Education

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Open Access
Lady Game Club: The Popular Feminist Politics of Women-in-Games Organizations
(2024-11-07) Fisher, Stephanie Judith; Coulter, Natalie
‘Feminism in games’ is a large, dispersed, and networked movement that is happening in online and offline spaces. This research seeks to illuminate how inequities can be reproduced within a feminist community through a close examination of Lady Game Club (LGC), a non-profit organization that teaches women how to make digital games. Drawing on the feminist theories of ‘platform feminism’ (Singh, 2021) and ‘popular feminism’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018), I theorize LGC as a platform for popular feminism in games. This study employs community-engaged ethnographic methods, specifically participant-observation and interviews, to analyse the feminist logics that are built into the structure of LGC and practiced by the women game-makers who are a part of this community. By examining the feminist politics of LGC, this study demonstrates the limits of popular feminism in creating an inclusive and equitable games industry and challenging systems of oppression. LGC takes a direct representation approach to feminist activism. It is designed to get more (white and middle-class) women into the games industry, but not to change it. As a platform, LGC elevates and amplifies popular feminism’s normative modes of feminist resistance (i.e., ‘women’s individual empowerment’) while obscuring other forms of feminist resistance, such and those based in survival, care, and refusal. The organization structures feminist politics as an individual politics rather than a collective one, foreclosing the possibility for feminist resistances that are based on collective action or thinking about oppression as systemic or 'built in' (Benjamin, 2019). Although LGC is enmeshed in and reinforces the hegemonic systems of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, it also creates an opening in the public’s imagination for a more equitable game industry.
Open Access
Professional Learning for Educators: Enhancing Practice and Parent-Teacher Relationships in Early Childhood Programs in the Cayman Islands
(2024-10-28) Williams, Nicola Sian; Mishra Tarc, Aparna
Many countries around the world including the Cayman Islands are drawing upon the principles of developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) to develop curriculum frameworks for early childhood programs in response to the convergence of multidisciplinary research indicating the importance of high-quality care and learning experiences in the early years. This study investigated how teachers and parents in the Cayman Islands are responding to the Cayman Islands Early Years Curriculum Framework. Specifically, this mixed methods study investigated the effectiveness of a three-month long multi-dimensional professional learning (PL) intervention designed to: 1) enhance teacher and parent understandings of DAP, and 2) empower and support teachers in the design and implementation of two Early Childhood (EC) Parent Open Houses to discuss and share DAP with parents. Four preschools were randomly assigned to either the PL intervention or comparison groups. Prior to the PL intervention, surveys were used to understand parent and teacher views of DAP and parent-teacher relationships (PTRs) finding that teachers and parents have similar views of DAP and that while both parents and teachers rated their PTRs very favorably, parent ratings were significantly higher. Pre-intervention focus groups with PL teachers revealed three themes: dichotomies and uncertainties; more communication needed and barriers to PTRs. The quantitative data analysis found that PL teachers had more positive views of DAP and PTRs after the intervention, a change not found for the comparison teachers. Both the qualitative and quantitative data analyses provided evidence that the PL intervention enhanced teacher understandings and implementation of DAP; empowered teachers, promoted more collegiality and reflexive practice; and improved teacher views of PTRs. Parent focus groups revealed that parents also had positive views of the EC Parent Open Houses. This study can inform ECCE policy and practice in the Cayman Islands.
Open Access
Sculpting in Time. Between Meaning and Information
(2024-07-18) Ivanova, Veronika Mikhailovskaya; Mishra Tarc, Aparna
Employing an auto-ethnographic perspective and non-linear notions of time, "Sculpting in Time" identifies erosions of meaning and agency under techno-capitalism and explores the implications of their disappearance for the democratic ideal. The theoretical framework of this research-creation dissertation problematizes linear conception of time and posits that the rethinking of time can be emancipatory; when time is seen instead as the unfolding of relations, with others and with oneself, sensitivities can be honed toward other ways of embodying the present and conceptualizing notions of progress.
