Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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Intersectionality and Solidarity in Curriculum-Making Theatre Encounters with Marginalized Youth Researcher-Artists
Get PDFIn this article, drawn from my doctoral study, I argue that applied theatre encounters can serve as methods of Deweyian social inquiry and as curriculum-making events that illuminate how youths perceive their roles in social resistance and that offer them an opportunity to serve as artists, researchers, activists and public pedagogues. I situate the study in the field of curriculum studies by placing the research project itself in relation to a William Doll’s 4Rs model of curriculum principles: Richness, Recursion, Relations and Rigor. I posit that the research-based applied theatre practice of ethnodrama can potentially serve as an educational space wherein marginalized youths can integrate qualitative research and experiential knowledge as facilitators of a more just society. The 12 racialized, socioeconomically under-resourced youth participants in Toronto focused on intersectionality and solidarity in their ethnodrama action project. I explore the pedagogical, political and artistic choices these youths made in the process of both devising and presenting their original theatrical piece
L’enseignement en tant qu’enquête méditative : une exploration dialogique
Get PDFThis is a conversational paper that explores an unconventional pedagogical approach—teaching as meditative inquiry—as developed by Ashwani Kumar. This pedagogical contribution is explored and expounded upon through a related research methodology called dialogical meditative inquiry (DMI). DMI emphasizes listening holistically, learning from silence, as well as having an open and vulnerable attitude to allow for a deeper engagement with self and other participants where inner thoughts and feelings may be expressed in meditative awareness. Through this dialogic approach, the authors explore the concept of meditative inquiry and the ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti, as well as how these have informed Kumar’s professional practice as a teacher educator and scholar. Emergent themes from this dialogue include: 1) how Kumar’s concept of meditative inquiry began and developed; 2) the connection between holistic thinking and meditative inquiry; 3) differences in how “holistic” is conceptualized from Western and Eastern perspectives; 4) teacher education candidates’ perceptions of holistic education; and 5) examination of resistance toward self-inquiry and the instrumentalization of meditative approaches.Conçu sur le modèle d’une conversation, ce papier explore l’enseignement en tant qu’enquête méditative, une approche pédagogique non-conventionnelle développée par Ashwani Kumar. Usant d’une approche méthodologique associée, l’enquête dialogique méditative (EDM), les auteurs explorent et expliquent cette contribution pédagogique. L’EDM met l’accent sur l’écoute holistique et l’apprentissage par le silence, ainsi que l’attitude ouverte et vulnérable nécessaire à un engagement profond avec le soi et d’autres participants accueillant l’expression, en pleine conscience méditative, de sentiments et de réflexions internes. Usant de cette approche dialogique, les auteurs explorent la conceptualisation de l’enquête méditative et les idées de Jiddu Krishnamurti, ainsi que leur influence sur les travaux scientifiques et pratiques éducatives de Kumar. Les thèmes suivants émergent de ce dialogue : 1) la naissance conceptuelle et le développement de l’enquête méditative, selon Kumar; 2) le lien entre la pensée holistique et l’enquête méditative; 3) comment « holistique » est conceptualisé différemment dans les traditions intellectuelles de l’Est et de l’Ouest; 4) les représentations de l’éducation holistique que se fait le corps étudiant en formation à l’enseignement; 5) les réponses à la résistance à l’enquête introspective et l’instrumentalisation des approches méditatives
Finding Humanity in Design
Get PDFThe Calgary Board of Education’s Design the Shift was a radical step away from typical professional development opportunities. It was a year-long collaboration designed for educators to provoke a shift in practice by redefining curriculum through design. Our definition of design evolved from a linear business model to a much more generous movement. As designers of learning, the participants took up “what really [mattered] to them”, with design becoming an intersection of creativity, place, and community (Chambers, 1998, p. 17). We created opportunities for participants to charge up against an experience, causing them to make, unmake, and remake the curriculum of their classrooms. All experiences inspired the participants to stop, notice, listen and awaken, drawing on Maxine Greene’s (1977) wide-awakeness philosophy
