Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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Traces of the Past: Raising the Allumettières (Matchworkers) in Sites of Collective Remembering
Get PDFEngaging with historical events, people and places encourages students to envision history as a dynamic process where individual, group, and national identities are reproduced. These types of educational interventions can foster recognition that history—both past events and our records about them—result from a process of authorship. The recent surge of interest amongst history educators and within recent publications of provincial curricula that focus on historical thinking concepts—historical significance, primary source evidence, continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical perspectives, and the ethical dimension of historical interpretations—encourages educators to consider ways to integrate these concepts within their teaching practice. Our case study of the narrative account of the allumettières (matchworkers) of Hull, Quebec is an example of one type of classroom inquiry into local places of remembering that could be taken up in the context of recent developments in, and aspirations for, the history curriculum. Our project invites readers to engage in the historical process of understanding the past within contemporary classrooms by drawing upon a range of interdisciplinary approaches including web-based exhibits and artefacts, visits to historic sites, published accounts and dramatic representations to meet these curriculum expectations
Poetic Ponderings of Being at Home/Not at Home: (Em)bodiment in the Spaces In-Between
Get PDFThis poetic inquiry grapples with the notion of home—what it means to be at home in all of its de/generative possibilities of dis/placement, be/longing, and be/coming. Home, as a place that one is from, is explored by way of the tensions in-between place and self, highlighted through a series of personal vignettes. In working through what it means to inhabit the space in-between, the author calls attention to the limits of language for representing the in-between within a text, detailing the constraints of the dash and ampersand and offering the slash as a possible means of representation
kistikwânihk êsko kitêhk: Storying Holistic Understandings in Education
Get PDFLearning alongside Dr. Dwayne Donald and Elder Bob Cardinal in a Holistic Understandings of Learning class held in Fall 2014 on Enoch Cree Nation evoked different ways of living well and wisely in the world. This course created a sacred place for the “four-part person” (mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual) to emerge, as we learned to pay deeper attention to the interconnectivity of creation in our educational practices. This multimedia métissage (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, & Leggo, 2009) combines life writing, readers’ theatre, and visual representations, weaving together our embodied responses to Elder Cardinal’s teachings. Each individual’s journey kistikwânihk êsko kitêhk (Cree: from head to heart) maintains its integrity and unique voice as it is intentionally woven into the Cree principles of meskanaw (pathway), miyo waskawewin (to walk in a good way), and the Blackfoot concept of aokakio’siit (being wisely aware)
Book Review- Simon, Roger I. (2014). A pedagogy of witnessing: Curatorial practice and the pursuit of social justice. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
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“Students are Once Again ‘Numbers’ Instead of Actual Human Beings”: Teacher Performance Assessment and The Governing of Curriculum and Teacher Education.
Get PDFThis paper will examine the educational experiences of teacher candidates and the use of teacher performance assessment (edTPA) to measure their quality, competence, and impact. It will situate edTPA within the national, politically-charged debate between the defenders and reformers of teacher education who advocate for the professionalization versus deregulation of the field, respectively. Their positions converge, however, in the collective belief and reliance on testing to measure educational inputs and outputs. Even the defenders are caught in a reactive stance to show through testing data the value and relevance of teacher preparation. The paper will also investigate the perspectives on edTPA of teacher candidates at a medium-sized, public university in the US Midwest. Using a survey of candidates who completed edTPA during the 2014-15 academic year, it will highlight candidate resistance to edTPA, even though they have been disciplined and immersed in a culture of testing throughout their K-12 and university education. Their resistance foregrounds three themes: (a) time and stress; (b) outsourcing of teacher evaluation; and (c) contradictions between curriculum and assessment in teacher education. Moreover, it will mobilize Michel Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and critique to analyze the ruling logic and practices in education and the candidates’ resistance under difficult conditions
Collaborative Writing as an Exercise of Poetic Resistance in Teacher Education
Get PDFOver the last decade we have strived through a collaborative writing project to open a polyvocal and layered conversation on critical contemporary issues in teacher education, even as our program faced its demise. Our writing inquiries began as a critical thinking-through of the qualities of lived experiences as instructors within an innovative and now defunct teacher education program. The context for our work was a radically construed approach to teacher education that—in its language, form, and curriculum—challenged prevailing norms of practice. In our collaborative writing we confront the difficult work of teacher education, addressing specific challenges, complex demands, and forms of resistance that are prevalent in faculties of education everywhere. Such challenges include how we narrate alternative visions of teacher education, attend to issues of ethics and recognition, deal with the complexities of learning professional practice and take into account the larger, historical project of teacher education. As a provocative example of self-study research, our collaborative method of inquiry illustrates the richness and productivity of collaborative, poetic, practice-based research, oriented to critical issues in teacher education. The intentional effort to make our work public and politically provocative represents a deliberate attempt by the authors to reveal the importance of these critical conversations. We intend our conversations and thinking-through about practices in teacher education to remain open-ended and responsive to a plurality of thought and experience. Collaborative writing serves for us as a kind of resistance, reclaiming, re-storying, and historical accounting through encounters with others
From Lists to Images: Exploring the Concept of the Good Teacher in Teacher Education
Get PDFThe question of what it means to be a good teacher is often addressed through lists of teacher traits, competencies, skills, beliefs, and practices. However, list-making runs the risk of fragmenting the complex, relational act of teaching and limiting the types of conversations that occur in teacher education. There is a small body of literature that attempts to explore this question through the use of images rather than lists. The aim of this paper is to foreground that research and the types of conversations it enables in order to begin to interrogate the images and corresponding discourses about good teachers that are held both individually and collectively
The teacher-coach relationship- a relationship geared toward deep learning or increased institutional control?