Open Access
Monologues from the margins: Voices and experiences of racially minoritized French immersion students
(2024-07-18) Kunnas, Rachel Marika; Prasad, Gail
This doctoral study investigated race and racism in French immersion (FI) programs in Ontario and Canada. Much research in the field of FI prioritizes efficacy of language learning and the studies that do consider equity speak to English language learners, immigrants, socioeconomic status, and special education needs. Meanwhile, racial identity is frequently overlooked entirely or simply not researched, despite long-standing evidence FI is dominated by White people. Despite the racial diversity of the French-speaking world, race has only recently started to be considered in FI. This study investigates racially minoritized students’ experiences in FI to find ways to improve their experiences. This exploratory sequential mixed method study aimed to better understand how racially minoritized students experience FI. Stage 1 engaged racially minoritized FI student participants (n=3) in modified Playbuilding (Norris, 2016) to create autoethnographic counter-stories and monologues about their experiences in FI. Participants in Stage 1 also created a list of suggestions and needs to improve FI. Stage 2 of the study employed a qualitative and quantitative online questionnaire. FI Stakeholders across Ontario and Canada (n=39) read and watched the stories and monologues, then reacted to them via the online questionnaire. Stakeholders rated and expanded on the suggestions from Stage 1. Stage 3 included one follow-up interview with a participant from Stage 1. Thematic analysis, critical discourse analysis, content analysis, and descriptive statistics revealed three major findings: 1) there was very little cultural learning—let alone racially and culturally diverse learning— in FI; 2) participants experienced racism in FI and FI teachers and administrators needed to address antiracism; 3) participants in Stage 1 were more concerned about improving their French proficiency than addressing racism. Disturbingly, some participants accepted racism as a foregone conclusion, but could not accept that their French had not improved in years. Findings reveal that there is a pressing need for diverse, culturally responsive and sustaining intercultural teaching in FI as well as training on anticolonial and antiracist pedagogy for teachers. Given the small participant size, this study serves as a launching point for future research into diverse intercultural teaching and learning, and antiracism in FI.
Open Access
Rooted and Rising: A Pedagogical Narrative Inquiry into Re-Storying Education in the Era of Climate Change
(2024-07-18) Cohen, Roxanne Wendy Silverstein; Alsop, Steve
As my relationship with global climate change grows deeper, I find myself increasingly intrigued by how this era compels a fundamental re-storying of education. In pursuit of this inquiry, I co-created Rooted and Rising – a pedagogical experiment in supportive education with and for youth climate leaders – and took up research within and alongside it. Through this dissertation, I sought to better understand the foundational narratives of this experiment, and what they might offer into the re-storying of education at this very pivotal time in global history. I collected data through a Pedagogical Narrative Inquiry, which explores the storied experiences of students and educators in Rooted and Rising (R+R), including my own, using interviews, document analysis, field notes, and personal reflections. My inquiry contributes to re-storying and re-structuring education as prefigurative, understood as the deliberate and experimental implementation of desired futures in the here and now. I offer three sets of significant narratives towards this re-storying: Interconnecting and the opening practices of valuing, attending, and sustaining interconnecting; Social Action narratives including processual narratives of improvisation and tinkering, social narratives of collaboration, and planetary healing narratives that both framed and emerged in the experiment; and Desired Futures, reflecting with R+R’s pedagogical invitations into play, desire, and agency with futures, and the aesthetics, temporalities, and well beings students’ expressed desire for across three activities. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Open Access
In Their Own Words: The Voices of Disabled First-Person Protagonists in Children's and Young Adult Literature
(2024-07-18) Richmond, Aaron John; Parekh, Gillian
