Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education (JCIE)
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Towards an Inclusive Pedagogy: Applying the Universal Design for Learning in an Introduction to History of Global Art Course in Ghana
No full textThis convergent parallel mixed methods study was aimed at addressing the lack of empirical studies in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as an inclusive pedagogy in the Ghanaian higher education context. The overarching objective was to find out whether UDL has the potential in improving the learning processes and learning outcomes of the diverse students reading a History of Global Art course. Quantitative and qualitative data sets were garnered from 122 conveniently sampled students using an adapted version of the Inclusive Teaching Strategies Inventory-Students (ITSI-S) survey instrument. The findings of the study revealed that the UDL principles of multiple means of representation, multiple means of engagement and multiple means of action and expression impacted positively on students’ learning processes and outcomes. UDL assisted greatly in the development of collaborative, problem-solving, good time management and critical thinking skills, while increasing learners’ level of motivation. The study contends that though the UDL as an inclusive pedagogical approach requires a lot of dedication on the part of the instructor as well as a great deal of time and material resources, the accrued benefits of its implementation on the students’ learning processes and learning outcomes are far-reaching.
What We See as One River is a Convergence of Many: Three Convergence Commitments in University Teaching
No full textMichael Marker knew we are never just one thing. He often wrote about concepts that gesture toward convergence: To converge as a way of blurring boundaries; To converge as a challenging process of coming-together; to converge educationally in a murky, “alluvial” place of relationality that is only navigable through artistic and storied methodologies (Marker, 2017). Marker steadfastly resisted colonial structures that attempted to tidily delineate knowledge and compartmentalize the unknowable. In this article, I reflect upon Marker’s scholarship through the idea of convergence, and I outline three conceptual spaces of convergence that I have observed in his work. Through analysis of Marker’s body of work, and an attunement to his loving and poetic forms of resistance, I articulate my commitments in my role as a relatively new, non-Indigenous faculty member in his former department at the University of British Columbia. I think of convergence commitments as relational meeting places that can be at once joyful and also tension laden; they are necessary practices that help me to decentre and “muddify” Western ways of knowing that I have been socialized to enact in institutional spaces.
 
Black Graduate Students\u27 Mentorship Experiences at a University in Western Canada
No full textThis discussion examines the mentoring experiences of Black graduate students enrolled in a Faculty of Education at a university located in western Canada between the years 2010 and 2020. The students were pursuing masters’ and doctoral degrees and were asked to reflect on the mentorship and support that they received during the course of their graduate programs. Drawing from critical and interdisciplinary perspectives about Blackness, the paper analyzes these experiences as narrated by the participants through semi-structured qualitative research interviews. Findings point to the pervasiveness of systemic racism in a culture of whiteness, along with the lack of mentorship and its impacts on the Black graduate experience. The discussion concludes with recommendations for policy and practice
Teacher Education Students’ Implicit Racial Attitudes and Interpersonal Attribution of Racialized Student Behavior
No full textTeachers have been shown to hold lower behavioral expectations for Black students than for their White peers, and the mechanism underlying this may be teachers’ implicit attitudes about their Black students based on causal attributions. This study examined this connection, predicting that teacher education students (TES) who scored higher on the racial implicit bias test would attribute internal causality and controllability to explain challenging behaviors in the classroom more frequently for Black students than for White students. 233 teacher education students completed the racial bias section of the Implicit Assessment Test and a set of questions assessing causal attribution based on four vignettes depicting student misbehaviors in a classroom setting. We found that regardless of implicit bias, TES were more likely to believe that Black students had an internal locus of causality and controllability than their White counterparts when presented with similar instances of challenging behavior. These results support the need for teacher preparation programs to address how these internal beliefs of teacher education students affect what they learn about managing their expectations around students’ behavioral regulation and to what they attribute these behaviors
How Sweet the Ground: The Metaphysical Vision of Michael Marker
