244 research outputs found
Identity, Subjectivity, and Schooling: Portugueseness and the Educational Deselection of Portuguese-speaking Students in Toronto
No full textThe academic trajectories of Portuguese-speaking students in Toronto, Canada, have been characterized as underachieving and truncated. Concurrently, the voices of Portuguese-speaking students themselves have been relatively absent from reports on their rates of underachievement and school dropout. This critical school ethnography explores Portuguese-speaking students’ school experiences in a Toronto high school to contextualize these statistics and expose how identity and subjectivity inform their school (dis)engagement. While peers and parents inform aspects of said (dis)engagement, thus far these have been the main if not only factors to explain this underachievement phenomenon. This ethnography, however, demonstrates that school personnel and their expectations appear to also play a role in some students’ decisions to deselect schooling.
This dissertation exposes discourses that circulate in classrooms and other school spaces that construct Portuguese-speaking students and their parents in Toronto as working class immigrants. These discourses (inclusive of phrases and actions) draw on language, nationalism and diaspora, and class and labour to construct dominant depictions of what I and others (da Silva, 2012) have termed portugueseness. Portugueseness becomes a subjectivity that marks the Portuguese-speaking student subject for certain experiences in schools.
In addition to reflecting on their experiences to illustrate how portugueseness is constructed, participants’ experiences and narratives revealed that association with portugueseness (or being marked as Portuguese(-speaking)) placed them disproportionately at risk of experiencing certain disciplinary practices in school. These disciplinary practices reference dominant depictions of portugueseness, namely disciplining language, dropout and disability. And, participants recounted both their defiant and compliant responses to these disciplining practices. Finally, disciplinary practices appear to inform educational deselection, a process that sees some students drop out of school and others remain enrolled despite deeply disengaging with school and putting forth a bare minimum of effort to be pushed through, rather than be pushed out of, their high school trajectory.Ph.D
Decolonizing Indigenous Youth Studies: Photography and Hip Hop as Sites of Resilience
No full textThis dissertation examines the role an arts-based educational program played in unleashing youth's creativity as they confront various structures of power that become challenges to social identity, belonging, and self, under different local and national circumstances. My research questions considered how Indigenous youth utilized a photography and hip hop based educational program as a resource to explore social identity and relations, indigeneity, place/space, and the legacy of settler colonialism on education. I also considered how the findings from this study informed and contribute to decolonize Indigenous youth studies and how programs such as mine help Indigenous youth comprehend crisis in the urban environment. This critical ethnography found that in some cases cultural and racial identity existed more internally than externally for youth, with the complexities and contradictions the Indigenous Young Adults (IYAs) face when coming to terms with their social identity. The results showed how much youth grapple with the idea of looking Native and the desire to be more phenotypically Indian as defined by dominant society. The stories of the IYAs became vital to learning about the challenges they faced and obstacles they have overcome, including fighting for recognition under the Indian Act, border politics within Canada and the US, not knowing one's traditional land, and barriers to migrating to the city independently of one's family. Regarding the legacy of settler colonialism on education, of particular interest was how schooling upholds settler colonial ideals and what we can do to dismantle these ideals so that our students are represented in truthful ways. The findings indicated how youth learned about Indigenous cultures in schools and how they were represented in the curriculum. Throughout this project the intent was to propose ways to decolonize education through the arts. It also revealed the positive accomplishments that IYAs worked towards and the ways they show extreme resilience in the light of legacies of settler colonialism on their communities.Ph.D
Queering Places and Curricular Spaces: LGBTQ+ Students in the Community, the College, and the Curriculum
No full textThis exploratory dissertation addresses a significant gap in Canadian scholarship: the inadequate recognition of LGBTQ+ student experiences in a community college, and the problem of queer presence in the curriculum, college, and community. The research question is: “What are the school experiences of LGBTQ+ students in an Ontario college, and how does campus climate affect experiences such as coming out?” This work introduces campus climate, Queer identity formation, the ‘campus closet’, and the problem of unwelcoming schools with heteronormative curricula and school ethos. Campus climate for LGBTQ+ students is problematic, yet a positive climate is fundamental to students’ feeling welcome, as institutions undertake EDI initiatives.