Located in the field of education, my dissertation examines the representations of disability in 12 popular children’s and young adult novels that are commonly being taught in Ontario schools. Throughout my study, I have used autocritical disability studies, autoethnography, and critical inquiry-based research methods to answer the central research questions of my dissertation within a critical disability studies informed social constructivist theoretical frame. 1. How are disabled first-person protagonists depicted in the contemporary realistic children’s and young adult literature that is being taught in grades 7 through 12 in Ontario schools? 2. How can “asset-based pedagogies” (Waitoller & King Thorius, 2023, p. xv) be used by teachers in the language arts classroom to teach disability-themed children’s and young adult literature in a disability “culturally authentic” (Brown, 2020, p. 141) manner? Based on Bates’ (2017) survey of the texts being taught in grades 7-12 in Ontario schools, I initially located 39 disability-themed children’s and young adult novels which I reduced to the 12 texts containing 12 disabled first-person protagonists that I have analysed in this study, using a comprehensive inclusion and exclusion criteria. I thereafter applied criteria informed by critical disability studies, education, and English literature scholars to critique disability representation in cultural texts. By deconstructing the portrayals of disability in 12 popular novels through a critical disability studies lens, I have exposed the systemic ableism that is present in many of the stories containing disabled characters which negatively impacts students’ beliefs about disability and disabled people. In response to my second research question, I have developed a new application regarding culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy (CRRP) by demonstrating how CRRP can be used to teach disability-themed literature in a culturally affirming manner in the language arts classroom by using the middle-grade novel A Kind of Spark (McNicoll, 2020) as an illustration. My thesis concludes by making recommendations for teacher preparation programs and in-service teachers for future research in literary disability studies, and disability studies in education regarding the selection, analysis, and teaching of disability-themed children’s and young adult literature.
Open Access
Accessing Privilege: Teachers’ Experiences in Elite Private Schools
(2024-07-18) De Santis, Stephanie Amelia; Barrett, Sarah
Schools serve as a site of investigation for social reproduction, often with a lens on marginalized communities to elucidate how inequity and class disparities are actualized. Comparatively, there has been less access to private schools for researchers, and therefore, fewer studies that focus on the role of upper-class communities in maintaining these structures. This study explores the elite private school environment to come to an awareness of how privileged self-understandings are created in these institutions via educators’ perspectives. Privileged dispositions can be a barrier to building an equitable world as they are oriented toward self-fulfillment, often with little regard for one’s impact on others. Focusing on the experiences of teachers broadens existing research and creates space to think about the implicit and explicit ways educators relate to privilege for the purpose of critical reflection and change. Two questions frame this endeavour: How do teachers working in elite private schools perceive and negotiate privilege in various spaces? Secondly, how might teachers’ experiences engender privilege or how might they challenge it in their everyday practices? This study explored these questions through a series of three in-depth interviews with eight middle and secondary educators in southern Ontario with varying degrees of experience in elite private schools. Using an iterative, thematic, and intersectional approach to data analysis, this study arrives at patterns of how privileged self-conceptions are formed, reinforced, and areas in which there are attempts to challenge them. Ultimately, this study finds that despite teachers’ attempts to confront privilege, they take part in reinforcing privileged self-understandings of their students. Educators feel they can teach about the topic but are limited in the extent they can challenge the privilege that pertains to students or parents. As well, teachers adopt their own privileged self-understanding and perpetuate exclusion based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and linguistic differences. These factors shape how they conceive of their responsibility and work as teachers in relation to students and colleagues. In making these distinctions, it becomes clearer what hidden discourses shape teachers’ experiences, who is most implicated by these narratives, and the power dynamics that exist in elite spaces.
