Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (JCACS)
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Symposium: Driving Black Student Success on a System-Wide Level
No full textQualitative and quantitative data indicators from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and York University highlight the crucial need for a holistic Black Student Success and Excellence (BSSE) strategy to address systemic racism that Black students face in all aspects of their schooling. To this end, TDSB developed a program to foster critical consciousness in educators. The initiative partnered educators, school administrators, central support staff, associated researchers and initiative leaders in an inquiry-based journey relevant to their role(s), space(s) and experience. The study took place in 17 secondary and elementary schools. Results demonstrate that participants fostered their own critical consciousness and that of their students’ through the research or inquiry process. The symposium details experiences from across this work. It also explores the direct and indirect effects of the initiative on participants related to the conditions and mechanisms for entry, implementation, mobilization and sustainability, and processes within the initiative at micro and macro levels. As an extension of this work, TDSB and York University also piloted a Black Student Summer Leadership Institute to provide Black secondary students with opportunities to understand and develop leadership and agency in challenging anti-Black racism through principles of Youth Participatory Action Research. As part of their inquiry, students in the summer program also identified the following key themes to describe the Black student experience: sense of belonging, stress, engagement, body/self-image, neglect, student voice and safety. Overall, this panel highlights the different components, challenges and successes with this initiative and implications for expanding this work
Feeling Environmental Policing: Possibilities and Challenges for Socio-Ecological Justice.
Get PDFThis is a conceptual paper that merges collaborative acts of storying with theoretical contributions from the affective turn (Clough, 2008) to illustrate ways by which mainstream forms of environmentalism (Klein, 2015) may inscribe normative ways of feeling and being with environments while policing others. Methodologically, we draw on our personal and collective storying-while-walking (Springgay & Truman, 2019) in and around the University of British Columbia (UBC) during the Canadian Society for the Study of Education 2019 conference. We consider how our encounters with/in nature are often disciplined by popular environmentalist discourses (e.g., recycling, greening, contaminating). In our walks/storying, we centre material agents (e.g., trash receptacles, kombucha bottle, tree) as part of affective economies (Ahmed, 2013) that align us to particular ways of feeling (with) nature, for example, embarrassment from not knowing how to recycle a kombucha bottle. We attune ourselves to this hegemonic environmental imaginary, in which certain humans assume control and dominion over nature and reinforce that control via green economies. This compels us to ask: in what ways do environmental efforts for cultivating more response-ability towards nature (Wallace, Higgins & Bazzul, 2018) come to exceed our response-ability with each other as part of nature? How might we follow affective economies that discipline how we value, manage and save nature, and how might this open up pedagogical possibilities for relating differently with each other/nature? With science and environmental education and research in mind, we suggest staying with emotions that make visible acts of environmental policing for socio-ecological justice
Recovering the (Mis)Promises of Critical Pedagogies in Neoliberal Times: A Turn to Ethics
Get PDFThere are many renderings of critical pedagogy and at the core of each theory is a desire for the common good and a more just world. However, neoliberal logic is undermining the foundational promises of critical pedagogies. What happens when teachers, schooled in these theories—these promises—work in buildings that are hostile, indifferent or simply pay lip service to such theoretical goals? What happens when teachers realize, witness and participate in education as a force of ongoing colonial and systemic oppressions based on sex, gender, class and race (Battiste, 2005; Dion, 2010; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2011; Noroozi, 2017)? What happens to teachers’ (critical) pedagogical praxis when all hope of change seems impossible, when the inevitability of the way-things-are sucks all hope out of you? In an attempt to grapple with the “pervasive atmosphere of capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009, p. 16) that infiltrates and impedes the educational, I position public education in Berlant’s (2011) notion of cruel optimism and question the (mis)promises of critical pedagogies. In doing so, I consider a turn to ethics to recover the “educational in education” (Di Paolantonio, 2016, p. 148). I make this move to think through how an ethics of responsibility to and for others might be fostered in schools given the compromised place of public education today