Literature uses a social justice framework, and introduces major themes: LGBTQ+ identity formation; the lack of recognition of diversity in schools; research and policy which do not serve students equally; and curriculum as heteronormative social control. This project employs qualitative research methods, in particular grounded theory, to situate the experiences of LGBTQ+ college students in Canada. Campus climate should reflect Queer presence in the curriculum, the college, and the wider community.
The findings introduce the research participants, and reflections on homophobia, campus climate, inclusive curriculum, as well as social relationships inside and outside the classroom. Findings also suggest a theory about the school lives of LGBTQ+ students: that for queer students a positive campus climate lies at the intersection of Queer in the curriculum, Queer in the college, and Queer in the community, and further, that a welcoming local community, institution, and curriculum shape the school experiences of LGBTQ+ students, and contribute to their persistence in their studies and successful degree completion, as well as to their determination of a post-secondary education being an experience worth wanting.Ph.D
Young Black Men's Embodied Experiences of Traumatic Gun Violence
No full textThis thesis examines the experiences of 10 young Black men who have been impacted by traumatic gun violence either directly through being shot or indirectly by witnessing gun violence in their communities or losing loved ones to gun violence. Few studies have considered the traumatic and embodied impact of gun violence on young Black men. Using trauma theory and embodiment as theoretical frameworks, this research demonstrates how due to the lack of resources and recognition of young Black men’s experiences of traumatic gun violence, young Black men begin to “embody” experiences of traumatic gun violence physically and emotionally. Young Black men’s experiences of gun violence within the city of Toronto continue to be stigmatized, criminalized, and disregarded as a traumatic issue and the main approaches to solving gun violence have focused on criminal justice interventions and policing which do not engage with the actual “embodied trauma” of gun violence. This thesis demonstrates that to understand how young Black men embody traumatic violence we first need to understand how systemic violence and structural oppression, as expressed through racial profiling, over-surveillance, incarceration, police brutality, and experiences of poverty, coincide with the traumatic impact of gun violence, and directly relate to young Black men’s experiences of ongoing exposure to gun violence.Ph.D
Pakistani Immigrant Parental Perspectives on New Media Literacies
No full textThis phenomenological study researches Pakistani immigrant parents’ perspectives and attitudes on how their children use new media technologies. Parental attitudes are directly linked to student achievement (Hampton, Mumford & Bond, 1998) and parents are the gatekeepers of technology use in the home, where, during unstructured time, children can experiment and develop skills in using new technologies (Ito et al, 2010). Therefore, this study looks at how parents, through their actions and attitudes, encourage or discourage their children from developing competencies in using new media technologies By examining the pedagogical histories of parents and their concerns and rules about technology use, this study adds to the literature on parental attitudes towards the use of technology as a pedagogical tool. Further, this study examines the issue from an immigrant perspective, focusing on 10 Pakistani immigrant parents who live in the Greater Toronto Area and whose children attend pubic school.MAS
"Somos Parte de la Solución": Women Activists' Knowledge of Gendered Risk and Their Educational Responses to HIV/AIDS in the Peruvian Amazon
No full textThis dissertation is a critical ethnography conducted in the Amazon jungle city of Iquitos, Peru--a city where sex work and sex tourism are becoming increasingly prevalent, and where AIDS cases in women are on the rise. In recent years, HIV positive and sex worker women activists in Iquitos have made significant strides to respond to the AIDS crisis through social movement organizing and educational outreach. This dissertation exposes the nuanced gender relations perspectives of HIV positive and sex worker women activists and underscores the importance of including these subjugated knowledges in solution-oriented discourses in HIV/AIDS education.
I deployed a combination of gender relations and postcolonial feminist theories to pursue two lines of inquiry. First, I investigated HIV positive women and sex worker women activists' own understandings of gender relations and gender-related risk factors for HIV. Second, I explored the varied educational spaces that activist women produced to disseminate this knowledge to other affected populations and the wider public.
