Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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D’une bonne manière : Réflexions sur l’humour en éducation autochtone
Get PDFHumour is ubiquitous in Indigenous communities, and often provides some of the most memorable moments in our relationships with one another. In this article, I explore an instance of such humour backfiring in an educational situation, and reflect on whether humour was an appropriate response. After surveying some academic research in the area of humour in the classroom, as well as some of the works of several prominent Indigenous writers and comedians, I reflect on the importance of humour in Indigenous pedagogy. Drawing on this research, and moments from my own practice, I theorize that humour has three core pedagogical impacts. First, it has a humanizing affect, helping us to see one another more clearly, and to appreciate that we all have foibles, and areas of ourselves that require improvement. It is also a culturally relevant pedagogy, having been used for millennia as a mechanism of social order and of upholding community values in Indigenous communities. Finally, humour also has a soothing effect, especially in the face of grappling with difficult concepts and situations, and can ease the tensions that often arise in Indigenous education classrooms. Used judiciously, humour is a powerful tool for decolonization. While I do not presume to offer a prescription for the use of humour in the classroom, in reflecting on my own practice, I am increasingly convinced of its importance in Indigenous pedagogy, and I offer my reflections for the reader’s consideration.Omniprésent dans les communautés autochtones, l’humour est source des moments les plus mémorables de nos rapports humains. Cet article explore une situation pédagogique dans laquelle cet humour n’a pas eu les effets escomptés et je questionne sa pertinence dans cette instance. Suivant une recension partielle des écrits sur le sujet de l’humour dans la salle de classe, de plusieurs œuvres d’auteurs autochtones notables et de comédiens autochtones, je propose une réflexion sur l’importance de l’humour pour une pédagogie autochtone. Tirant de cette recherche et de ma pratique enseignante, je propose que l’humour a trois valeurs pédagogiques profondes. La première est son effet humanisant qui nous amène à se voir mutuellement de manière plus claire et à apprécier que chacun, chacune, a ses caprices et ses besoins d’amélioration personnelle. La deuxième est sa pertinence culturelle : l’humour est depuis toujours un mécanisme pour le maintien de l’ordre social et de valeurs communes au sein des communautés autochtones. Finalement, l’humour a un effet apaisant lorsque l’on est aux prises avec des concepts ou des situations difficiles, et peut amoindrir les tensions qui font souvent surface dans les classes d’éducation autochtone. Utilisé avec jugement, l’humour est un outil de décolonisation puissant. Alors que je n’aie pas la présomption d’offrir une prescription pour l’utilisation de l’humour dans la classe, ma conviction de l’importance de l’humour pour une pédagogie autochtone est grandissante et j’offre, pour la considération des lecteurs et lectrices, mes réflexions sur ma pratique
Curriculum as Planned: Who Is Affected When Difference Is Marginalized?
Get PDFHow does a minority mother explain to her Canadian children the meaning of “exclusion”, “religious stigmatization” and “discrimination” when she sees her children’s identity being shaped by “structured silences” (Greene, 1993) in curriculum? Curriculum, in any time and place, becomes a contested site where debate occurs over whose values and beliefs will achieve legitimation through acceptance in the national discourse (Klieberd, 1995). My children live in liminality, as holders of hybrid identities, multiple languages, beliefs and cultures, juxtaposed against a social story of Canadian classroom teaching. Experiences such as theirs “challenge the conceptualization of curriculum as a prefabricated plan” (Wilson, Ehret, Lewkowich, & Kredl, 2017) and foreground the “blind impresses” (Rorty, 1989), gaps and silences of ideology, perceptions and practices (Rautins & Ibrahim, 2011). What are the implications when difference is censored or marginalized? By using autobiographical narrative inquiry and poetic representation, I interrogate my children’s experiences with the Canadian curriculum from the positioning of a minority parent. I explore “encounters” (Greene, 1967) through my unique lens, and propose positioning parents integrally in curriculum conversations in order to move curriculum conceptualizations from a place of binaries defined by “us” and “them”, by “dominant culture” and “minorities”, to a place of shared hope and responsibility, to a just and democratic society
Recension : Visioning a Mi’kmaw humanities: Indigenizing the Academy
