Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
Not a member yet
474 research outputs found
Sort by
Virage pédagogique : Le cas du développement professionnel en arts visuels
Get PDFLes enseignants de l’élémentaire en Ontario, sont tenus d’offrir des cours en arts, soit en danse, en arts dramatiques, en musique et en arts visuels. L’acquisition d’une compétence élevée dans ces quatre disciplines représente un défi de taille pour eux. Une université bilingue ontarienne et un comité consultatif des arts de l’est de l’Ontario ont collaboré à la mise sur pied d’un programme de développement professionnel en arts visuels visant à répondre à ce besoin. Une étude du programme a su démontrer que les participants ont pu améliorer leur expertise, ont augmenté leur niveau de confiance, ont démontré plus d’efficacité au niveau de leur enseignement, se sont sentis plus à l’aise avec la discipline en général et ont, par conséquent, pris goût d’enseigner cette discipline. L’acquisition des connaissances des enseignantes dans le domaine des arts visuels a été favorisée en s’initiant aux différentes stratégies d’apprentissage utilisées dans l’enseignement des arts visuels, en étant encouragé de façon soutenue à explorer leur propre créativité, en s’engageant dans des activités concrètes, en ayant l’occasion d’observer le processus artistique et en se retrouvant dans un environnement dépourvu de risques et de préjugés. Les participants ont clairement énuméré leurs besoins par rapport à l’amélioration de leurs techniques d’enseignement des arts: l’acquisition d’une meilleure connaissance des habiletés à développer en arts visuels, l’accès à un programme de perfectionnement sur place, l’établissement d’un lien entre les habiletés en arts et les résultats d’apprentissage qui s’y rattachent et la possibilité d’avoir accès au développement professionnel dans toutes les disciplines des arts
Promoting Environmental Stewardship through gardens: A case study of children’s views of an urban school garden
Get PDFFostering children’s relationships with nature to develop their sense of environmental stewardship is an important means for redressing damage to the planet caused by human consumption and our collective failure to connect with the natural world. School garden programs provide a potentially meaningful way to promote children’s sense of connection to nature. This paper describes findings from an 8-month qualitative study investigating how a school garden program at one public elementary school in southeastern Ontario promoted the students’ sense of environmental stewardship. Data collected from eight students through observations, semi-structured interviews, and students’ photographs identified five broad themes associated with enhancing environmental stewardship for children (including connecting with nature, caretaking, and harvesting) as well as three broad themes that help explain the long-term success of the venture (including parental involvement and community connections). The discussion highlights some of the benefits of the school garden program, as well as some of the difficulties associated with the program and limitations of the study
A heart of wisdom: Life writing as empathetic inquiry
Get PDFThis exquisite collection of creative non-‐‑fiction expands possibilities for education through its rich and provocative articulation of life writing as curriculum inquiry. “A Heart of Wisdom: Life Writing as Empathetic Inquiry” (2012) is a companion volume to the editors’ previous work, “Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for our Times” (Hasebe-‐‑Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009)
Fishing for difference: A case study of singularity and sensibility in critical literary life writing
Get PDFThis paper draws upon a two-year study that examined how critical literary life writing helped a group of lesbian seniors negotiate identity. As we consider the notions of difference and singularity, building upon the earlier work of one of the authors, we analyze the work of one participant - an ex nun whose life’s work has made her remarkable in the eyes of the world. However, as oral historians (Portelli, 1981; Thompson, 2009) have found, epic stories of celebration and achievement can serve to limit the scope of life narratives. This can hold especially true for marginalized individuals (Boyd, 2008). We suggest that in this instance, structured practices of close writing opened up our participant’s narrative to lyric possibility, rather than the “grammars of consequence” (Zwicky, 2006)
Hooping through Interdisciplinary Intertwinings: Curriculum, Kin/aesthetic Ethics, and Energetic Vulnerabilities
Get PDFLearning to become a teacher is inherently stressful. Daunting deadlines of final assignments become the curricular hoops students jump through, conceptualized as gateways to experiencing something meaningful on the ‘other’ side, beyond the circumscribed constraints of a university campus. In an ethic, kinaesthetic, and energetic pedagogical response, teacher candidates were invited to spend time with and physically explore the very object they associate with their exasperations: the hoop. This inquiry thus aimed to explore emergent interdisciplinary understandings between the practice of ‘learning to teach’ and ‘learning to hoop’ on campus and with children in local schools and a First Nations community. Student interviews revealed that the practice of hooping not only released stress, it afforded an opportunity to loosen rigid notions of curriculum and pedagogy, specifically that learning is more than a linear journey of jumping through a prescribed set of hoops and that teaching is more than a process of transmitting information. A bodily pedagogical practice of vulnerability, fluidity and interactivity thus emerged as teacher candidates became receptive to step into and be transformed by the hoop.