Wild Profusions: An Ode to Academic Hair
Get PDFWith the intention of expanding educational conversations through playful encounters, we braid curricular intensities inspired by wild profusions, written in our academic hair and offered as expressions of life writing. Through our hairatives, we share discomforts and provocations that are the stories of our scholarly identities, rooted in the body-word nexus as affective attunements. Through our entanglements, we map our networks of relations and invite curricular conductivity concerning how and why hair is formative in the context of the academy. Living on the precarious margins of stories, we share our narratives within the folds of educational theory to passionately and poetically render our richly textured events as the moments of knowledge creation. In this way, our hair serves as an artistic configuration, where we are manifest in “situated inquiry about the truth that it locally actualises”, to borrow from Badiou (2005), opening what may be described as an “eventual rupture” of our scholarly truths (p. 12). Our ruminations are the imaginaries of academics, or simply living intensities. We intend to crack open from the inside that which is “a reality concealed behind appearances” in an attempt to reconfigure “a different regime of perception and signification” (Rancière, 2009, pp. 48, 49)
Silence, Discipline and Student Bodies
Get PDFIn this ecological poetic inquiry, I contemplate a curriculum of silence, discipline and student bodies. As I seek to work through and against the entrenched-knowings of school and schooling in these ecologically urgent times, I contemplate how children’s bodies are disciplined, how the voices of nature are silenced, how dominance rears its head through the myths of competition, progress and human supremacy. The cluster of poems is a consideration of some of the ways in which bells, security screening systems, silent lunchrooms, dead-lines, and all of the so-called “practical necessities” of schools, serve to silence and marginalize the voices, beings and bodies implicated in the industrial-powerful places and ecologically barren times of education. I ask, what wild, young-old, creaking, sleeping voices, beings and bodies need to be considered in our curriculum encounters? In response to David Geoffrey Smith’s (2014) call for educators to “reimagine new, wiser, human possibilities” (p. 1), I consider how educators may encounter ecological possibilities for a curriculum of living
The Arts in Curriculum: Aesthetics, Embodiment and Well-Being
Get PDFThis issue invites the reader to join the authors in a quest for the meaning of Arts in Curriculum; it calls on those reading to see, and not merely look. Drawing on the unique perspectives of educators, artists of diverse forms, and curriculum theorists, the issue invites a consideration of how the unique visions and personal experiences expressed in the issue foster thinking about Aesthetics, Embodiment and Well-being and their place in provoking transformation
La perspective estudiantine sur la pertinence et l’importance de l’apprentissage par les arts
No full textDrawing on interview data from a practitioner research study involving secondary students in a Jewish school, the following paper presents students’ explanations for why learning through the arts is a valuable and important classroom experience. The explanations offered by students reflected a strong self-awareness and understanding of their own learning styles and how the arts complimented their studies and challenged them in new ways. In addition to hearing how students appreciate learning through the arts, the data also suggests that teachers and other school stakeholders should find ways to provide opportunities for students to contribute to conversations about pedagogical practice.Cette présentation des perspectives d’élèves du secondaire sur la valeur et l’importance de l’apprentissage par les arts pour leur expérience scolaire tire ses données d’une étude participative avec des jeunes d’une école juive. Les explications offertes par ces élèves témoignent d’une grande conscience de soi et compréhension de leurs styles d’apprentissage et démontrent comment les arts ont été sources de nouveaux défis et de complexité dans leurs études. En plus de laisser place à l’appréciation qu’ont les jeunes pour l’apprentissage par les arts, les données suggèrent que le personnel enseignant et autres acteurs scolaires devraient trouver le moyen d’offrir aux élèves la possibilité de contribuer au dialogue pédagogique
From Fragmentation to Wholeness: Containers for Healing
