Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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unFIX Me in the Red: Re/collections and Re/novations
Get PDFIn ruminating on authors’ contributions in this issue, Wiebe’s 2014 video, Curricular Fixations and Poetic Tactics, is used as an anchor to consider the limitations of official and Tylerian curriculum, thought of as infrastructure. The need for reconstructing meanings, deliberating ideas, and reflecting in solitude are suggested as means to unfix ourselves from the comforts of canonized bodies of knowledge which eliminate difference and confine possibilities
Post-Truth Simulacra: Inviting Mutable Meaning-Making
Get PDF“Post-Truth Simulacra” is an artwork created to confront post-truth realities and constructions of meaning in response to the articles in this journal issue. An aerial photograph of Miami is used to depict the way humanity has fully operationalized the territory of the barrier islands. Various overlays are used to think about social theorist Jean Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra. Using the lens of Baudrillard's phases of representation from a pedagogical perspective, an analysis of meaning-making processes for each of the articles is discussed. The editorial recognizes the importance of place and autoethnography in the context of Canadian curriculum studies
Re-imagining Education Policy and Practice in the Digital Era
Get PDFNew digital technologies are changing the nature and contexts of work in Canada. It is essential that education policy and practice acknowledge and respond to these changes. The impacts and implications of new and emerging technologies for work can be summarized within two paradigms: technology is replacing work through automation and digital Taylorism; and technology is changing communication, collaboration and knowledge creation. Derived from a SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis report, this article explores how nurturing uniquely human abilities by employing a threshold concept approach will help create education policy and practice that can better prepare students for the realities of the evolving knowledge-based creative economy. Highlighting the complexity and transdisciplinary nature of knowledge, The New Literacies Threshold Concepts in English Language Arts are presented as a curriculum heuristic that is well-suited to developing uniquely human abilities
The Faces of Love: The Curriculum of Loss
Get PDFMy brother was diagnosed with cancer in early July, 2017. He died on August 22, 2017. I have written many poems about growing up with my brother, and now that he has died, I am revisiting the poems I once wrote and writing more because writing is my way of addressing grief. Writing is an integral path in the curriculum of loss, and I trust writing will lead me to the understanding I need to begin each new day with hope, even joy in the midst of loss. Joy Kogawa (2016) sees “the world as an open book embedded with stories” that we can hear “if we have ears to hear” (p. 149). When my brother died, the loss was grievous, but the loss reminded me I am alive and I must keep on telling stories. I am learning to live with the curriculum of loss. As one who is left behind, my calling is to remember my brother and to share stories about him, but my calling is also to explore connections between life and loss, and the possibilities that extend beyond loss. Ultimately the curriculum of loss is a curriculum of hope. I want to be open to learning from my brother. I am not satisfied with remembering or memorializing him. I want to continue in a pedagogic relationship with my brother so that I learn from both memories and loss, as well as from the possibilities that continue
Cartographies of Colonial Commemoration: Critical Toponymy and Historical Geographies in Toronto
Get PDFEveryday, I move across a cartography that tells me a story, one that I often don’t consciously listen to, but do learn from. This story, one of colonial dominance, lives on through the markings of place, particularly the toponyms, or place names. In this article, I seek to explore the role of these toponyms in telling a story of place, one that (re)writes my home, Toronto, as a colonized space, one whose geographic and historic intelligibility is made possible through the inscription of place-names that commemorate the European centre. I demonstrate how the banality of colonial geography works in its powerfully subtle ways by taking the reader on an imaginary subway ride, one that travels across a series of toponyms that highlight how the city recites, inscribes and promulgates a story of colonial presence in a largely obscured but simultaneously hyper-visible way. I argue that such colonial story telling through toponymy is a crucial site at which to engage critically
Book Review: Inclusive Education: Stories of Success and Hope in a Canadian Context
Get PDFIn their book, Inclusive Education: Stories of Success and Hope in a Canadian Context (2018), Stegemann and AuCoin have created an exceptional collection of case studies that illustrate what is possible when a firm belief in inclusion in its deepest sense is combined with a spirit of collaboration and co-operation. The nine case studies include students with unique and complex learning needs at different stages of their educational career. A wide range of exceptionalities and levels of ability are presented in different settings across Canada. While this diversity makes the book interesting and informative, it is the inclusion of multiple perspectives and the actual voices of the individuals involved that results in a compelling and important resource for both pre-service and in-service educators
Two Hands, Two Decks and a Theory in Action: Expanding Thinking Vocabularies of Learners in the 21st Century
Get PDFA complex 21st century offers us complex problems. We need more complex ways to think in order to solve them—such as Ken Wilber’s integral thinking. In this article, utilizing historical education referents for reconceptualizing curriculum in order to create more emphasis on meta-cognitive thinking about thinking, I offer a playful arts-based inquiry and performance of a unique curriculum device (a deck of thinking cards) that allows educators and researchers to bring forward their diverse vocabulary of types of thinking. I assert that it is time we passed on this vocabulary to our youth, to access and utilize in their own human potential growth and transformation into integral thinkers
A Tale of Two Schools: A Practitioner’s Use of Bourdieu’s Theory to Understand Academic Underachievement Among Students at His Inner-City School
Get PDFThis paper describes my journey, as a teacher at a Canadian inner-city elementary school, toward conceptually understanding why many children at my current school repeatedly academically underachieve. I have utilized Bourdieu’s theory of practice as a heuristic to examine how social reproduction operates differently for school children from different social classes and leads to differences in achievement. The first component of this paper establishes a crucial theoretical base for practitioners by describing theory of practice and its key concepts of cultural capital, habitus, field, and symbolic violence, to explicate how social reproduction functions in education, highlighting the roles of institutions and professionals, and the transformative and generative potentials of Bourdieu’s theory. The second component provides important epistemological and methodological considerations regarding how practitioners might conduct successful empirical studies while avoiding the problems that are prevalent in existing empirical literature
(Re)visiting John Dewey and (Re)imagining a Curriculum with the Empty Space of a Haiku
Get PDFLike the haiku, in which the empty space invites a reader into open and honest communication with the poet, the authors believe that the empty space of curriculum can promote genuine conversations between the learner and the teacher. Relying on Dewey’s concepts of interest, continuity, and interaction in education, the authors develop three aspects of a curriculum that may engender sustained conversations: (a) aspirations of both the teacher and the learner; (b) continuous interaction; and (c) trust and respect between the teacher and learner. Mentoring in teacher education programs is proposed to develop such conversations, in which both mentor and teachers-to-be feel secure and open enough to claim their aspirations
Feeling My Way From the University Into the Wilderness and Back Again
Get PDFThis narrative essay unfolds in two parts. Part 1—Feeling My Way into Embodied Research—reflects on my doctoral fieldwork, which involved living for a year in complete solitude in the remote wilderness of southern Chile. The life events that shaped this experience, including childhood, education, early career, and graduate studies, laid the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual groundwork for the project. A key challenge was to develop a methodology appropriate to the unusual context of my study. My methodology was grounded in mindful observation layered with analytic introspection, loosely based on autoethnography. Part 2 Feeling My Way into Embodied Writing—recounts the process of transforming my 900 page wilderness journal into a doctoral dissertation that was both academically rigorous and accessible to audiences. I abandoned the traditional academic approach of using a conceptual framework to organize the work in favour of a first person narrative, punctuated with analytic essays. Rather than write a dissertation about solitude, I let the voices of solitude speak directly to readers and evoke for them the actual experience as I had lived it