No full textThrough this essay, Rocha seeks to describe and honour Michael Marker’s signature notion of the “metaphysical demand” within his more well-known historical and anthropological work on the agentic notion of place. The essay begins by noting the difficulty of this essay due to the “unwritability” of Marker, in allusion to Mellvile’s character, Bartleby, and Garcia Marquez’ssense of Latin America’s solitude. Then, after hermeneutic clarifications that resist reading this essay as a eulogy, the essay proceeds biographically reaching the intimate friendship between Rocha and Marker. These biographical confessions lead to Marker’s ideas, rooted in (and progressing from) Vine Deloria Jr’s critical understanding of the Indigenous philosophy of space, which proceed into a record of correspondence where Marker shares his idea of the metaphysical demand. The essay closes in a series of impressionistic anecdotes that contain key elements in Marker’s approach to his life and thought. A key element is Marker’s practice as a folk musician and his collaborative work with the author in the improvised composition of a track on claw-hammer and bluegrass banjo. From these memorial movements, Marker’s notion of the metaphysical demand of place, a voice that speaks through a calcified andlayered modern reality, is left unfinished, as he left it, to be heard and continued in work to follow
Tracing the Lines of Power, Coloniality, and Neoliberalism in UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development Policy
No full textThis paper critically analyses a reflection paper commissioned by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that proposes a future where we, humans, learn to coexist with the non-human world and thereby contribute to its preservation. The paper, titled Learning To Become With the World: Education for Future Survival, represents a response to previous unsuccessful Education for sustainable development (ESD) initiatives. Drawing on Carol Bacchi’s (2009), “What’s the problem represented to be?” method, our analysis sheds light on assumptions and silences and considers potentially conflicting interests among different actors in formulating the policy proposed by the paper. Through this critical approach to analysis, several crucial implications have emerged. We argue that the report lacks practical applicability by ignoring human complexities and diversity and does not pay enough attention to the potential important role Indigenous ways of knowing, learning, and teaching could play for education for sustainable development.
Alluvial Zones of Decolonizing Internationalization of Higher Education
No full textUniversities play a critical role in the “alluvial mixing” of Indigenous and Western knowledges, but at the same time they are reluctant to dismantle structures that support their ongoing epistemic ignorance, epistemic biases, and epistemic dominance and are resistant to dismantle hierarchies that maintain the status quo (Marker, 2019). Decolonization and internationalization of higher education does not exist in separate realities, but exists in alluvial third spaces that are often turbulent, contested, and contradictory. This article encourages researchers, faculty, and staff to rethink assumptions about long-standing, deeply-rooted policies, practices, and structures of international student recruitment and enrolment that are characterized by dominating neocolonial values and priorities and to reimagine the practice of recruiting international students and competing in the global international student market by centering primacy of place where “land is not a soulless commodity” to be exploited and profited (Marker, 2019). 
“The Scream”: Using the Visual Critical Pedagogy of Subversive Indigenous Art in the Elementary Classroom to Discomfort the Comforted and Activate the Empathic, Ethical, and Relational Dimensions of Reconciliation
No full textThis paper uncovers my journey as K-12 practitioner in British Columbia towards exploring the use of “subversive art” as a “visual critical pedagogy” (Gil-Glazier,2015; Naidus,2005; Peters, 2016; Zorilla & Tisdell, 2016) to advance my students and myself towards reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in Canada. I use the powerfully unsettling painting done by Cree artist, Kent Monkman, titled “The Scream”, as a springboard for this inquiry. “The Scream” provides an Indigenous counternarrative to the colonial versions of residential school histories and has the potential to progress practitioners and students towards actionable reconciliation by activating their empathic and ethical consciousness. I attempt in this essay to weave together a cluster of concepts, as I explore: (a) the nature and evolution of truth in BC’s elementary school curriculum (Andersen, 2017); (b) the historical establishment of the curriculum in a positivist modality (Gadamer, 2013; Greene, 1975; Marker 2004); (c) Greene’s (1995) argument that aesthetic education can help students and practitioners to engage meaningfully with difficult knowledge; (d) Greene’s (1977, 1995) philosophy of wide-awakeness, through which students and practitioners can activate the power of difficult knowledge; (e) Gadamer’s (2013) “fusion of horizons” as a means by which wide-awakeness can function in this context; (f) “subversive art” as a form of “visual critical pedagogy” (Gil-Glazer, 2015); (g) and the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire. I braid these concepts together using the scholarship of Indigenous scholar, Michael Marker (1951-2021) to provide the pedagogical rationale for my determination to establish the visual critical pedagogy of “subversive art” in my classroom.
Key Words
Subversive art, Visual critical pedagogy, Reconciliation, K-12 education, Practitioner inquir