Open Access
Productive Struggle in Developmental Mathematics
(2024-03-16) Cheung, Matthew; Rapke, Tina
This dissertation highlights the potential of productive struggle in addressing the issues of teaching and learning in developmental mathematics. This research presents a course designed to support productive struggle, empirical findings on students’ experiences and conceptions, and my own experience supporting students’ struggles. The design of the course is oriented towards supporting productive struggle by engaging students with tasks that elicit uncertainty. Instruction was delayed, providing an opportunity to promote self-explanation as students explained and questioned their thinking with a partner. As the course instructor, I asked purposeful questions during students’ engagement with the tasks to show students that struggle is a necessary part of learning. This environment is in stark contrast to skill-and-drill instruction often found in developmental mathematics classrooms. Empirical findings suggest that students experienced and conceptualized struggle and productive struggle in various ways. Significant to the findings was the connection to deep approaches to learning, persevering, positive affective structures, and habits of mind. Through phenomenography, semi-structured interviews were conducted, data was collected, and students’ experiences and conceptions were analyzed. The findings bring focus to the affective nature of learning, a facet infrequently explored in developmental mathematics. More importantly, these findings starkly contrast with students’ reliance on rote memorization often reported in developmental mathematics classrooms. I engaged in the Discipline of Noticing to investigate my experience of supporting productive struggle. The methodology presented in this study acts as a form of professional development that simultaneously produces research for others to test in their own practice. This systematic inquiry into my practice contributes to the underrepresented area of self-based methodologies to understand instructors’ learning in mathematics teacher professional development. Deliberately honing my skill of noticing enhances the choices that can come to mind in my future practice of supporting productive struggle.
Open Access
Policy Making in Times of Crisis: The Case of Immigration and International Students in Canada During the COVID-19 Pandemic
(2024-03-16) Garcia-Sitton, Isaac; Trilokekar, Roopa
This research explores policy making in time of crisis, by examining immigration policy measures introduced in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on international student recruitment and retention in postsecondary education institutions. The study adopts a qualitative research design with policy analysis as a research method, and used elements of Kingdon’s multiple streams approach (MSA) (1984) and Keeler’s macro-window-opening process (MWOP) (1993) to develop its theoretical framework. Data for this study was gathered through published policy documents as well as semi-structured interviews with diverse policy actors, including civil servants, senior leaders in educational institutions, national and provincial associations, immigration consultants and education agents. Findings of this study suggest that the immigration measures introduced by the Canadian government during the pandemic can be classified into four main types: travel regulations, online learning provisions, work-related measures, and immigration policies (including pathways to permanent residency and immigration level plans). In alignment with the theoretical framework, the study finds that the COVID-19 pandemic served as a crisis that, in combination with the government’s pro-immigration policy mandate, helped create a macro-window of opportunity that allowed for major reforms supporting continued international student recruitment and retention, most notably through online learning provisions and work-related policies. Interview participants noted that the government’s approach to policy making evolved over time with a noticeable shift from reactive to proactive strategies, that involved increased consultation and collaboration with relevant stakeholders. The focus of the policy measures also shifted from public health to economic recovery as the immediate threats of the pandemic were contained. The findings identify chaos and uncertainty in the environment, communication gaps, and tensions between federal and provincial government as the main limitations that impacted policy outcomes and their scope of achievement. Moreover, the findings emphasize the key role of policy entrepreneurs, including government actors and national associations, in shaping policy decisions. The research highlights gaps in the existing framework and identifies the need for considering variables such as institutional constrains, net impact assessment, geopolitical factors, and policy alignment, especially when studying policy making in an international context. Findings of this study are particularly relevant to inform high-impact and rapid-response policy changes to support the international education sector in Canada.