An Uncanny Insurrection: Debating Negativity in the Work of Kara Walker
Get PDFMost well known for her large-scale silhouette installations, Kara Walker offers a critique of African-American history, as well as current cultural conditions, through a series of images that are a mixture of beautiful and grotesque, tranquil and violent, real and fantasized. Her work has provoked both criticism and commendation. In this paper, I bring Deborah Britzman’s (2009) educational theory into conversation with Mark Reinhardt’s (2007) aesthetic theory to examine the debates around Walker’s work through the questions: How might we read the anxieties brought about by Walker’s work? And, what might her work bring to bear on education
Living Ethically within Conflicts of Colonial Authority and Relationality
Get PDFTo consider more fully the contextual complexities of living ethically as curriculum scholars, we wish to attend to the various discursive regimes that effectively delimit and circumscribe research projects initiated in partnership with Indigenous peoples and their communities. The habitual disregard of Indigenous peoples stems from the colonial frontier experience. The overriding assumption at work in these colonial frontier logics is that Indigenous peoples and Canadians inhabit separate realities. The inherent intention is to deny relationality. Within the research community there is an increased awareness of the importance of including Indigenous people in the development of research programs related to their communities. We were invited by an Indigenous community to work with the community and school leadership to develop a research program related to student performance in mathematics. Through our work, we have come to wonder about the authority of researchers, the authority of mathematics, and the authority of culture. We have come to understand how easy it is to replicate colonial logics as authoritative and have encountered conflicts when resisting these stances. In this paper, we offer some reflections and insights regarding how, and in what ways, we attempted to disrupt colonial logics. Through our listening to the teachings of children and teachers, we have come to conceptualize cultural relationality as an ethic guiding our participation in a research project with an Indigenous community
“Do you know what a tower is?” The Crisis of 9/11 Remembrance Pedagogy in Samira Makhmalbaf’s God, Construction and Destruction
Get PDFFor Deborah Britzman and Alice Pitt (2004), “difficult knowledge” “signif[ies] the relations between representations of social trauma in curriculum and the individual's encounters with them in pedagogy” (p. 354). Difficult knowledge thus poses a twofold crisis for and of education. The remembrance of historical trauma is a crisis for education, since teaching and learning about such events are necessary when addressing their myriad legacies. It is also a crisis of education because the practices of teaching about and learning from traumatic experiences are themselves constituted by the events that education represents through pedagogy and curriculum. This paper takes up Britzman’s concept of “difficult knowledge” as it is embodied in the film God, Construction and Destruction. In particular, the paper unpacks the concept of difficult knowledge as it relates to the film’s aim of making 9/11 remembrance pedagogy more ethically accountable. This paper argues that the film’s portrayal of a “failed” lesson on 9/11 demonstrates how “strategic memorial practices” (Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert, 2000, p. 3) risk equating 9/11 remembrance pedagogy with hegemonic and nationalist forms of remembrance that foreclose the crises that difficult knowledge otherwise poses. In its investigation into the futures of 9/11 remembrance pedagogy, the paper addresses three issues that preoccupy Makhmalbaf’s film: distinguishing between “learning from” versus “learning about” traumatic events; historicizing and contextualizing historical trauma; and lastly, assessing the significance of art and artists in education and public remembrance