Sociotechnical Imaginaries: A Possible Contribution to Science Education
Get PDFThis is a conceptual paper that highlights notions of sociotechnical imaginaries (STIs; Jasanoff, 2015) from fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that seem relevant to science education aimed at preparing critical and active citizens (Bencze, 2017). We extend our discussion to fields of future studies in science education to argue that a needed direction is not merely to get students to imagine desired (often personalized) futures (especially given social and environmental harms), but to interrogate how products of science and technology seem to delimit kinds of futures we ought to desire. That is, technoscientific futures are not just out there, but are already present, actively fashioning current practices and values. Drawing from STS literature, we demonstrate how STIs are enacted through two current technoscientific products: self-tracking devices and algorithms. We argue that such technoscience products have an active role in constructing certain kinds of individuals/publics (e.g., quantified citizens, calculated publics). Roles of material technologies in normalizing moral and political visions and future orientations need to be explicitly addressed in re-centering nature of technology as inseparable from nature of science (Roth, 2001). Notions of STIs further offer more nuanced approaches to discuss power at the interface of the public/private within STS Education (Pedretti & Nazir, 2011). Finally, notions of STIs may present us with new ways for (re-)encountering affect in science education (Alsop, 2016), as feelings of hope and anxieties contour (how we come to re-envision) imaginaries grounded in technoscientific worlds
To Know, To Love and To Heal: PhotoStory and Duo-Ethnography as Approaches to Enhancing Social Justice and Self-Actualization in High School Classrooms
Get PDFThis article explores using PhotoStory to promote social justice in the classroom. Interweaving Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) with story-sharing results in PhotoStory, a unique teaching and learning approach that can empower voices of marginalized high school students. Through PhotoStory, we explore possibilities for self-actualization in high schools, where a primary pedagogical goal is to disrupt inequitable social orders and change oppressive behaviors and perceptions. Coming to critical consciousness for both teachers and students is vital, leading to engagement in dialogical pedagogy (Mthethwa-Sommers, 2014). As bell hooks (1994) asserts, oppression emanates in and through differences in relation to sex/gender, class and race. Similarly, Freire (1970) highlights the critical role of literacy skills to equip those who are oppressed to speak truth to power. Contextualized by habitus (Bourdieu, 1986), creators of PhotoStory documentaries come to understand their own and others’ lived experiences, enhancing individual and collective empathy, and promoting healing, offering holistic ways to connect through culturally responsive learning, and flipped and flattened pedagogies. By applying duoethnography (Sawyer & Norris, 2013), three authors, two graduate students and one professor discuss and critique this art-based pedagogical method via experiences of utilizing PhotoStory as an experiential teaching and learning tool. Although the scholars are different in relation to age, status, gender and sexual identities, they are committed to exploring an ethic of care and pedagogical self-actualization that serves our need “to know, to love, and to heal”
A Subdued Palette of Subversion
Get PDFArtwork and exegesis, provided by the artist.Oeuvres d'art et exégèse, donnés par l'artiste
Body Maps as Ecological, Affective, Relational and Decolonizing Method
Get PDFBuilding upon previous research (Fidyk 2019a, 2019b) aimed to support the mental health of vulnerable youth, this presentation focuses on body maps as an ecological, affective, relational and decolonizing method for data creation, collection and expression/presentation. Body maps, broadly defined, are life-size body images, while body mapping is the process of creating body maps using collage, photography, painting or other arts-integrated techniques to visually symbolize aspects of people’s lives, bodies and worlds. Rooted in research regarding women’s reproductive health and body biology in Jamaica (MacCormack, 1985), body maps became widely used as a method to study HIV/AIDS self-care needs. It has been used in community-based work in Zimbabwe (Cornwall, 1990) and South Africa (MacGregor, 2009), and in Brazil, Colombia, Canada and Mexico (Devine, 2008; Gastaldo et al., 2012; Gastaldo et al., 2018; Wienard, 2006). The use of body maps also enables participants to engage with sites of injury, even trauma, yet in a safe, playful way (Crawford, 2010; Haiman, 2013; van der Kolk, 2014; Orchard, 2017). Indigenist (Wilson, 2008), feminist, anti-colonial, anti-race and decolonizing theories value its trans nature because participants can “speak” through counter-hegemonic discourses. For example, participants rejected the naming of girl and boy, choosing “something in-between” but not opting for terms such as transgender. Of significance, body maps support poetic approaches to research that respect imagination, sensation and body awareness. The art of body mapping serves those who seek witnessing, testimony and social justice. Moving beyond a historical and contemporary analysis of the method, its strengths and limitations are discussed, particularly via interdisciplinary research and pedagogical praxis