Open Access
Eco-Somatic Educational Journey: Physical, Emotional and Planetary Lives of My Body
(2024-03-16) Anilkumar, Prerna; Alsop, Steven John
This study offers itself as an educational journey oriented by ecosomatics and earth democracy. It deepens these ways of knowing by locating them in ways of sensing, feeling, relating, being and living in a brown woman’s somatic body, experiencing her physical, emotional, and earthly entanglements, participating in the alive-ness of her earth family. Through the educational journey, this study carves possibilities and openings of a somatically textured environmental education by revolving around the question of what it means to do this work with the body in relationship with the planet, in this time and place. Bodywork in this study takes the form of exploring the researcher’s three bodily processes of digesting, breathing and menstrual bleeding framed through the physical, emotional, and planetary lives of the gut, breath, and menstrual blood. These explorations shed light on the various physiological and ancestral somatic entanglements, the enmeshed medicines of various emotions and the intertwined planetary kin relationships held within the gut, breath and menstrual blood. This study finds that all of these corporeal entanglements make and shape the living ways of digestion, breathing and bleeding which throb, simmer, swirl and flow in a somatic web of relationships.
Open Access
Drag Across Borders: Negotiating 2SLGBTQ+ Refugee/Migrant Being and Belonging Through Drag Personas
(2023-12-08) McDermid, Paulie; Kyriakides, Christopher
This qualitative study uses drag performance to better understand some of the complexity of 2SLGBTQ+ refugee and other migrant identities and experiences of in/exclusion from (national) belonging in Canada. Racialized Western border regimes and reception frameworks position refugees/migrants along an in/voluntary axis that both denies and fears agency while constructing ‘the refugee’ as a diminished ‘non-person’. Utilizing drag as an analytical lens sheds fresh light on questions of refugee/migrant agency and performativity as well as (racialized) queer/trans self-enactment and belonging. In this study, refugee/migrant drag artists describe materializing through their drag personas a desired ‘person’ that stakes out spaces of belonging for themselves and for others in their communities. Thus, they push back against dehumanizing social and political forces hostile to their being and belonging. The dissertation draws on in-depth interviews with twenty-two refugee/migrant drag artist and audience member respondents from across Canada and utilizes an abductive grounded theory approach to analyze the resulting data. The drag artists’ narratives counter Western scripts of ‘refugeeness’ by emphasizing agency and autonomy in their lives long before and after arrival. Through their personas, the work the drag artists do is social, political, and relational. Relationships with their families (of all kinds) and others form a vital part of building collectivity. The sharing of their knowledge and experience with new generations of artists shows how these refugee/migrant drag performers work toward the futures they desire for themselves and others and toward the change they want to see in the world. Uniquely, this study signals the public pedagogical potential of drag in relation to refuge and migrancy. The study adds to queer/trans migration studies that centre the everyday lived experiences of 2SLGBTQ+ refugees and other migrants before and after conflict/arrival. By focusing on the experiential in and continuity of (queer/trans) refugee/migrant lives, this research contests the reduction of ‘the refugee’ to an anonymous category of diminished ‘non-person’, stripped of a past and refused a future. In demonstrating how (past) social relations nourish present and future belonging for 2SLGBTQ+ refugees and other migrants through collectivity, the study also contributes to the theorizing of queer/trans-of-colour futurity.
Open Access
Privilege and Vulnerability: Early Study Abroad Experiences and Policy Enactment in a Superdiverse Secondary School
(2023-12-08) Bell, Nancy Louise; Schecter, Sandra Ruth
This dissertation explores the lived experience of Early Study Abroad (fee-paying international) students in a publicly funded Ontario secondary school. I situate my research in the broader context of international education, particularly the recruitment and hosting of students from abroad. The study also explores the complex world of adolescent language learning and intercultural exchange in a superdiverse school setting. My qualitative case study comprises interviews with students, who describe their personal experiences, and educators, who reflect on their own practices and share observations of their colleagues’ pedagogical response to this cohort. My analysis was influenced by my experience as an English as a Second Language/English teacher who worked with Early Study Abroad students and informed by a reading of relevant policy documents. I use several complementary frameworks: Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological model of development; theories from critical policy research (Ball, 1993, 2015; Ball et al., 2012; Levinson & Sutton, 2001) and engaged language policy and practice (Menken & García; 2010; Ricento & Hornberger, 1996); and Vertovec’s (2007, 2019) concept of superdiversity. My findings reveal that students’ experiences and teacher responses are broadly shaped by discourses that support the marketization of education at a global scale. At the school level, highly agentive students successfully navigated their way through an educational system that did not widely acknowledge or support them, notwithstanding the efforts of few engaged teachers. My policy recommendations include stronger oversight of student care and well-being, more opportunities for professional development and collaboration for teachers who work in linguistically diverse classrooms, and greater transparency in accounting for the management of student tuition revenue.
