Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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Memories, Crossings, and Station Stops: Displaced Pasts into Present Teaching of Language and Art
Get PDFWhether photographed from the missing pages of a summer day, or surrounded by the light of spectral clouds passing through a whisper, stories that provoke connections between person and place can be both powerful and inspiring in the recurring creation of teaching narratives. What happens when we, a professor and a doctoral student, come together to critically inquire into the displaced pasts of our present selves for future teachers of language and art? Which locations will we select? Where will our dialogue take us? We respond in a composition of poetry, prose, and image
Taking the Quantum Leap: Arts-Based Learning as a Gateway into Exploring Transition for Senior Nursing Students
Get PDFIn a senior-baccalaureate nursing program, a student’s journey of transition to becoming a Registered Nurse is fraught with institutional and relational tensions. In a fourth-year capstone theory course focused on issues and trends in nursing leadership, we explored these tensions through arts-based learning activities. Through the theoretical lens of Janzen’s (2013) Quantum Perspective of Learning, reflective narratives illuminated student experiences of the transition and into the unknown. Our goal to inspire, to nurture, and to empower students to take their own quantum leaps took them into finite career spaces and the infinite spaces in-between and beyond
Two Voices on Aboriginal Pedagogy: Sharpening the Focus
Get PDFThis paper is the story of the authors’ paths to the shared realization that the strategies and epistemological underpinnings of Aboriginal education need to move out of the margins and into the centre of education in Canada, not only for Aboriginal students, but for all students. Between August, 2010 and April of 2012, the authors were seconded for two years from their Vancouver classrooms to work as Faculty Associates in the teacher preparation program at Simon Fraser University. There we came face to face with the British Columbia Teacher Regulation Branch’s mandate that Aboriginal education courses must be taught to pre-service teachers. Part of our job was to cultivate strategies using Aboriginal pedagogy to inform pre-service teachers’ developing practice and ways of communicating with their students. Here we describe how, after returning to our school district, we changed our teaching practices through actualizing Aboriginal pedagogy
When Is the Teacher? Reflections on Life Writing, Social Fiction, and Film
Get PDFIn this paper, seven Canadian curriculum researchers investigate and discuss life writing as a mode of educational inquiry and curricular theorizing through which educators can attend to the tensions and complexities of teaching and learning in a variety of curricular and pedagogical contexts. Drawing from their individual and collective research in creative methods of arts-based inquiry, they explore how life writing, with its multiple modalities between creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, theatre arts, fine arts, and multimedia, can open up possibilities for researchers, teachers, and students to rethink and re-enact education as an inspiriting, heart-full, and empathetic endeavour
(Re)searching (Trans-Multi)Culturally Responsive Curricular Conversations
Get PDFHaunted by the regurgitating moments of schooling experienced by myself and my students in multiple cultural contexts, in this paper, I attempt to initiate a provocative dialogue regarding the kinds of conversations we should have to bring “education” into today’s culturally diverse classrooms. By sharing the current dilemmas encountered by many students in contemporary schooling, specifically in science and mathematics classrooms, I argue for the creation and enactment of a (trans-multi)culturally responsive curriculum. Drawing on Aoki’s inspirited rhizomatic curriculum, Pinar’s currere as a complicated conversation, along with Schwab’s deliberated practice of engaging curricular commonplaces in a dialogue, I propose a (trans-multi)culturally responsive curricular framework as one way to invite teachers to engage deliberatively in a complicated conversation that could broaden their understandings of culturally responsive education in today’s classrooms
The Old Durham Road Black Pioneer Settlement: Contested Place as an Invitation to Curriculum
Get PDFUsing Lippard’s (1997) conceptual framings of place (the physical, ideological and imaginary), we consider how the dominant White Pioneer Narrative shapes stories told about a historic Black pioneer settlement in Grey County, Ontario. The contested history of this community demonstrates the importance of place to people’s stories and it also points to new imaginings that might restore this forgotten community to its rightful place in local history. An oral history project with community elders and an engagement with children in the local school are used to explore the tensions and a hopeful way forward
The Live(d) Curriculum: Life Feeling Itself
Get PDFThe article focuses on the ideas and meanings that emerge for the author as she experiences the death of her father. Here, through a series of vignettes which expose curricula as live(d) by herself, her father, and others, the author explores multiple conceptions of the live(d) curriculum. As a result, ideas and meanings of (in)visibility, last(ing) rituals, and life feeling itself surface and in significant ways occasion the author’s new awareness and deeper understanding of the live(d) curriculum
Towards a Walking-Based Pedagogy
Get PDFAfter several years of experimenting with walking as a creative process and an artistic form, my commitment to developing walking-based pedagogy for art education has been honed and heartened. This article details my doctoral research and summarizes the mindful walking methodology I am developing for diverse demographics and variable geographies. In particular, I share excerpts from interviews conducted with four Montreal-based artists who walk as an aspect of their practice: Victoria Stanton, Kathleen Vaughan, karen elaine spencer, and Dominique Ferraton. Presented as a hybrid article that couples a written introduction with a self-directed audio walk, the two components are designed to complement one another. By providing an audio walk as a pedagogical tool, I am advocating for kineasthetic engagement as an essential component for discourse on this topic. Likewise, I propose a notion of curriculum that is lived and emerging, somatic and contextual, personal yet political, and enhanced by curiosity and listening
The Divide Between Vocational and Academic Education and How We Might Be Able to Repair the Rift.
Get PDFThe following article provides a historical perspective to the notion there is a divide between academic and vocational education and training (VET). The author explores the biases held by parents, teachers, administrators and policy-makers toward VET, and provides explanations of why these views might be held. Even though positive changes have been made in promoting VET there still remains an undercurrent of negative discourse. The autobiographical approach of the article provides the writer with the means to challenge the negative perspectives, and presents a personal view into how VET might be vindicated from denigrating attitudes
Maroon Theory and Me-thou-poeisis
Get PDFTaking ‘maroon’ as a complexly embodied psychoanalytic hermeneutic aesthetic in Caribbean literatures in English I tell a story of my own production as a curriculum scholar with others through poetry and photographs. In many ways aspects of my experience of doctoral education in curriculum studies in Canada can be described as a marooning. This perhaps is not a unique experience. However, in my case, very early on in the process – less than two months in – I physically abandoned my doctoral seminar and though my body returned to the classroom in the coming weeks I do not think my spirit ever has. That moment has become an identity marker, somatically sutured and indexed to a mythopoetic re-construction of a-Being-not-at-home-with-oneself