Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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Upsetting Ourselves: Readings, Relations, and Other Unsettling Practices
Get PDFThis editorial introduces the current issue, Volume 7 Number 1
Unsettling Fictions: Disrupting Popular Discourses and Trickster Tales in Books for Children
Get PDFThis paper examines why stories and storytelling within education are important, discusses reasons why appropriation of stories is problematic, raises issues with the process of sharing cultural stories from around the world, and discusses Trickster stories and the complexity of these stories. With this background, we then critique the book Raven: A Trickster Tale from the Pacific Northwest by Gerald McDermott as an example of the complexity teachers, parents, and librarians face in teaching with books for children that are appropriated from Indigenous knowledges. In an example of teachers engaging with a story told from an Indigenous perspective, A Coyote Columbus Story (King, 1992), students engage in disrupting boundaries and transforming the classroom experiences. These examples highlight the challenges and responsibilities of rejecting literature that appropriates Indigenous knowledges and moves towards teaching with Indigenous literatures. Educators are challenged to consider Indigenous literatures written from Indigenous perspectives and to engage with these in ways that transform educational experiences
“Taking Haig-Brown Seriously”: Implications of Indigenous Thought on Ontario Educators
Get PDFHaig-Brown’s paper offers a definitive statement of the bi-epistemic implications of Indigenous and mainstream knowledge paradigms as they influence curriculum studies. For Ontario educators its impact centers ultimately in forcing them to make sense of their own epistemic experiences in light of Indigenous ontologies and curricular policies. The aim of this paper is to apply the descriptive points of view that Haig-Brown presents into a more extended conversation as it applies to a provincial context. More specifically, it first offers a conceptual analysis of the tension between the principles of integrating Indigenous Knowledge into mainstream curriculum practices and the realities of their integration in the context of Ontario Aboriginal education policy. Second, it discusses how Indigenous Knowledge has the potential to “reframe and decentre” educators’ paradigms of curriculum, teaching and learning from the same policy context (Haig-Brown, 2008, p. 13). Last, this paper comments upon how the Ontario policy has the potential to dismantle the “border-world” that Indigenous epistemologies have been relegated to by colonial understandings of teaching and curriculum (Haig-Brown, 2008, p. 14). This analysis represents a response to the ideological pressure on public school educators in Ontario to implement the curricular focus of the policy Framework into their school’s classrooms. Yet, Haig-Brown’s warning to seriously consider the implications of Indigenous Knowledge eclipses to a much greater extent the politics behind the rhetoric of the policy. The underlying effect of Haig-Brown’s position implicates educators’ ideologies as they plan and exercise the respective policy interventions into their curriculum
Landwash Readers: A Space of Collective Reading in the Medical Humanities
Get PDFAs readers, the sedimentations of our surrounding world ensure that we never read alone. There is an uneasy otherness in all readings, through which naming our obstacles is a bringing to the fore a consciousness of lack and flatness; what Maxine Greene calls an achievement of freedom in education as a transcendence of the given, an overcoming that is never complete. Obstacles in learning, which signify the dialectical nature of every human situation, are stirrings that engage dialogue in the place of an assumed silence, imagining the possible pluralities of subjectivity through learning on the verges of a fractured space. Within the context of this pedagogical confrontation, I examine the articulations of a reading group in the medical humanities from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Surpassing the closed nature of individual readings, such groups choose to act out their freedoms, and in doing so, interact with other people and textual forms as obstacles, where reading is a looping, a struggle, and a risking of free choice in a landspace that is forever shifting. As a commitment of an inherently social nature, Greene’s struggle for freedom in learning enables an embracing of alterity in a reader’s process of becoming; to become different from what one is, and what one is supposed to be—pursuing a curriculum of incessant rupturing, where openings and cleavages are always available. In this paper, I look at one use-value of social reading shared by members of this reading group: Resistance, and a Legitimation of Artistry in Medicine
The Hidden Curriculum of Wilderness: Images of Landscape in Canada
Get PDFIn this article, I offer an analysis of the Canadian relationship with the land as a point of departure for educators to consider personal modes of resistance so that the curricular goals of communal responsibility for the land, and understanding within and across differences can begin and continue to flourish. Because of the reality of increasing encounters with difference in schools, teachers and students need space to examine their epistemological and ontological grounding: how they come to know who they are in the time and place of contemporary life. Relationships with images of the land are cogent aspects of this kind of deep, reflexive inquiry and pursuit of these connections involves critical visual literacy. Through a consideration of some forces that shape the development and maintenance of national identity in Canada, I examine the influences of images of wilderness on contemporary, collective life. In this light, I trace the historical evolution of the landscape work of the Group of Seven painters to the level of national icon. The hidden curriculum of “wilderness nation” is an influence that runs counter to the realities of many students’ learning experiences in Canadian schools. I discuss the ways that the signifier of wilderness maintains hegemonic, discriminatory practices within schools
Curricular Landscapes: Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions of Place and Identity
Get PDFThe longitudinal study explored preservice teachers’ understandings of Canadian identity and representations of identity in Canadian multicultural picture books. The design involved descriptive case studies in six Faculties of Education across six provinces. Some participants viewed place as related to landscape and geography; some perceived place as a site for promoting sociocultural understanding; others articulated critical discourse of place. Perspectives ranged from sophisticated understandings of Canadian identity and representations in the picture books to resistance to representations or issues that disrupt a dominant (white) perspective of a benevolent multicultural Canada
