Nicholas Ng-A-Fook
- Courses2
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- School: University of Ottawa
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- Department: Education
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Ottawa, ON - Dates at University of Ottawa: January 2012 - May 2015
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Biography
University of Ottawa - Education
Director of Indigenous Teacher Education Program at University of Ottawa
Nicholas
Ng-A-Fook
Gloucester, Ontario, Canada
Making the best use of the research facilities at the University of Ottawa to make a difference in the lives of future Canadian citizens.
Experience
Canadian Society for the Study of Education
Past President
Nicholas worked at Canadian Society for the Study of Education as a Past President
Education
University of Ottawa
Bachelor of Arts - BA
Classical Studies
Community Service Learning Outstanding Achievement Award
Yves Herry, associate vice-president, Teaching and Learning Support, presents the 2010 CSL Outstanding Achievement Award to Professor Nicholas Ng-A-Fook. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education. Through his involvement with the Developing a Global Perspective for Educators program, Professor Ng-A-Fook has led a number of Community Service Learning Projects. In the Spring of 2008, he coordinated a trip for teachers to the United Houma Nation in Louisiana so they could observe how societal issues and schooling influenced each other. Other projects led by the professor include: a media studies program for “at risk” youth at Sir Guy Carleton High school; a local literacy program for teen mothers and their children; and the Guatemalan Stove Project. His latest collaboration was with the elders of Kitigan Zibi and their School Board, where he guided his students to develop resources for a language program that is culturally sensitive and enriching for students. Professor Ng-A-Fook has used CSL as a tool to extend his classroom beyond the confines of the rooms of Lamoureux Hall. Throughout these projects he is able to transfer his deep sense of social engagement and service with his students who are soon to be teachers.University of Ottawa
Director of Teacher Education, Full Professor
Facilitating our collaborative transition toward the new two year teacher education program in Ontario.University of Ottawa
Full Professor of Curriculum Studies
Dr. Ng-A-Fook, a Full Professor, is Director of the Teacher Education Program at the University of Ottawa. He is the President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, the largest professional educational research association in Canada. In these administrative, educational, and research capacities, he is committed toward addressing the 94 Calls to Action put forth by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in partnership with the local Indigenous and school board communities. He is collaborating with colleagues to create a state of the art teacher education program that promises to prepare teacher candidates for the social, economic, and cultural demands of the 21st century. As part of his administrative mandate, he and colleagues are creating a digital hub strategy, social innovation mobile design labs in local schools, reconceptualizing their programming in light of social science and humanities social innovations and contributions to initiatives such as, but not limited to, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics Education (STEAMED). For the past 3 years Dr. Ng-A-Fook has sought to establish stronger research and teacher education partnerships with local school board administrators, principals, lead associate teachers across the Outaouais region as well as international partners in the United States, China, and elsewhere to address their collective priority areas. Dr. Ng-A-Fook's research specializes in curriculum studies (policy development, implementation, and integration of emergent technologies). He draws on life writing research (autobiography, ethnography, oral history, and narrative inquiry) to develop culturally responsive and relational curriculum with Indigenous and first generation immigrant communities.University of Ottawa
Co-Director of Equity Knowledge Network
Réseau de Savoir sur l’Équité | Equity Knowledge Network (RSEKN), hosted by the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education and the Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services (CRECS), is a provincial multi-stakeholder bilingual knowledge mobilization network that brings equity innovators together in order to stimulate activities and support product development that can be used to break down current systemic barriers to children and youth from marginalized groups.University of Ottawa
Director of Indigenous Teacher Education Program
Louisiana State University
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Curriculum and Instruction
Indigenous Studies, Curriculum Studies, History of EducationYork University
Master of Education (M.Ed.)
Multicultural Education
Western Sydney University
Graduate Diploma
Teacher Education
Canadian Society for the Study of Education
Past President
Publications
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Living Between Truth and Reconciliation: Responsibilities, Colonial Institutions, and Settler Scholars
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
In the spring of 2015, the city of Ottawa hosted both the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and the 5th Triennial International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) conference. In this paper, we reflect on the coincidence of these two events, by drawing on our presentations at IAACS to provide a series of reflections on the implications of the TRC’s Final Report for us as settler educators and researchers. Living and working in Canada’s colonial capital, what are our responsibilities to take up truth and reconciliation? How should we proceed? Addressing these curricular questions, we present four narrative snapshots that seek to understand the Ontario secondary school civics curriculum, teacher education, and the curricular and pedagogical (re)organization of postsecondary institutions in light of the educational recommendations of the TRC. We discuss the particular complexities of taking up truth and reconciliation in these different contexts, and provide examples of possible ways forward. Drawing particularly on the ground-breaking work of Cynthia Chambers, we attempt to situate these examples of our work as curriculum scholars within the landscape of Ottawa, looking first to the colonial institutions we have built upon the unceded ancestral land, then to the pre-existing relational landscape that makes all of this possible. Living and working within these topographies, we consider how we as settler scholars and educators can ethically engage with local Indigenous communities, and take part in the ongoing work of truth and reconciliation.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Living Between Truth and Reconciliation: Responsibilities, Colonial Institutions, and Settler Scholars
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
In the spring of 2015, the city of Ottawa hosted both the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and the 5th Triennial International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) conference. In this paper, we reflect on the coincidence of these two events, by drawing on our presentations at IAACS to provide a series of reflections on the implications of the TRC’s Final Report for us as settler educators and researchers. Living and working in Canada’s colonial capital, what are our responsibilities to take up truth and reconciliation? How should we proceed? Addressing these curricular questions, we present four narrative snapshots that seek to understand the Ontario secondary school civics curriculum, teacher education, and the curricular and pedagogical (re)organization of postsecondary institutions in light of the educational recommendations of the TRC. We discuss the particular complexities of taking up truth and reconciliation in these different contexts, and provide examples of possible ways forward. Drawing particularly on the ground-breaking work of Cynthia Chambers, we attempt to situate these examples of our work as curriculum scholars within the landscape of Ottawa, looking first to the colonial institutions we have built upon the unceded ancestral land, then to the pre-existing relational landscape that makes all of this possible. Living and working within these topographies, we consider how we as settler scholars and educators can ethically engage with local Indigenous communities, and take part in the ongoing work of truth and reconciliation.
Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies
Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2
In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts of the IRS system in Ontario’s social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon to reread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As Simon’s life‐long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each other’s unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Living Between Truth and Reconciliation: Responsibilities, Colonial Institutions, and Settler Scholars
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
In the spring of 2015, the city of Ottawa hosted both the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and the 5th Triennial International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) conference. In this paper, we reflect on the coincidence of these two events, by drawing on our presentations at IAACS to provide a series of reflections on the implications of the TRC’s Final Report for us as settler educators and researchers. Living and working in Canada’s colonial capital, what are our responsibilities to take up truth and reconciliation? How should we proceed? Addressing these curricular questions, we present four narrative snapshots that seek to understand the Ontario secondary school civics curriculum, teacher education, and the curricular and pedagogical (re)organization of postsecondary institutions in light of the educational recommendations of the TRC. We discuss the particular complexities of taking up truth and reconciliation in these different contexts, and provide examples of possible ways forward. Drawing particularly on the ground-breaking work of Cynthia Chambers, we attempt to situate these examples of our work as curriculum scholars within the landscape of Ottawa, looking first to the colonial institutions we have built upon the unceded ancestral land, then to the pre-existing relational landscape that makes all of this possible. Living and working within these topographies, we consider how we as settler scholars and educators can ethically engage with local Indigenous communities, and take part in the ongoing work of truth and reconciliation.
Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies
Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2
In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts of the IRS system in Ontario’s social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon to reread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As Simon’s life‐long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each other’s unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice.
EMPOWERING MARGINALIZED YOUTH: CURRICULUM, MEDIA STUDIES, AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CODE Funded)
Canadian Journal of Action Research
Students are bombarded daily with print, visual, and digital media. Whether it is on a billboard, listening to an iPod on the way to school, or text messaging a friend during class, youth culture is hardwired into these multiple forms of communication technologies. Nonetheless, the daily life and respective experiences of students are often still subordinated to the school curriculum. Our social action curriculum project, which targeted “at risk” youth at a vocational high school in the Ottawa region, attempted to disrupt this by integrating emergent digital technologies and differentiated instructional strategies into five Grade 10 courses over a span of two years. Devising what we call a “socio-culturally responsive media studies curriculum,” we addressed the following Ontario Character Development Initiatives: (1) Academic achievement; (2) Character development; (3) Citizenship development; and (4) Respect for diversity. But, what happens when social action researchers and teachers seek to institutionalize such taken-for-granted use of digital media within their design and implementation of the provincial curriculum and these character development initiatives? In response to this question, this paper will examine the curriculum we implemented with teachers and students in order to negotiate the four character development initiatives. As well, we examine how our curriculum research and the implemented program specifically created spaces for marginalized voices to be heard, and multiple literacies to flourish.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Living Between Truth and Reconciliation: Responsibilities, Colonial Institutions, and Settler Scholars
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
In the spring of 2015, the city of Ottawa hosted both the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and the 5th Triennial International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) conference. In this paper, we reflect on the coincidence of these two events, by drawing on our presentations at IAACS to provide a series of reflections on the implications of the TRC’s Final Report for us as settler educators and researchers. Living and working in Canada’s colonial capital, what are our responsibilities to take up truth and reconciliation? How should we proceed? Addressing these curricular questions, we present four narrative snapshots that seek to understand the Ontario secondary school civics curriculum, teacher education, and the curricular and pedagogical (re)organization of postsecondary institutions in light of the educational recommendations of the TRC. We discuss the particular complexities of taking up truth and reconciliation in these different contexts, and provide examples of possible ways forward. Drawing particularly on the ground-breaking work of Cynthia Chambers, we attempt to situate these examples of our work as curriculum scholars within the landscape of Ottawa, looking first to the colonial institutions we have built upon the unceded ancestral land, then to the pre-existing relational landscape that makes all of this possible. Living and working within these topographies, we consider how we as settler scholars and educators can ethically engage with local Indigenous communities, and take part in the ongoing work of truth and reconciliation.
Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies
Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2
In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts of the IRS system in Ontario’s social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon to reread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As Simon’s life‐long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each other’s unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice.
EMPOWERING MARGINALIZED YOUTH: CURRICULUM, MEDIA STUDIES, AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CODE Funded)
Canadian Journal of Action Research
Students are bombarded daily with print, visual, and digital media. Whether it is on a billboard, listening to an iPod on the way to school, or text messaging a friend during class, youth culture is hardwired into these multiple forms of communication technologies. Nonetheless, the daily life and respective experiences of students are often still subordinated to the school curriculum. Our social action curriculum project, which targeted “at risk” youth at a vocational high school in the Ottawa region, attempted to disrupt this by integrating emergent digital technologies and differentiated instructional strategies into five Grade 10 courses over a span of two years. Devising what we call a “socio-culturally responsive media studies curriculum,” we addressed the following Ontario Character Development Initiatives: (1) Academic achievement; (2) Character development; (3) Citizenship development; and (4) Respect for diversity. But, what happens when social action researchers and teachers seek to institutionalize such taken-for-granted use of digital media within their design and implementation of the provincial curriculum and these character development initiatives? In response to this question, this paper will examine the curriculum we implemented with teachers and students in order to negotiate the four character development initiatives. As well, we examine how our curriculum research and the implemented program specifically created spaces for marginalized voices to be heard, and multiple literacies to flourish.
What Does the Eye See? Reading Online Primary Source Photographs in History (SSHRC Funded)
Journal of Contemporary Issues in Technology and Social Studies Education
This exploratory study looks at how a sample of preservice teachers and historians read visuals in the context of school history. The participants used eye tracking technology and think-aloud protocol, as they examined a series of online primary source photographs from a virtual exhibit. Voluntary participants (6 students and 2 professional historians) were recruited at a bilingual Ontario University in fall 2011. From this group, the authors used a purposive sampling of three participants who represented the novice-intermediate-expert spectrum and whose results displayed typicality among other participants with similar educational backgrounds.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Living Between Truth and Reconciliation: Responsibilities, Colonial Institutions, and Settler Scholars
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
In the spring of 2015, the city of Ottawa hosted both the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and the 5th Triennial International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) conference. In this paper, we reflect on the coincidence of these two events, by drawing on our presentations at IAACS to provide a series of reflections on the implications of the TRC’s Final Report for us as settler educators and researchers. Living and working in Canada’s colonial capital, what are our responsibilities to take up truth and reconciliation? How should we proceed? Addressing these curricular questions, we present four narrative snapshots that seek to understand the Ontario secondary school civics curriculum, teacher education, and the curricular and pedagogical (re)organization of postsecondary institutions in light of the educational recommendations of the TRC. We discuss the particular complexities of taking up truth and reconciliation in these different contexts, and provide examples of possible ways forward. Drawing particularly on the ground-breaking work of Cynthia Chambers, we attempt to situate these examples of our work as curriculum scholars within the landscape of Ottawa, looking first to the colonial institutions we have built upon the unceded ancestral land, then to the pre-existing relational landscape that makes all of this possible. Living and working within these topographies, we consider how we as settler scholars and educators can ethically engage with local Indigenous communities, and take part in the ongoing work of truth and reconciliation.
Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies
Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2
In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts of the IRS system in Ontario’s social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon to reread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As Simon’s life‐long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each other’s unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice.
EMPOWERING MARGINALIZED YOUTH: CURRICULUM, MEDIA STUDIES, AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CODE Funded)
Canadian Journal of Action Research
Students are bombarded daily with print, visual, and digital media. Whether it is on a billboard, listening to an iPod on the way to school, or text messaging a friend during class, youth culture is hardwired into these multiple forms of communication technologies. Nonetheless, the daily life and respective experiences of students are often still subordinated to the school curriculum. Our social action curriculum project, which targeted “at risk” youth at a vocational high school in the Ottawa region, attempted to disrupt this by integrating emergent digital technologies and differentiated instructional strategies into five Grade 10 courses over a span of two years. Devising what we call a “socio-culturally responsive media studies curriculum,” we addressed the following Ontario Character Development Initiatives: (1) Academic achievement; (2) Character development; (3) Citizenship development; and (4) Respect for diversity. But, what happens when social action researchers and teachers seek to institutionalize such taken-for-granted use of digital media within their design and implementation of the provincial curriculum and these character development initiatives? In response to this question, this paper will examine the curriculum we implemented with teachers and students in order to negotiate the four character development initiatives. As well, we examine how our curriculum research and the implemented program specifically created spaces for marginalized voices to be heard, and multiple literacies to flourish.
What Does the Eye See? Reading Online Primary Source Photographs in History (SSHRC Funded)
Journal of Contemporary Issues in Technology and Social Studies Education
This exploratory study looks at how a sample of preservice teachers and historians read visuals in the context of school history. The participants used eye tracking technology and think-aloud protocol, as they examined a series of online primary source photographs from a virtual exhibit. Voluntary participants (6 students and 2 professional historians) were recruited at a bilingual Ontario University in fall 2011. From this group, the authors used a purposive sampling of three participants who represented the novice-intermediate-expert spectrum and whose results displayed typicality among other participants with similar educational backgrounds.
Brokering Knowledge Mobilization Networks: Policy Reforms, School Partnerships, and Teacher Education
Education Policy Analysis Archives
Educational researchers and policy-makers are now expected by funding agencies and their institutions to innovate the multidirectional ways in which our production of knowledge can impact the classrooms of teachers (practitioners), while also integrating their experiential knowledge into the landscape of our research. In this article, we draw on the curriculum implementation literature to complicate our understandings of knowledge mobilization (KMb). Policy implementation, we suggest, can be understood as one specific type of KMb. We draw on different models for KMb and curriculum implementation and develop a relational model for KMb. Utilizing our model we critically reflect on the specific successes and challenges encountered while establishing, building, and sustaining the capacity of our KMb network. Our findings suggest that faculties of education are uniquely positioned to act as secondary brokers for the implementation of policy reforms within public education systems. To this end, we discuss how a relational KMb network is a “best practice” for establishing and sustaining partnerships among policy makers, educational researchers, and public school practitioners.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Living Between Truth and Reconciliation: Responsibilities, Colonial Institutions, and Settler Scholars
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
In the spring of 2015, the city of Ottawa hosted both the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and the 5th Triennial International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) conference. In this paper, we reflect on the coincidence of these two events, by drawing on our presentations at IAACS to provide a series of reflections on the implications of the TRC’s Final Report for us as settler educators and researchers. Living and working in Canada’s colonial capital, what are our responsibilities to take up truth and reconciliation? How should we proceed? Addressing these curricular questions, we present four narrative snapshots that seek to understand the Ontario secondary school civics curriculum, teacher education, and the curricular and pedagogical (re)organization of postsecondary institutions in light of the educational recommendations of the TRC. We discuss the particular complexities of taking up truth and reconciliation in these different contexts, and provide examples of possible ways forward. Drawing particularly on the ground-breaking work of Cynthia Chambers, we attempt to situate these examples of our work as curriculum scholars within the landscape of Ottawa, looking first to the colonial institutions we have built upon the unceded ancestral land, then to the pre-existing relational landscape that makes all of this possible. Living and working within these topographies, we consider how we as settler scholars and educators can ethically engage with local Indigenous communities, and take part in the ongoing work of truth and reconciliation.
Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies
Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2
In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts of the IRS system in Ontario’s social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon to reread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As Simon’s life‐long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each other’s unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice.
EMPOWERING MARGINALIZED YOUTH: CURRICULUM, MEDIA STUDIES, AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CODE Funded)
Canadian Journal of Action Research
Students are bombarded daily with print, visual, and digital media. Whether it is on a billboard, listening to an iPod on the way to school, or text messaging a friend during class, youth culture is hardwired into these multiple forms of communication technologies. Nonetheless, the daily life and respective experiences of students are often still subordinated to the school curriculum. Our social action curriculum project, which targeted “at risk” youth at a vocational high school in the Ottawa region, attempted to disrupt this by integrating emergent digital technologies and differentiated instructional strategies into five Grade 10 courses over a span of two years. Devising what we call a “socio-culturally responsive media studies curriculum,” we addressed the following Ontario Character Development Initiatives: (1) Academic achievement; (2) Character development; (3) Citizenship development; and (4) Respect for diversity. But, what happens when social action researchers and teachers seek to institutionalize such taken-for-granted use of digital media within their design and implementation of the provincial curriculum and these character development initiatives? In response to this question, this paper will examine the curriculum we implemented with teachers and students in order to negotiate the four character development initiatives. As well, we examine how our curriculum research and the implemented program specifically created spaces for marginalized voices to be heard, and multiple literacies to flourish.
What Does the Eye See? Reading Online Primary Source Photographs in History (SSHRC Funded)
Journal of Contemporary Issues in Technology and Social Studies Education
This exploratory study looks at how a sample of preservice teachers and historians read visuals in the context of school history. The participants used eye tracking technology and think-aloud protocol, as they examined a series of online primary source photographs from a virtual exhibit. Voluntary participants (6 students and 2 professional historians) were recruited at a bilingual Ontario University in fall 2011. From this group, the authors used a purposive sampling of three participants who represented the novice-intermediate-expert spectrum and whose results displayed typicality among other participants with similar educational backgrounds.