Get PDFPsychological and social fragmentation in many forms confronts us daily. Using a framework of holistic education and Indigenous holism, I propose a pedagogy of repair to facilitate healing and wholeness. The metaphor of container is used to investigate how to transform fragmented parts of the self or of society and lead the fragments towards wholeness by facilitating transformational encounters with ourselves, with others, and with the world. Metaphorical containers are not necessarily physical spaces, but are created by relationships, by ritual, by art-making and by other means. A felt-sense-informed, arts-based inquiry elucidates characteristics of effective containers. An Indigenous model of healing and justice, an alternative prison in the province of British Columbia, serves as a poignant example of an effective healing container
Innovative Exemplars and Curriculum Created from Online Videos of Visual Artists in Greater Sudbury
Get PDFThe article begins with a description of the award-winning online artists’ video project, 14 Videos of Visual Artists in Greater Sudbury, and concludes with a presentation of my pre-service BEd students’ creative use of this digital resource. The video series was conceived and created with the aim of filling a gap in materials that were sorely lacking to teachers of Visual Arts in Ontario. The video series includes Aboriginal, Métis, Francophone and Anglophone artists and highlights the artists’ interconnections with the local community. The streamed, linked and library-accessible videos (see http://www3.laurentian.ca/visual_artists/) served as inspiration for student teachers’ creation of their own innovative curricular exemplars. In the article, I describe the complex inner workings of the research project in order to establish a context for the students’ work. I show how the students were able to conceptualize curriculum through being able to better see what and how to teach through creating art and making exemplars in a variety of media. Using the artists’ work as a catalyst, the students worked in groups, selecting artists whose artwork spoke to them while creating exemplars and co-creating curricula that would be meaningful. The article concludes with student exemplars that offer insights into the value of focusing on local artists in order to better meet Art Education curriculum goals in Ontario and, by extension, elsewhere in Canada
Rétroviseur : vers une meilleure compréhension des besoins d’enseignantes d’immersion française sur le plan du développement professionnel en arts visuels
Get PDFAn Ontario bilingual university and a community arts committee collaborated in offering a professional development program for elementary and high school teachers to improve their instructional competence in visual arts. A year after offering the professional development program, researchers did a qualitative study in order to verify the effectiveness of the program as well as gather detailed information about its impact on classroom teaching. The group of participants in the follow-up project was comprised of French immersion teachers. Data was collected with a questionnaire used during a phone interview with each participant. Findings indicate that the program was successful in changing practices. The critical factor effecting change was the emphasis throughout the program on participants playing the role of children in age-appropriate activities. Confidence and motivation increased considerably during field applications; skills and concepts were effectively integrated into the school curricula; and creativity, experimentation and flexibility were employed to overcome instructional obstacles and effectively deliver visual arts lessons.Une université bilingue de l’Ontario et un comité consultatif des arts ont collaboré à la mise en œuvre d’un programme de perfectionnement professionnel pour des enseignant(e)s de l’élémentaire et du secondaire en arts visuels. Un an après l’avoir offert, les chercheurs ont mené une recherche qualitative afin d’en vérifier l’efficacité dans le but de recueillir des informations détaillées au sujet de son influence sur les pratiques d’enseignement. Les participantes à ce projet de suivi étaient des enseignantes d’immersion française. Les données ont été recueillies à l’aide d’un questionnaire utilisé pendant une entrevue téléphonique avec chacune des participantes. Les chercheurs ont découvert que le programme avait été en mesure de changer les modes d’enseignement des participantes. Le fait que ces dernières aient joué le rôle d’enfants de divers âges, tout au long du programme, fut ce qui influença le plus le changement. Lors des activités, la confiance ainsi que la motivation ont augmenté. De plus, les habiletés et les concepts ont pu être compris et intégrés de façon efficace au programme scolaire. La créativité de même que l’expérimentation et la flexibilité ont permis de surmonter les difficultés d’ordre pédagogique et de donner des leçons d’arts visuels de qualité