No full textThis paper examines relationship(s) between school coaches and teachers. The paper positions teacher ongoing professional learning and change through this relationship as a contested experience that exposes both qualities of rich learning and new practice as well as power relations and relative disempowerment. The paper is drawn from a larger interpretive case study that followed the experiences of district-based consultants working in a large-scale consultancy-based reform, the Secondary National Strategy (SNS), in London, UK from 2002-2006. The paper uses unstructured interviews to reveal the various and diverse experiences that occurred in schools as a result of the introduction of the consultant-teacher relationship into schools. From these experiences, a complex picture of the coach-teacher relationship appeared. Amongst other things, the SNS consultants provided opportunities for teachers to collaborate and share their work in ways that helped break some of the structural isolation within secondary schools, while also serving to further control teachers’ workspace and classroom activities. The potential for teachers to take on new curriculum, refine their practice and potentially grow new forms of pedagogy within their work will also presumably require district, federation, faculty and government supporting conditions that are responsive to school and teacher workspaces. Viewing an instance of intensive interaction between teachers and coaches provides insights into the challenge of new, refined or adapted forms of pedagogy becoming institutionalized within large, diverse public school systems
Awakeness, complexity and emergence: Learning through curriculum theory in teacher education
Get PDFIn this self-study research, we explore how the work of significant and diverse curriculum scholars informed the learning of teacher candidates within an intensive summer semester that serves as the foundation for a Secondary Teacher Education Program (STEP) at a Canadian university. Questions that guided our inquiry include: How did teacher candidates take up and negotiate theory as part of their emerging professional identities? How did teacher candidates understand the relationship between pedagogy and their learning of/through curriculum theory? How did teacher candidates embody diverse theories and how did they understand the significance of this within and beyond this foundational semester? And finally, as teacher educators, how are our beliefs, understandings and practices developing through this self-study? We employed a qualitative, grounded theory approach and engaged in iterative cycles of analysis with learning artifacts and interview transcripts from 26 teacher candidates. We identified the rich and layered themes of emergence, complexity, and awakeness, which revealed shifts in teacher candidates’ awareness in relation to their evolving identities. We discuss these themes in relation to the above questions and locate the influences of the selected theorists. This research contributes to the field of curriculum studies through offering a living case that explores how taking up diverse and contemporary curriculum theorists has potential to both support teacher candidates to experience praxis and shift the ground of teacher education
Métis Curricular Challenges and Possibilities: A Discussion Initiated by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Education Policy in Ontario
Get PDFThe Ontario Ministry of Education’s (2007) Ontario First Nation, Métis and Inuit Education Policy Framework asks school boards to “provide a curriculum that facilitates learning about contemporary and traditional First Nation, Métis, and Inuit cultures, histories, and perspectives among all students, and that also contributes to the education of school board staff … [and] teachers” (p. 7). The framework is a conduit to push First Nation, Métis, and Inuit initiatives beyond the exceptional program or course found in a few Ontario schools. However, in our recent Report on Métis education in Ontario’s K-12 schools (2012) for the Métis Nation of Ontario’s Education and Training Branch, we found only a small portion of school boards were engaged actively in bringing the above mandate to life. As to Métis, the challenge is largely a lack of awareness of Métis history and culture. Our findings show there is a need for more Métis curricular material to be developed to broaden the appreciation, awareness, and understanding of the historical and contemporary Métis. Here, we share curricular challenges and possibilities in heading the call from Métis for a nuanced portrayal of families and communities at school