Open Access
Journey With Me: Wanderings and Wonderings Through Childhoods
(2023-12-08) Barnikis, Tiffany Victoria; Mishra Tarc, Aparna
Dominant assumptions and views of children and childhood inform and guide educational policy and practice and have worked to institutionalize meanings of children and childhood. Within the sociology of childhood, literature has challenged these assumptions by recognizing the lived realities of children as contextually specific and historically dynamic, and by acknowledging the existence of multiple situations and perspectives of childhood (James & James, 2012; Mayall, 2002; Prout & James, 1997), however, these understandings are majoritively considered from an adult perspective. This qualitative study welcomes children’s perceptions and narratives into discussions of children and childhoods by exploring five children’s perspectives and narratives. This study is influenced by the Mosaic approach, “a multi-method, polyvocal approach that brings together different perspectives in order to create with children an image of their worlds” (Clark, 2017, p. 17). Semi-structured conversations, photography and child-led walking tours of their neighbourhoods provided the participants with an opportunity to express their thoughts, opinions, and retellings of their own lived experiences. Working within a social-critical paradigm and underpinned by the sociology of childhood, critical childhood studies, and post-structuralism, the aim of this inquiry is to explore from the perspectives of children themselves. Employing poetic inquiry alongside a thematic narrative analysis the child participants’ narratives are explored through the discussions of adult/child constructs; freedoms, restrictions and resistance; relationships; and been, being and becoming, and their decision-making and influence on curriculum. In conclusion, recommendations for future practices and areas for further research are discussed. Positioning children, rather than adults, as the storytellers of their lived realities this study works to de-objectifying children in conversations of children and childhood and seeks to acknowledge children as active and valued members of society, and important tellers of their own stories.
Open Access
Consumer Culture and its Social Effects on Education
(2023-01) Colangelo, Halldor; Tarc, Aparna Mishra
Some of the difficulties that educators are having in teaching their students today are resultant from what Hannah Arendt (2006), called the crisis of authority in our modern world. It is hindering, among other things, the teacher’s ability to educate and protect the children from the world. This study proposes the importance of including consumer culture as the fundamental context with which to understand some of today’s more negative aspects of individualism and individuation that may be partly caused by a culture of entitlement in contemporary society in general, as well as in education and schools. Using consumer culture as an all-encompassing term to understand what Zygmunt Bauman (2007) referred to as our ‘liquid’ society, this study shows how this crisis is the result of capitalism’s metamorphosis from that of producers to that of consumers. It discusses how the change of capitalism’s ethos over the decades has had a marked effect on the individual sense of being and belonging by fundamentally replacing the citizen with the consumer. In education, consumer culture is promoting an individualized consumerist ethos that compromises the more metaphysical and holistic aspects of teaching (educere) while promoting the exclusively functionalist and mechanical educare with its more practical, skills-oriented, standardized, individualizing and ‘marketable’ aims of education. To understand the genesis of consumer culture’s alienating form of individualism, this study makes a brief historical analysis of capitalism’s initial stages of consolidation to its semiotic and surveillance forms of today. It demonstrates how the quasi-complete commodification of daily life, including often within rapports, is manufacturing our identities and personas through egotism, egoism, and even simulation. Through an autoethnography, this study manages to align and illustrate this discussion and theories espoused by several scholars through ten vignettes from this author’s personal life experiences both as a citizen and educator.