Transforming the (Teacher) Educator Through Ecojustice and Decolonization
Get PDFTransformative Inquiry (Tanaka, 2015) can be a methodological ally in critical education that addresses systems of oppression. Transformative Inquiry (TI) actively decenters institutional knowledge by placing one’s intuitions and embodied experiences and classroom observations on an equal footing with the academic literature. The process draws heavily upon Indigenous methodologies and pedagogies, specifically, relational accountability. This paper reports how using TI challenged the author’s previously held Western cultural beliefs around scientism and individualism. It also reports on selected experiences from the author’s teaching career, salient public pedagogy moments and conversations with fellow critical ecojustice educators that helped decolonize her thinking and made her more aware of eco-cidal neoliberal structures often overlooked, like the Janus-face of science. Data are still being collected as the research process is (and always will be) ongoing. However, initial results point to an increased understanding of unjust local power structures and habits of mind and the need for courage in pointing them out. These results also suggest the necessity of speaking out in allyship with oppressed groups who may not have a voice and using the author’s white privilege to make and hold space for everyone to be heard. This study is about how one scientist-turned-educator used TI to learn from and with others about how to decolonize her mind and unlearn Western, eco-cidal, neoliberal norms that have created the conditions for current socio-ecological crises
Enhancing the Teaching and Learning of Basic Arithmetic Through Subitizing
Get PDFThis paper examines how subitizing (recognizing a quantity and naming it without having to count the objects individually) can help develop students’ understanding of basic arithmetic and how teachers’ and students’ actions can inform one another. Studies suggest that subitizing is underused in teaching and can be harnessed to enhance the learning of subtraction and addition because of its deep links to visualization. Pairing research that points to possibilities of using subitizing to teach arithmetic with an enactivist view of teaching, this research examines how teachers’ and students’ actions co-adapt. Data from short, seven- to eight-minute addition and subtraction lessons in a Grade 2 classroom were collected and analyzed with an enactivist view of teaching actions as triggers. Actions included verbal prompts, movement of small circular objects that represent numbers and hand gestures above the objects. In these lessons, teachers and students arranged small circular objects to guess/identify one another’s computational strategies to arithmetic questions. Our findings suggest that teacher actions triggered and were triggered by students’ subitizing capabilities and occasioned making connections between number (de)composition and operations. Teachers’ actions were contingent on students’ actions as they repeated, enhanced or changed their actions. Triggered by teachers’ actions, students were able to use subitizing to describe their computation strategies instead of counting to combine and/or form large values and to (de)compose, add or subtract values. This research recommends the use of subitizing to make arithmetic strategies visual and calls for more research on the co-emergence of teaching and learning in mathematics classrooms
Shifting Transliteracies in Elementary School: Understanding How Transliteracy Practices Contribute to Grade-3 Students’ Construction of Meaning
Get PDFSituated within social constructivist understandings of multiliteracies, this eight-month ethnographic case study explored transliteracy practices in a Grade-3 classroom. The intention of this research was to learn how digital and multiliteracies support the ways in which children in elementary school construct meaning through transliteracy practices. Findings revealed that transliteracy, using both digital and analog technologies across modes, media, genres and platforms, is an effective lens to understand the shifting literacy practices of young 21st century learners. Transliteracy is described in relation to four literacy concepts: critical transliteracy, digital transliteracy, social transliteracy and disciplinary transliteracy. Understandings and implications of a transliteracy mindset are articulated in scholarship and pedagogy and by descriptive examples of transliteracy in the classroom. This study contributes to the growing conceptual understanding of transliteracy that supports the fluid nature of transliterate learning. It promotes the use of multiliteracies, student choice and opportunities to use more than one mode, device or platform simultaneously at school. Canadian students constantly face many choices in literacies; thus, being transliterate becomes significant to their literacy education