Results show that women activists' collective organizing around their stigmatized identities positioned them to critically comment about how gender influences HIV risk for both women and men and also enabled them to encourage their stakeholders to re-think and re-learn gender in ways that would reduce their risk to HIV. As the title of this dissertation reads, women activists asserted that they are "part of the solution" to combat HIV/AIDS in Peru. My dissertation shows that "activist knowledge" is critical to re-conceptualize the ways that local expressions of masculinities, femininities and gender relations are taken up in HIV/AIDS education initiatives.Ph
You have Nothing to Lose! Using Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Secondary Education to Make Space for Body Acceptance
No full textSchools are sites of great power and influence where the “obesity” discourse is often taken uncritically as truth and reproduced, to the detriment of young people. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how theories of fatness can inform theories of culturally relevant pedagogy with the goal of helping teachers create spaces where increased size acceptance is possible for secondary students. Literature from both these areas of study was reviewed and applied to the Ontario secondary curriculum documents for science and physical education. This analysis demonstrated a body acceptance orientation in teaching these disciplines, and that doing so can mitigate many of the negative effects of living in a fat hating world.MAS
Reframing Classroom Encounters: Teachers Making Sense of School Securitization
No full textThis thesis explores the discourses available to teachers in navigating and making sense of their role in the securitization of high schools. My analysis is based on semi-structured interviews conducted with nine teachers working in urban schools in Toronto. Drawing on frameworks from post-colonial, critical race, and urban education studies, I argue that school securitization is not just complicated by racism, but structured and enabled by it. While there is an urgent need to resist the implementation of particular security and surveillance measures that intensify the targeted disqualification of racialized youth, it is equally if not more important to uncover and resist the ways that racial thinking organizes a much wider range of classroom encounters and pedagogical practices. I urge teachers to interrogate their investments in the categories and subject positions that race thinking makes available, including those that are desirable and pleasurable.MAS
Identity, Subjectivity, and Schooling: Portugueseness and the Educational Deselection of Portuguese-speaking Students in Toronto
No full textThe academic trajectories of Portuguese-speaking students in Toronto, Canada, have been characterized as underachieving and truncated. Concurrently, the voices of Portuguese-speaking students themselves have been relatively absent from reports on their rates of underachievement and school dropout. This critical school ethnography explores Portuguese-speaking students’ school experiences in a Toronto high school to contextualize these statistics and expose how identity and subjectivity inform their school (dis)engagement. While peers and parents inform aspects of said (dis)engagement, thus far these have been the main if not only factors to explain this underachievement phenomenon. This ethnography, however, demonstrates that school personnel and their expectations appear to also play a role in some students’ decisions to deselect schooling.
This dissertation exposes discourses that circulate in classrooms and other school spaces that construct Portuguese-speaking students and their parents in Toronto as working class immigrants. These discourses (inclusive of phrases and actions) draw on language, nationalism and diaspora, and class and labour to construct dominant depictions of what I and others (da Silva, 2012) have termed portugueseness. Portugueseness becomes a subjectivity that marks the Portuguese-speaking student subject for certain experiences in schools.
In addition to reflecting on their experiences to illustrate how portugueseness is constructed, participants’ experiences and narratives revealed that association with portugueseness (or being marked as Portuguese(-speaking)) placed them disproportionately at risk of experiencing certain disciplinary practices in school. These disciplinary practices reference dominant depictions of portugueseness, namely disciplining language, dropout and disability. And, participants recounted both their defiant and compliant responses to these disciplining practices. Finally, disciplinary practices appear to inform educational deselection, a process that sees some students drop out of school and others remain enrolled despite deeply disengaging with school and putting forth a bare minimum of effort to be pushed through, rather than be pushed out of, their high school trajectory.Ph.D
You have Nothing to Lose! Using Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Secondary Education to Make Space for Body Acceptance
No full textSchools are sites of great power and influence where the “obesity” discourse is often taken uncritically as truth and reproduced, to the detriment of young people. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how theories of fatness can inform theories of culturally relevant pedagogy with the goal of helping teachers create spaces where increased size acceptance is possible for secondary students. Literature from both these areas of study was reviewed and applied to the Ontario secondary curriculum documents for science and physical education. This analysis demonstrated a body acceptance orientation in teaching these disciplines, and that doing so can mitigate many of the negative effects of living in a fat hating world.MAS
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