Brokering Knowledge Mobilization Networks: Policy Reforms, School Partnerships, and Teacher Education
Education Policy Analysis Archives
Educational researchers and policy-makers are now expected by funding agencies and their institutions to innovate the multidirectional ways in which our production of knowledge can impact the classrooms of teachers (practitioners), while also integrating their experiential knowledge into the landscape of our research. In this article, we draw on the curriculum implementation literature to complicate our understandings of knowledge mobilization (KMb). Policy implementation, we suggest, can be understood as one specific type of KMb. We draw on different models for KMb and curriculum implementation and develop a relational model for KMb. Utilizing our model we critically reflect on the specific successes and challenges encountered while establishing, building, and sustaining the capacity of our KMb network. Our findings suggest that faculties of education are uniquely positioned to act as secondary brokers for the implementation of policy reforms within public education systems. To this end, we discuss how a relational KMb network is a “best practice” for establishing and sustaining partnerships among policy makers, educational researchers, and public school practitioners.
Reconceptualizing High School: Curriculum, Film, and Narrative Assemblies
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
Research Interests: Film Studies, Popular Culture, Critical Pedagogy, Curriculum Studies, and Curriculum and Instruction
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Living Between Truth and Reconciliation: Responsibilities, Colonial Institutions, and Settler Scholars
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
In the spring of 2015, the city of Ottawa hosted both the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and the 5th Triennial International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) conference. In this paper, we reflect on the coincidence of these two events, by drawing on our presentations at IAACS to provide a series of reflections on the implications of the TRC’s Final Report for us as settler educators and researchers. Living and working in Canada’s colonial capital, what are our responsibilities to take up truth and reconciliation? How should we proceed? Addressing these curricular questions, we present four narrative snapshots that seek to understand the Ontario secondary school civics curriculum, teacher education, and the curricular and pedagogical (re)organization of postsecondary institutions in light of the educational recommendations of the TRC. We discuss the particular complexities of taking up truth and reconciliation in these different contexts, and provide examples of possible ways forward. Drawing particularly on the ground-breaking work of Cynthia Chambers, we attempt to situate these examples of our work as curriculum scholars within the landscape of Ottawa, looking first to the colonial institutions we have built upon the unceded ancestral land, then to the pre-existing relational landscape that makes all of this possible. Living and working within these topographies, we consider how we as settler scholars and educators can ethically engage with local Indigenous communities, and take part in the ongoing work of truth and reconciliation.
Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies
Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2
In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts of the IRS system in Ontario’s social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon to reread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As Simon’s life‐long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each other’s unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice.
EMPOWERING MARGINALIZED YOUTH: CURRICULUM, MEDIA STUDIES, AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CODE Funded)
Canadian Journal of Action Research
Students are bombarded daily with print, visual, and digital media. Whether it is on a billboard, listening to an iPod on the way to school, or text messaging a friend during class, youth culture is hardwired into these multiple forms of communication technologies. Nonetheless, the daily life and respective experiences of students are often still subordinated to the school curriculum. Our social action curriculum project, which targeted “at risk” youth at a vocational high school in the Ottawa region, attempted to disrupt this by integrating emergent digital technologies and differentiated instructional strategies into five Grade 10 courses over a span of two years. Devising what we call a “socio-culturally responsive media studies curriculum,” we addressed the following Ontario Character Development Initiatives: (1) Academic achievement; (2) Character development; (3) Citizenship development; and (4) Respect for diversity. But, what happens when social action researchers and teachers seek to institutionalize such taken-for-granted use of digital media within their design and implementation of the provincial curriculum and these character development initiatives? In response to this question, this paper will examine the curriculum we implemented with teachers and students in order to negotiate the four character development initiatives. As well, we examine how our curriculum research and the implemented program specifically created spaces for marginalized voices to be heard, and multiple literacies to flourish.
What Does the Eye See? Reading Online Primary Source Photographs in History (SSHRC Funded)
Journal of Contemporary Issues in Technology and Social Studies Education
This exploratory study looks at how a sample of preservice teachers and historians read visuals in the context of school history. The participants used eye tracking technology and think-aloud protocol, as they examined a series of online primary source photographs from a virtual exhibit. Voluntary participants (6 students and 2 professional historians) were recruited at a bilingual Ontario University in fall 2011. From this group, the authors used a purposive sampling of three participants who represented the novice-intermediate-expert spectrum and whose results displayed typicality among other participants with similar educational backgrounds.
Brokering Knowledge Mobilization Networks: Policy Reforms, School Partnerships, and Teacher Education
Education Policy Analysis Archives
Educational researchers and policy-makers are now expected by funding agencies and their institutions to innovate the multidirectional ways in which our production of knowledge can impact the classrooms of teachers (practitioners), while also integrating their experiential knowledge into the landscape of our research. In this article, we draw on the curriculum implementation literature to complicate our understandings of knowledge mobilization (KMb). Policy implementation, we suggest, can be understood as one specific type of KMb. We draw on different models for KMb and curriculum implementation and develop a relational model for KMb. Utilizing our model we critically reflect on the specific successes and challenges encountered while establishing, building, and sustaining the capacity of our KMb network. Our findings suggest that faculties of education are uniquely positioned to act as secondary brokers for the implementation of policy reforms within public education systems. To this end, we discuss how a relational KMb network is a “best practice” for establishing and sustaining partnerships among policy makers, educational researchers, and public school practitioners.
Reconceptualizing High School: Curriculum, Film, and Narrative Assemblies
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
Research Interests: Film Studies, Popular Culture, Critical Pedagogy, Curriculum Studies, and Curriculum and Instruction
Developing A Global Perspective For Educators
Education Review
Globally, we continue to face critical environmental, social and economic challenges such as poverty, climate change, infectious diseases, depletion of natural resources, and violations of human rights. To address some of these challenges, in 2005, UNESCO launched The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD). In taking up this initiative, the Canadian Ministers of Education Council astutely warned educators that, “a whole generation will need to be engaged to think and act in a way that enables responsible choices....” The ten authors assembled for this peer reviewed special issue of Education Review take up this critical challenge in their research and teaching practices in an effort to mobilize knowledge focused on global citizenship education and sustainable development. The concepts underpinning much of the research presented in this collection on Developing Global Perspectives for Educators (DPGE) invite readers to reconsider the global implications of our civic responsibilities as teachers in Canada and/or elsewhere in the world.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Living Between Truth and Reconciliation: Responsibilities, Colonial Institutions, and Settler Scholars
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
In the spring of 2015, the city of Ottawa hosted both the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and the 5th Triennial International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) conference. In this paper, we reflect on the coincidence of these two events, by drawing on our presentations at IAACS to provide a series of reflections on the implications of the TRC’s Final Report for us as settler educators and researchers. Living and working in Canada’s colonial capital, what are our responsibilities to take up truth and reconciliation? How should we proceed? Addressing these curricular questions, we present four narrative snapshots that seek to understand the Ontario secondary school civics curriculum, teacher education, and the curricular and pedagogical (re)organization of postsecondary institutions in light of the educational recommendations of the TRC. We discuss the particular complexities of taking up truth and reconciliation in these different contexts, and provide examples of possible ways forward. Drawing particularly on the ground-breaking work of Cynthia Chambers, we attempt to situate these examples of our work as curriculum scholars within the landscape of Ottawa, looking first to the colonial institutions we have built upon the unceded ancestral land, then to the pre-existing relational landscape that makes all of this possible. Living and working within these topographies, we consider how we as settler scholars and educators can ethically engage with local Indigenous communities, and take part in the ongoing work of truth and reconciliation.
Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies
Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2
In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts of the IRS system in Ontario’s social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon to reread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As Simon’s life‐long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each other’s unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice.
EMPOWERING MARGINALIZED YOUTH: CURRICULUM, MEDIA STUDIES, AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CODE Funded)
Canadian Journal of Action Research
Students are bombarded daily with print, visual, and digital media. Whether it is on a billboard, listening to an iPod on the way to school, or text messaging a friend during class, youth culture is hardwired into these multiple forms of communication technologies. Nonetheless, the daily life and respective experiences of students are often still subordinated to the school curriculum. Our social action curriculum project, which targeted “at risk” youth at a vocational high school in the Ottawa region, attempted to disrupt this by integrating emergent digital technologies and differentiated instructional strategies into five Grade 10 courses over a span of two years. Devising what we call a “socio-culturally responsive media studies curriculum,” we addressed the following Ontario Character Development Initiatives: (1) Academic achievement; (2) Character development; (3) Citizenship development; and (4) Respect for diversity. But, what happens when social action researchers and teachers seek to institutionalize such taken-for-granted use of digital media within their design and implementation of the provincial curriculum and these character development initiatives? In response to this question, this paper will examine the curriculum we implemented with teachers and students in order to negotiate the four character development initiatives. As well, we examine how our curriculum research and the implemented program specifically created spaces for marginalized voices to be heard, and multiple literacies to flourish.
What Does the Eye See? Reading Online Primary Source Photographs in History (SSHRC Funded)
Journal of Contemporary Issues in Technology and Social Studies Education
This exploratory study looks at how a sample of preservice teachers and historians read visuals in the context of school history. The participants used eye tracking technology and think-aloud protocol, as they examined a series of online primary source photographs from a virtual exhibit. Voluntary participants (6 students and 2 professional historians) were recruited at a bilingual Ontario University in fall 2011. From this group, the authors used a purposive sampling of three participants who represented the novice-intermediate-expert spectrum and whose results displayed typicality among other participants with similar educational backgrounds.
Brokering Knowledge Mobilization Networks: Policy Reforms, School Partnerships, and Teacher Education
Education Policy Analysis Archives
Educational researchers and policy-makers are now expected by funding agencies and their institutions to innovate the multidirectional ways in which our production of knowledge can impact the classrooms of teachers (practitioners), while also integrating their experiential knowledge into the landscape of our research. In this article, we draw on the curriculum implementation literature to complicate our understandings of knowledge mobilization (KMb). Policy implementation, we suggest, can be understood as one specific type of KMb. We draw on different models for KMb and curriculum implementation and develop a relational model for KMb. Utilizing our model we critically reflect on the specific successes and challenges encountered while establishing, building, and sustaining the capacity of our KMb network. Our findings suggest that faculties of education are uniquely positioned to act as secondary brokers for the implementation of policy reforms within public education systems. To this end, we discuss how a relational KMb network is a “best practice” for establishing and sustaining partnerships among policy makers, educational researchers, and public school practitioners.
Reconceptualizing High School: Curriculum, Film, and Narrative Assemblies
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
Research Interests: Film Studies, Popular Culture, Critical Pedagogy, Curriculum Studies, and Curriculum and Instruction
Developing A Global Perspective For Educators
Education Review
Globally, we continue to face critical environmental, social and economic challenges such as poverty, climate change, infectious diseases, depletion of natural resources, and violations of human rights. To address some of these challenges, in 2005, UNESCO launched The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD). In taking up this initiative, the Canadian Ministers of Education Council astutely warned educators that, “a whole generation will need to be engaged to think and act in a way that enables responsible choices....” The ten authors assembled for this peer reviewed special issue of Education Review take up this critical challenge in their research and teaching practices in an effort to mobilize knowledge focused on global citizenship education and sustainable development. The concepts underpinning much of the research presented in this collection on Developing Global Perspectives for Educators (DPGE) invite readers to reconsider the global implications of our civic responsibilities as teachers in Canada and/or elsewhere in the world.
Corrigan, J. A. & Ng-A-Fook, N., “Mobilizing Curriculum Studies in a (Virtual) World: Open Access, Edupunks, and the Public Good”, Canadian Journal of Education, 35(2), 2012, 58-76.
Canadian Journal of Education
Despite societal imperatives for equity—whether espoused by nation states or transnational agencies like UNESCO—current models of higher education are unequivocally failing to provide universal access. This paper seeks to explore the (cyber)spaces (un)occupied by higher education, specifically in the area of curriculum studies, arguing that the World Wide Web can be used to effect the democratization of education. Further, it argues for the benefits of Open Access research by means of a small-scale empirical study, the results of which indicate that making research openly accessible does not diminish the impact of research, but rather may actually increase it.
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Living Between Truth and Reconciliation: Responsibilities, Colonial Institutions, and Settler Scholars
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
In the spring of 2015, the city of Ottawa hosted both the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and the 5th Triennial International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) conference. In this paper, we reflect on the coincidence of these two events, by drawing on our presentations at IAACS to provide a series of reflections on the implications of the TRC’s Final Report for us as settler educators and researchers. Living and working in Canada’s colonial capital, what are our responsibilities to take up truth and reconciliation? How should we proceed? Addressing these curricular questions, we present four narrative snapshots that seek to understand the Ontario secondary school civics curriculum, teacher education, and the curricular and pedagogical (re)organization of postsecondary institutions in light of the educational recommendations of the TRC. We discuss the particular complexities of taking up truth and reconciliation in these different contexts, and provide examples of possible ways forward. Drawing particularly on the ground-breaking work of Cynthia Chambers, we attempt to situate these examples of our work as curriculum scholars within the landscape of Ottawa, looking first to the colonial institutions we have built upon the unceded ancestral land, then to the pre-existing relational landscape that makes all of this possible. Living and working within these topographies, we consider how we as settler scholars and educators can ethically engage with local Indigenous communities, and take part in the ongoing work of truth and reconciliation.
Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies
Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2
In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts of the IRS system in Ontario’s social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon to reread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As Simon’s life‐long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each other’s unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice.
EMPOWERING MARGINALIZED YOUTH: CURRICULUM, MEDIA STUDIES, AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CODE Funded)
Canadian Journal of Action Research
Students are bombarded daily with print, visual, and digital media. Whether it is on a billboard, listening to an iPod on the way to school, or text messaging a friend during class, youth culture is hardwired into these multiple forms of communication technologies. Nonetheless, the daily life and respective experiences of students are often still subordinated to the school curriculum. Our social action curriculum project, which targeted “at risk” youth at a vocational high school in the Ottawa region, attempted to disrupt this by integrating emergent digital technologies and differentiated instructional strategies into five Grade 10 courses over a span of two years. Devising what we call a “socio-culturally responsive media studies curriculum,” we addressed the following Ontario Character Development Initiatives: (1) Academic achievement; (2) Character development; (3) Citizenship development; and (4) Respect for diversity. But, what happens when social action researchers and teachers seek to institutionalize such taken-for-granted use of digital media within their design and implementation of the provincial curriculum and these character development initiatives? In response to this question, this paper will examine the curriculum we implemented with teachers and students in order to negotiate the four character development initiatives. As well, we examine how our curriculum research and the implemented program specifically created spaces for marginalized voices to be heard, and multiple literacies to flourish.
What Does the Eye See? Reading Online Primary Source Photographs in History (SSHRC Funded)
Journal of Contemporary Issues in Technology and Social Studies Education
This exploratory study looks at how a sample of preservice teachers and historians read visuals in the context of school history. The participants used eye tracking technology and think-aloud protocol, as they examined a series of online primary source photographs from a virtual exhibit. Voluntary participants (6 students and 2 professional historians) were recruited at a bilingual Ontario University in fall 2011. From this group, the authors used a purposive sampling of three participants who represented the novice-intermediate-expert spectrum and whose results displayed typicality among other participants with similar educational backgrounds.
Brokering Knowledge Mobilization Networks: Policy Reforms, School Partnerships, and Teacher Education
Education Policy Analysis Archives
Educational researchers and policy-makers are now expected by funding agencies and their institutions to innovate the multidirectional ways in which our production of knowledge can impact the classrooms of teachers (practitioners), while also integrating their experiential knowledge into the landscape of our research. In this article, we draw on the curriculum implementation literature to complicate our understandings of knowledge mobilization (KMb). Policy implementation, we suggest, can be understood as one specific type of KMb. We draw on different models for KMb and curriculum implementation and develop a relational model for KMb. Utilizing our model we critically reflect on the specific successes and challenges encountered while establishing, building, and sustaining the capacity of our KMb network. Our findings suggest that faculties of education are uniquely positioned to act as secondary brokers for the implementation of policy reforms within public education systems. To this end, we discuss how a relational KMb network is a “best practice” for establishing and sustaining partnerships among policy makers, educational researchers, and public school practitioners.
Reconceptualizing High School: Curriculum, Film, and Narrative Assemblies
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
Research Interests: Film Studies, Popular Culture, Critical Pedagogy, Curriculum Studies, and Curriculum and Instruction
Developing A Global Perspective For Educators
Education Review
Globally, we continue to face critical environmental, social and economic challenges such as poverty, climate change, infectious diseases, depletion of natural resources, and violations of human rights. To address some of these challenges, in 2005, UNESCO launched The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD). In taking up this initiative, the Canadian Ministers of Education Council astutely warned educators that, “a whole generation will need to be engaged to think and act in a way that enables responsible choices....” The ten authors assembled for this peer reviewed special issue of Education Review take up this critical challenge in their research and teaching practices in an effort to mobilize knowledge focused on global citizenship education and sustainable development. The concepts underpinning much of the research presented in this collection on Developing Global Perspectives for Educators (DPGE) invite readers to reconsider the global implications of our civic responsibilities as teachers in Canada and/or elsewhere in the world.
Corrigan, J. A. & Ng-A-Fook, N., “Mobilizing Curriculum Studies in a (Virtual) World: Open Access, Edupunks, and the Public Good”, Canadian Journal of Education, 35(2), 2012, 58-76.
Canadian Journal of Education
Despite societal imperatives for equity—whether espoused by nation states or transnational agencies like UNESCO—current models of higher education are unequivocally failing to provide universal access. This paper seeks to explore the (cyber)spaces (un)occupied by higher education, specifically in the area of curriculum studies, arguing that the World Wide Web can be used to effect the democratization of education. Further, it argues for the benefits of Open Access research by means of a small-scale empirical study, the results of which indicate that making research openly accessible does not diminish the impact of research, but rather may actually increase it.
Toward Understanding a Curriculum of Being Inhabited by the Language of the Other
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This paper traces, often drawing on autobiographical examples, the temporal migrations of educational experiences in the language of the other. As a documented Canadian and British citizen, an immigrant with an ex-appropriated proper name traced to Guyana’s indentured Chinese cane reapers, and thus, an imperial and postcolonial subject with certain identity disorders here in America, Canada, and elsewhere, how is a migratory subject subjected to the language of the other? More specifically, how might one learn, via currere, from a migrant subject’s educational experiences of appropriation and alienation in the language of the other?
Deconstructing a Curriculum of Dominance: Teacher Education, Colonial Frontier Logics, and Residential Schooling
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This article considers the idea of a curriculum of dominance in relation to the colonial logics that have, and continue to, shape the lived experiences and knowledges of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal individuals living in Ontario, Canada. In thinking about the present absence of certain Aboriginal narratives in relation to the ‘fort’ of Canadian history, the authors contemplate the ways in which the circumscribed logics of colonialism limit how we understand historical knowledge of Aboriginal groups not only as curriculum scholars but also as teachers and students who work in and have been educated in colonial public and Catholic schooling systems. Utilizing narrative assemblage as a research and writing methodology we partake in a dialectic wherein we confront the contours of colonial frontier logics. By braiding in our lived experiences, we seek to understand how curricular materials facilitate the silencing of certain Aboriginal narratives like residential schooling, the ways in which filmic representations can serve to re-write and redress lost memories, how one can learn from those who were subject to the violence of colonialism and how, as educators, we can address the violence and historical exclusion in our teacher education programs. Through this process, we suggest that although the continued discursive violence of colonial logics shape popular understandings of Aboriginal experiences in the Canadian nation-state, as socially justice orientated teachers we must continue to challenge the re-inscriptions of a curriculum of dominance within our future classrooms.
Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies
The Canadian field of curriculum studies is gifted with the presence of several creative scholars who bring differing innovative theoretical and methodological ideas for us to listen to, reflect on, and synthesize in relation to our research methodologies and our curriculum theorizing. However, as the editors noted in Curriculum Studies at a Crossroads the tasks of Canadian scholars and respective conceptualizations of the term “curriculum” still remains many things to many people. According to the editors, such pervasive meaningfulness—that everything goes and counts as “curriculum studies”—has provoked several potential threats to the epistemological, discursive, and pragmatic fabric of our community. In this inaugural issue of Curriculum Conversations, how might we continue to study, provoke, analyze, synthesize, re-interpret, and narrate the very “idea” of Canadian curriculum studies as a counterpointed composition? In response to their concerns and to begin our conversational forum, I have attempted to structure this essay into three sections. First, drawing on Glenn Gould’s concept of counterpoint compositions, I provide some historically situated narrative snapshots that partially represent the topographical—vertical and horizontal—contexts of our field of study. Second, I examine some of the different institutional structures through which Canadian curriculum scholars are mobilizing and sharing their research. In the last section, I provide a brief synthesis of such narrative snapshots in relation to the potential future threats to our field. My hope then, is that together, this forum might provide an opportunity for us to further situate, quell, and/or provoke some of the threats that inhabit the complicated conversation we call curriculum studies here in Canada.
Reconsidering our Attendance to Curriculum Development as… Events, Subjectivities, and a Cosmopolitan Praxis
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
I would like to thank Peter Applebaum, Peter Grimmet, João Paraskeva and Maria Alfredo Moreira for inviting Rochelle Skogen and myself to share some of work as co-presidents of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies. Unfortunately, Rochelle was not able to attend the conference. Consequently, during the address I attempted to share the following: 1) A partial history of our field in terms of key publications and conferences; 2) Situate my involvement as a co-president and a curriculum theorist within our international field of study; 3) Provide a brief sketch some of the research and community service learning I am currently doing within the Bachelor Education program at the University of Ottawa (for more information on our different social action curriculum research projects see www.curriculumtheoryproject.ca); 4) Begin preliminary conversation on the experimental possibilities of developing curriculum as a cosmopolitan praxis. Some sections of the address have been updated and edited to represent events that have transpired since our collective gathering.
Making interdisciplinary collaboration work: Key ideas, a case study and lessons learned
Alberta Journal of Educational Research
This article discusses the ‘lessons learned’ from an attempt to establish an interdisciplinary education research group. The growth, development and dissolution of the group are treated as an instrumental case study. Current literature on interdisciplinary collaboration is synthesized in order to provide a frame for analysis. Data was collected over several years and included three rounds of written participant reflections and documentation of group activities and meetings. Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress.Five major themes arose from the research, covering issues such as disciplinary diversity, common ground, interpersonal relationships, career pressures, and the need for concrete problems and tangible progress. Based on these themes, a number of ‘lessons learned’ are discussed which will likely be of great interest to those considering similar interdisciplinary initiatives.
Looking to the Future to Understand the Past: A Survey of Pre-Service Teachers’ Experiences with Digital Technologies in Relation to Teaching History (SSHRC Funded)
Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy
Digital technologies have the potential to enable history teachers to engage student learning, meet diverse learning styles, present a diversity of perspectives, and foster historical inquiry. Pre-service teachers entering today’s Canadian faculties of education are surrounded by more technology than their predecessors. But are they equipped with requisite knowledge and strategies to integrate these technologies effectively into their classrooms? This exploratory study used a cross-sectional survey to investigate pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies in relation to teaching history. By doing so it provides a context for further research into the pedagogical impacts of integrating digital technologies into history classrooms.
Introduction - Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century
Oral History Forum d'histoire orale
The topic of this special issue, “Making Educational Oral Histories in the 21st Century,” explores new and creative ways in which oral history has been used within different social settings. Certainly, engaging oral history within the contexts of public schooling with young people is not novel. What this special issue of Oral History Forum does demonstrate, however, are the ways in which oral historians and educators are utilizing both old and new technologies to interview audiences from far broader segments of society. Moreover, the articles put forth in this special issue provoke us to expand our imaginations with regards to the pedagogical possibilities of engaging oral history as university researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, teachers and students. The projects included in this special issue represent a robust discussion of the epistemological challenges and opportunities for those engaging oral history. Moreover, oral history, as this issue illustrates, enables both teachers and students of social history in relation to one’s community to introduce new evidence from the underside, shift the historical focus, open new areas of inquiry, challenge some of the assumptions and judgments of former researchers, and bring recognition to substantial groups of people, and their respective life histories, which have been largely ignored.
Living Between Truth and Reconciliation: Responsibilities, Colonial Institutions, and Settler Scholars
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
In the spring of 2015, the city of Ottawa hosted both the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and the 5th Triennial International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (IAACS) conference. In this paper, we reflect on the coincidence of these two events, by drawing on our presentations at IAACS to provide a series of reflections on the implications of the TRC’s Final Report for us as settler educators and researchers. Living and working in Canada’s colonial capital, what are our responsibilities to take up truth and reconciliation? How should we proceed? Addressing these curricular questions, we present four narrative snapshots that seek to understand the Ontario secondary school civics curriculum, teacher education, and the curricular and pedagogical (re)organization of postsecondary institutions in light of the educational recommendations of the TRC. We discuss the particular complexities of taking up truth and reconciliation in these different contexts, and provide examples of possible ways forward. Drawing particularly on the ground-breaking work of Cynthia Chambers, we attempt to situate these examples of our work as curriculum scholars within the landscape of Ottawa, looking first to the colonial institutions we have built upon the unceded ancestral land, then to the pre-existing relational landscape that makes all of this possible. Living and working within these topographies, we consider how we as settler scholars and educators can ethically engage with local Indigenous communities, and take part in the ongoing work of truth and reconciliation.
Unsettling our Narrative Encounters within and outside of Canadian Social Studies
Canadian Social Studies Volume 47, No. 2
In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary historical knowledge to address the intergenerational impacts of the IRS system in Ontario’s social studies classrooms. In this essay we therefore ask: How might we learn to reread and rewrite the individual and collective narratives that constitute Canadian history? In response to such curriculum inquiries, we lean upon the work of Roger Simon to reread and rewrite historical narratives as shadow texts. For us, life writing as shadow texts, as currere, enables us to revisit the past as a practice of unsettling the present, toward reimagining more hopeful future relations between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal communities across the territories we now call Canada. As Simon’s life‐long scholarly commitments make clear in this essay, the onus lies with those present to teach against the grain so that we might encounter each other’s unsettling historical traumas with compassion, knowledge, and justice.