No full textVisioning a Mi’kmaw Humanities: Indigenizing the Academy is intended to create discussions and describe actions that will challenge the colonial narrative and create more inclusive humanities. Aimed at both Indigenous and Settler educators, the beautifully edited book uses the metaphor of a basket to suggest the weaving of Mi’kmaw knowledge systems with Eurocentric knowledge systems, a weaving that is necessary to create a trans-systemic concept of the humanities that will ultimately decolonize and transform the academy. Visioning Mi’kmaw humanities can create the emergence of education systems which create pride, confidence, belonging and educational success for Indigenous students and teachers. This kind of education system will also benefit non-Indigenous students and teachers with the same gifts and lead to the reconciliation we so urgently seek.L’intention du livre Visioning a Mi’kmaw Humanities: Indigenizing the Academy est de créer un dialogue et décrire des actions qui défieront les narrations coloniales et créeront des humanités plus inclusives. Écrit pour les éducateurs autochtones et pour les éducateurs pionniers, ce volume, créé de main de maitre, utilise la métaphore du panier en référence au tissage des systèmes de connaissances mi’kmaws et eurocentriques, un tissage nécessaire à la création d’une science humaine trans-systémique qui pourra éventuellement décoloniser et transformer les milieux universitaires. Envisager des humanités mi’kmaws pourra faire émerger des systèmes scolaires qui font place à la fierté, la confiance, l’appartenance et le succès éducatif pour les élèves et le personnel enseignant autochtones. Ce type de système scolaire fera également bénéficier les élèves et le personnel enseignant non-autochtones des mêmes avantages et mènera à la réconciliation ardemment recherchée
Curriculum Alignment Among the Intended, Enacted, and Assessed Curricula for Grade 9 Mathematics.
Get PDFThis study examined curriculum alignment among the intended, the enacted, and the assessed curricula in Grade 9 mathematics in two domains: content/operations and cognitive processes. The Program of Studies was used to determine the content/ operations and the Delphi method was used to identify the cognitive levels for the intended curriculum. Classroom observations were used to capture the enacted curriculum. End of unit tests were used to determine the assessed curriculum. Results indicated that curriculum alignment among the intended, enacted and assessed curricula for the mathematics content/operations was high (97% alignment). In contrast, curriculum alignment among the intended, enacted, and assessed curricula for the cognitive processes was low (7.3% alignment). This study makes a contribution towards understanding the quality of the relationship among the intended, enacted, and assessed curricula in mathematics education. The methodological framework provides a model for subsequent research on curriculum alignment among the three components of the education system
Book Review: Getting Out of Your Head, Back in Your Heart
Get PDFMichele Tanaka’s book, Learning and Teaching Together: Weaving Indigenous Ways of Knowing Into Education, documents and contemplates the pedagogical effects of a unique course, Earth Fibres, designed by Lorna Williams, and guided by Indigenous elders, to immerse student teachers at the University of Victoria into Indigenous ways of knowing, by having them work with traditional Indigenous fabric and textile arts. In her book, Tanaka repeats the key questions of the course: How do you get out of your head? How do you get back into your heart? In the course, the students do this in the context of a culture that destabilizes their normative understandings of the world and of teaching, learning and the curriculum. The book uses the framework of the medicine wheel, of “walking the wheel,” and likewise, the student teachers taking the Earth Fibres course are invited on a kind of medicine walk of their own. The book contributes to efforts to Indigenize the curriculum through its thoughtful documentation of the Earth Fibres course itself, as well as the responsive, Indigenist frame in which it has been written
Challenging the Status Quo: The Evolution of the Supervisor-Student Relationship in the Process of Potentially Stigmatizing and Emotionally Complex Autoethnographic Research
Get PDFWriting and reliving autoethnographic research is a complex process, both emotionally and intellectually. This is especially true when the focus of the autoethnographer’s research involves experiences with stigma, discrimination, and marginalization in the presence of mental illness. Supervising this process, where students may find themselves feeling vulnerable and confused, presents a unique academic and ethical challenge. How far can a supervisor “push” the student to unearth personal experiences that draw meaning to the larger socio-cultural context to which those experiences took place? How do students confront emotionally painful issues to describe and systematically analyze as part of the academic process? By engaging in a duoethnographic process that pushed beyond surface learning to exploring depths of unconscious biases and hidden assumptions, this paper unveils how the academic relationship between a supervisor and student evolved in terms of understanding, influence, and inspiration, as part of the student’s autoethnographic research. It serves to guide others in the academic supervisor-student relationship when students find themselves confronting emotionally painful issues in their learning. Specifically, the dialogic process of duoethnographic research, where sensitive lived experiences are brought to light and examined, has the potential for students and supervisors to reconceptualize their ways of knowing and being in relation to one another. If successful, this pedagogical framework may be used to support students in their scholarly growth
