontario teachers who, alongside the research team, codesigned a race bias mitigation plan based on four to six varied mitigation strategies. These included technical and dialogical activities and a required reading of one anti-racist and/or anti-colonial book. Throughout the project, teachers engaged in ongoing reflection, journaling, email exchanges and an in-person interview. A thematic analysis of this data was completed (Ryan & Bernard, 2003). The design of this study was underpinned by a braiding of social psychology with critical race theory, second wave White teacher identity studies and other approaches. This multimodal approach brings a critical and dynamic reading of whiteness in education. Three broad preliminary findings have emerged from this study. First, teacher perceptions of efficacy of implicit race bias mitigation strategies relied on their noticing of conscious changes in their perceptions of and experiences with race, racism and Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) students. Second, the concurrent use of critical anti-racist strategies, alongside implicit race bias mitigation strategies, seemed to instigate participants’ deepest reflections on race. Finally, this synergy and the long duration of the project contributed to the participants’ evolving understandings of racism in education as a phenomenon that goes beyond the domain of the individual. The results may deepen our understandings of the challenges and opportunities surrounding implicit race bias mitigation work in terms of teacher practices and theoretical considerations
Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation: The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children History Education Initiative (DOHR)
Get PDFDigital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) is a history education initiative to teach Grade 11 students about the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children (NSHCC). The NSHCC, opened in 1921, was a segregated welfare institution for African Nova Scotian children. Residents suffered the effects of institutionalized racism in the Home throughout its 70 years. DOHR has partnered in the educational mandate of the restorative inquiry into the Home to co-design with the former residents a curriculum about their experiences (Province of Nova Scotia, 2015, p. 26). The purpose of the DOHR curriculum is for former residents to share their oral histories to develop students’ historical consciousness about institutionalized racism and to build right relations in their communities. The project was piloted in two Halifax area schools in October 2019. This symposium introduces attendees to the curriculum and shares initial findings from the pilot. Former residents share their impetus for the project, while other DOHR members share findings about the use of oral history—first person accounts of lived experiences with the past—as a restorative approach to redress of harms in education (e.g., Llewellyn & Llewellyn, 2015); how historical thinking lessons develop students’ historical consciousness—their sense-making of the past for orienting themselves to the present and future (Seixas 2004); and how DOHR’s use of virtual reality supports reconciliation with pedagogy-led (rather than technology-led) design principles (Kwon, 2019). To our knowledge, this is the first history education project centred on first-voice, to address reconciliation for African Nova Scotians
The Humilitant Pedagogue: An Invitation to a Refractive Curricular Encounter
Get PDFThe purpose of this auto-ethnographic study will be to explore and understand more fully how my experience of two educational events helped me discern between empty schooling and an educational education. I consider the theories of French philosopher Alain Badiou and their implications for English language arts curriculum and pedagogy. I hope to articulate what I will call a refractive curricular encounter as a contribution living within the traditions of reconceptualist curriculum theory, critical pedagogy and literary engagement. Such a refractive curricular encounter suggests breaking away from a given trajectory or set of coordinates; Badiou’s event does not interrupt or halt the world so much as interrupt the taken for granted knowledge and opinions, allowing the possibility of truths to emerge. As such, interruption is not static; interruption is vital and alive! I examine these truthful interruptions with a view to better understanding how neoliberal culture infiltrates my being so deeply as to have rendered my neoliberal and authoritarian urges invisible to me. My study also offers fruitful considerations for like-minded educators: how might framing education within an invitational context offer the possibility for an eventful-encounter to occur? Secondly, where Badiou suggests that the response to the emergent truth process ought to be one of a militant fidelity, I suggest that educators instead assume a disposition of what I call the humilitant teacher—a portmanteau of humility and militant. This paper explores the intersections of these notions and how they might offer insights into what it means to educate educationally