EMPOWERING MARGINALIZED YOUTH: CURRICULUM, MEDIA STUDIES, AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (CODE Funded)
Canadian Journal of Action Research
Students are bombarded daily with print, visual, and digital media. Whether it is on a billboard, listening to an iPod on the way to school, or text messaging a friend during class, youth culture is hardwired into these multiple forms of communication technologies. Nonetheless, the daily life and respective experiences of students are often still subordinated to the school curriculum. Our social action curriculum project, which targeted “at risk” youth at a vocational high school in the Ottawa region, attempted to disrupt this by integrating emergent digital technologies and differentiated instructional strategies into five Grade 10 courses over a span of two years. Devising what we call a “socio-culturally responsive media studies curriculum,” we addressed the following Ontario Character Development Initiatives: (1) Academic achievement; (2) Character development; (3) Citizenship development; and (4) Respect for diversity. But, what happens when social action researchers and teachers seek to institutionalize such taken-for-granted use of digital media within their design and implementation of the provincial curriculum and these character development initiatives? In response to this question, this paper will examine the curriculum we implemented with teachers and students in order to negotiate the four character development initiatives. As well, we examine how our curriculum research and the implemented program specifically created spaces for marginalized voices to be heard, and multiple literacies to flourish.
What Does the Eye See? Reading Online Primary Source Photographs in History (SSHRC Funded)
Journal of Contemporary Issues in Technology and Social Studies Education
This exploratory study looks at how a sample of preservice teachers and historians read visuals in the context of school history. The participants used eye tracking technology and think-aloud protocol, as they examined a series of online primary source photographs from a virtual exhibit. Voluntary participants (6 students and 2 professional historians) were recruited at a bilingual Ontario University in fall 2011. From this group, the authors used a purposive sampling of three participants who represented the novice-intermediate-expert spectrum and whose results displayed typicality among other participants with similar educational backgrounds.
Brokering Knowledge Mobilization Networks: Policy Reforms, School Partnerships, and Teacher Education
Education Policy Analysis Archives
Educational researchers and policy-makers are now expected by funding agencies and their institutions to innovate the multidirectional ways in which our production of knowledge can impact the classrooms of teachers (practitioners), while also integrating their experiential knowledge into the landscape of our research. In this article, we draw on the curriculum implementation literature to complicate our understandings of knowledge mobilization (KMb). Policy implementation, we suggest, can be understood as one specific type of KMb. We draw on different models for KMb and curriculum implementation and develop a relational model for KMb. Utilizing our model we critically reflect on the specific successes and challenges encountered while establishing, building, and sustaining the capacity of our KMb network. Our findings suggest that faculties of education are uniquely positioned to act as secondary brokers for the implementation of policy reforms within public education systems. To this end, we discuss how a relational KMb network is a “best practice” for establishing and sustaining partnerships among policy makers, educational researchers, and public school practitioners.
Reconceptualizing High School: Curriculum, Film, and Narrative Assemblies
Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies
Research Interests: Film Studies, Popular Culture, Critical Pedagogy, Curriculum Studies, and Curriculum and Instruction
Developing A Global Perspective For Educators
Education Review
Globally, we continue to face critical environmental, social and economic challenges such as poverty, climate change, infectious diseases, depletion of natural resources, and violations of human rights. To address some of these challenges, in 2005, UNESCO launched The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD). In taking up this initiative, the Canadian Ministers of Education Council astutely warned educators that, “a whole generation will need to be engaged to think and act in a way that enables responsible choices....” The ten authors assembled for this peer reviewed special issue of Education Review take up this critical challenge in their research and teaching practices in an effort to mobilize knowledge focused on global citizenship education and sustainable development. The concepts underpinning much of the research presented in this collection on Developing Global Perspectives for Educators (DPGE) invite readers to reconsider the global implications of our civic responsibilities as teachers in Canada and/or elsewhere in the world.
Corrigan, J. A. & Ng-A-Fook, N., “Mobilizing Curriculum Studies in a (Virtual) World: Open Access, Edupunks, and the Public Good”, Canadian Journal of Education, 35(2), 2012, 58-76.
Canadian Journal of Education
Despite societal imperatives for equity—whether espoused by nation states or transnational agencies like UNESCO—current models of higher education are unequivocally failing to provide universal access. This paper seeks to explore the (cyber)spaces (un)occupied by higher education, specifically in the area of curriculum studies, arguing that the World Wide Web can be used to effect the democratization of education. Further, it argues for the benefits of Open Access research by means of a small-scale empirical study, the results of which indicate that making research openly accessible does not diminish the impact of research, but rather may actually increase it.
Toward Understanding a Curriculum of Being Inhabited by the Language of the Other
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry
This paper traces, often drawing on autobiographical examples, the temporal migrations of educational experiences in the language of the other. As a documented Canadian and British citizen, an immigrant with an ex-appropriated proper name traced to Guyana’s indentured Chinese cane reapers, and thus, an imperial and postcolonial subject with certain identity disorders here in America, Canada, and elsewhere, how is a migratory subject subjected to the language of the other? More specifically, how might one learn, via currere, from a migrant subject’s educational experiences of appropriation and alienation in the language of the other?
Ng-A-Fook, N. & Radford, L. & Ausman, T., “Living a Curriculum of Hyph-e-nations: Diversity, Equity, and Social Media”, Multicultural Education Review, 4(2), 2012, 91-128.
Multicultural Education Review
This study considers the complexities of living a cross-cultural curriculum within the multicultural contexts of Canada through following the experience of some first generation immigrants in a project that employs the multi-dimensional space of the Internet and cyber social communities within a vocational public school in Ontario. Disrupting traditional conceptions of students’ production of literacies, the project seeks to re-work the boundaries that define multiculturalism as a series of homogeneous hyphenated spaces from which students who are racialized as non-white are expected to speak. Here we consider, “what is at play in the hyphen?” and “how might the networked classroom space be considered a hyph-e-nation?” To explore these questions, we begin with an overview of multicultural education in Canada. We then employ a reading of Third Spaces and quantum physics to reread how students might open up dual Third Spaces through self representations in a social networking space: first through the social network as a Third Space and second, as certain kinds of learners caught in the hyph-e-nated middle of Canadian multiculturalism in an Ontario classroom. The case studies are followed by a discussion that problematizes discourses of comparison between cultural communities of which students with many cultural backgrounds and experiences are members.