Towards a Curriculum of Rhythm: Learning at the Speed of Sound
Get PDFThis paper examines rhythm and repetition as possibilities for curricular wide-awakeness. When a rhythm is established, an expectation is established with it: patterned beats create momentum, so that subsequent beats arrive to a place that has been prepared by anticipation. But what happens when the rhythm stops? Grounded in the repetition of footsteps that constitute walking, this paper explores how rhythm offers pedagogical possibilities for curricular reconstruction, looking to the way that expectations for the future are informed by habits of listening to the present. It begins by framing the experience of monotony that can cloud sensitivity to daily life. Suggesting that “biographic situations” can be understood as beats in a historical phrase, the paper discusses poly-rhythms as invitations to observe, reflect and participate in the making of (rhythmic) history. Drawing on Deleuze, Pinar and Butler, it emphasizes the productive precarity of rhythm that is imminently falling away into the past, clearing spaces for new possibilities for imagining how circumstances and reactions could be otherwise. It concludes with a call to recognize the complexity of breaking with pre-established patterns of expectation, using sonic experience as practice for the cultivation of historical agency and ontological self-awareness
Book Review: In This Together: Fifteen Stories of Truth and Reconciliation.
Get PDFNumerous atrocities against Canada’s Indigenous peoples have revealed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process. Truth is being told. But, how is reconciliation to be fostered? In her book entitled In This Together: Fifteen Stories of Truth and Reconciliation, Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail has gathered stories from a variety of individual Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives that tell the truth and offer means for reconciliation. Stories have been mechanisms for sharing wisdom since time immemorial – this book is no exception. Through the personal nature of these stories, we journey with each author through their unique adventures, circumstances, reflections, questions, and growth. In doing so, we are called to examine our own stories and embark on our own journey of truth and reconciliation—together
Curriculum Encounters Through Walking the City
Get PDFIn this paper, the author explores how the practice of walking the city may open curricular spaces to nurture a deep engagement and feelings of enchantment with the world. By disrupting the taken-for-granted sensibilities of our everyday urban lives and being open to the unexpected voices, bodies and more-than-human beings who co-exist in urban spaces, the author contends that when we slow down and become attuned to our surroundings, possibilities of transformation can emerge. In this interdisciplinary unfolding, the author first shares how walking allows us to experience time and space to accentuate our relations, engagements, and being in the world. Through narrative and photography, the author then reflects on encounters from recent walks through the city of Calgary, addressing notions of self-reflexivity, play and experience. Through these walking encounters, this paper reflects on considerations for embodying a curriculum to promote a modern ecological ethic
Book Review: Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity: The Selected Works of William F. Pinar
Get PDFIn the book Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History and Alterity, William F. Pinar enacts his intellectual history of curriculum studies, intersecting knowledge, history, and alterity. He explores eighteen concepts of education that characterize his life works. The main argument of this volume is the centrality of subjective reconstruction through studying educational experience. What makes experience educational is one’s study, informed by historical knowledge and one’s engagement with others and the world. This book gives no practical strategies to solve educational problems, but instead provides us with insights to understand them, with which we might see what we experience clearly and differently. In this era of standardization, globalization, and cybertization of education, this book tells us how we have come to today, and questions what thoughts or actions would I, and you, take