University of Regina Open Journals
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SchoolPLUS: Creating Community Schools Through Integral Development
No full textWhen the Task Force and Public Dialogue on the Role of the School—SCHOOLPLUS: A Vision for Children and Youth (2001) called upon Saskatchewan educators to build school, community, and human service partnerships, the task force recommended that the formulation of holistic foci for meeting the needs of children in response to “tectonic” shifts that had shaken the ground of schooling. In recommending a holistic paradigm through which to transform schools to be more responsive to distinct learning requirements, the task force sought to increase the capacities of schools to support richer expressions of human meaning and purpose which would extend supportive structures to include the marginalized. In this paper, I recommend the notion of integral development through self-generating transformation of community, inter-subjectivity, and differentiation as the basis for continuing to build toward the SchoolPLUS vision.Keywords: SchoolPLUS; integral development; holistic; inter-subjectivity; differentiation; transformatio
Systemic Changes in Higher Education
No full textA power shift is occurring in higher education, driven by two trends: (a) the increased freedom of learners to access, create, and re-create content; and (b) the opportunity for learners to interact with each other outside of a mediating agent. Information access and dialogue, previously under control of the educator, can now be readily fulfilled by learners. When the essential mandate of universities is buffeted by global, social/political, technological, and educational change pressures, questions about the future of universities become prominent. The integrated university faces numerous challenges, including a decoupling of research and teaching functions. Do we still need physical classrooms? Are courses effective when information is fluid across disciplines and subject to continual changes? What value does a university provide society when educational resources and processes are open and transparent?Keywords: higher education; freedom of learners; open access; online learnin
School Consolidation and Notions of Progress: Why Community Actors Almost Always Lose the Fight to Keep Local Schools and How They Can Turn the Tables
No full textSupported by a growing body of research, the idea that schools have an essential role to play in local community cohesion and development has gained currency among urban and rural school advocates alike. Yet moving theory into action often grinds to a halt in the face of a recalcitrant bureaucracy. To understand why, it is important to step back and examine the theoretical framework of progress that has driven school consolidation and bureaucratization over the past century. Knowing these underlying power dynamics will help community advocates understand where their power is weakest, and where it is strongest, leading to more effective community action in defence of local schools.Keywords: school consolitation; community action; community schoo
Challenging Hierarchy: Narrative Ruminations on Leadership in Education
No full textEverybody involved in education is a potential educational leader. Consequently, leadership is everybody’s responsibility, either in a designated role of leadership or in supporting those in formal positions of leadership. This essay invites readers to consider the value of telling stories about our lived experiences with educational leadership. We as educators need to learn how to engage in dialogue with one another, how to support one another, and how to live creatively with one another. We need new stories, more complex, intricate, and eloquent narratives that conceive, compose, and imagine our relationships with one another. We need new myths or at least we need to engage in a process of constantly reviewing and revising the myths that we live by. Our lives in schools and outside schools are located (called together) in stories. So, in this essay, I offer a few stories from a long life of teaching, stories that I anticipate might raise questions for educators about how we compose and sustain more creative relationships among all of us in our different roles. I focus on heart, humility, health, and hope as four familiar concepts in teaching and learning in order to contribute to a conversation that is ongoing, always in process, and never definitive. As educators, we need to communicate, respond to, evaluate, and transform our stories by infusing our pedagogy with heart, humility, health, and hope. Our stories shape our identities, compose our relationships, and create possibilities for learning to live well with one another.Keywords: educational leadership; hierarchy; narrativ
The Canoe Trip: A Northern Cree Metaphor for Conducting Research
No full textIn this article, I use a northern Cree metaphor to conduct respectful research. Descriptive language is used to illustrate how community-based research is like going on a canoe trip. The landscape, rivers, and lakes come alive as the research unfolds from initial visioning, planning, implementation, final report, and knowledge dissemination.Keywords: community-based research; Indigenous knowledg
The Net Generation’s Informal and Educational Use of New Technologies
No full textMany educators have called for the inclusion of new technologies like blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking in higher education to address the learning needs of the Net Generation. Is there really a discrepancy between the personal and educational use of new technologies by undergraduates? What new technologies do they perceive as most beneficial for their learning? A survey piloted with 26 undergraduates in education demonstrated a huge gap in undergraduates’ informal and educational use of new technologies, but indicated that students independently apply their technical skills to their coursework. In open-ended responses, students explained how they have benefited from professors’ use of online videos, podcasts, wikis and blogs, and how they would like to see them used in the future. The results are discussed in the context of prior research and the need for further empirical evidence on the differences within the group termed the Net Generation is highlighted.Keywords: technology in education; Net Generation; use of new technologies; benefit
Poetic Consciousness in Pedagogy: An Inquiry of Contemplation and Conversation
No full textIn this paper we consider the kinds of pedagogical engagements a poetic consciousness might invoke. When we reflect on what it might mean to be poetically conscious in moments of teaching, learning, and connecting, what emerges is the possibility of integrating the classroom experience with the everyday of life; such poetically conscious teaching would make connections to the larger web of a person’s experience in the world. To inquire into this possibility, we share our contemplations on our scholarly and personal experiences with poetry, presenting it here as a dis(e)ruptive text in order to invite aesthetic modes of being within the interplay of language and self. Our conversations have evolved over 3 years and have created this in-between space of active disclosure, where, we argue, poetry has offered dis(e)ruptions that celebrate the variations we inhabit in our bodies, personalities, and creative works.Keywords: Poetic consciousness; pedagogy, contemplation; conversation; dis(e)ruptive tex
Editorial
No full textAn introduction to our Spring, 2010 issue of in education, a peer-reviewed, open access journal. This is also Part II of a two-part series focusing on Technology & Social Media
Editorial
No full textAn introduction to our Autumn 2009 issue of in education, a peer-reviewed, open access journal. This is also Part I of a two-part series focusing on Social Media & Technology