Open Access
Anishinaabe Learning Places: Teaching and Learning through Gift, Relational, Movement and Spirit Pedagogies
(2023-10-03) Hupfield, John Robert; Dion, Susan D.
Powwows have always been a place of dynamic colours, beadwork, a celebration of life on the land, a site for Anishinaabeg to ‘dance, sing, and pray, the Anishinaabe way.’ Anishinaabe pedagogy and powwow as place: Teaching and Learning through Gift, Relational, Movement and Spirit Pedagogies is a project that examines the ways in which powwow as place can provide spaces for teaching and learning within powwow families. As a grass dancer themselves, the author centres relationship with three other powwow families through a methodology rooted in Anishinaabewin (Indigenous knowledge systems), dibaajimowinan (storysharing), and nbwaachewin (visiting). Through a series of ZOOM sessions, stories were shared and knowledge co-constructed about Anishinaabe pedagogy through processes of reciprocity and relationality. The stories shared by families were oft-framed by colonization, naming its impacts on family structures and Anishinaabe identity - the dismantling of kinship systems. Powwow as place was described as a space that not only provides respite from ongoing forms of colonization, but fosters kin-making, wholistic wellbeing, and the learning of Anishinaabewin through coming to understand teachings about kinship through roles and responsibilities. Powwow families expressed the need to nurture the ‘spirit’ of the learner, a notion rooted in wholism that they felt is oft-lacking in zhaagnosh (non-Anishinaabe) learning settings. These findings indicate a need for powwows to be reframed from cultural gatherings and celebrations, to critical places of learning/teaching for Anishinaabeg. The focus on gifts of learners, reframing relationships between teacher and learner relationships, and a call for the hosting of more Anishinaabeg places of learning such as powwow, are all aspects that non-Indigenous educational contexts can learn from.
Open Access
Qissati. Counterstories of Muslim Women School Administrators in Schools
(2023-08-04) Nada Aoudeh; Aparna Mishra Tarc
This composite counter-stories study seeks to understand and illuminate the embodied experiences of Muslim women school leaders in Ontario public schools. Critical analysis of individual and group interviews with seven Muslim women public school administrators (principals and vice principals), autobiographical writing/reflection, and scholarship on racialized women’s school leadership shed light on: a) the systemic erasure of Muslim women leadership through ‘Invisibilizing’ and ‘Hypervisibilizing’ experiences, b) the experiences of Muslim women’s presence and actions as threatening to the cultural and institution reality of public schools and, c) the institutional attempts at containment of these leaders through controlling expectations and tools for reprisal should expectations be transgressed. Theories of Islamophobia and Critical Race/Feminism Theory are shown to arise out of the experiences of women as examined in the data. These theories inform the development of the composite counter-stories depicting the school lives of Muslim woman leaders. The composite characters allow for an embodied expression of the complexities of ‘being’ Muslim and woman in public institutions to resist further re-inscription into dominant narratives of their lives. These stories also disrupt majoritarian narratives about inclusive schools and Muslim women. The composite counter-stories provide a robust portrait of the impact of leading public-school spaces as a Muslim woman. Compiling the data through a composite depiction of individual experience, I provide new counterstories of gendered Islamophobia in school leadership and Islamophobia in schools more widely.
Open Access
Writing "Home" in Rural Queer Teacher Narratives: A Collaborative Autoethnography
(2023-08-04) Cummings, Darren Randall; Gilbert, Jen
This dissertation seeks to investigate the lives of rural queer teachers in their communities and schools. I explore how notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ might keep queer teachers in their rural locations despite an overwhelming discourse that associates the rural with rejection and homophobia. This study is a collaborative autoethnography that employs writing and discussion groups to explore rural queer life through Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical notions of the rhizome, assemblage, and perpetual “becomings” as a result of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. This framework informs the theoretical and methodological components of the study by demonstrating how group members negotiate their multiple identities as queer, educator, and rural community member, while also mapping “becomings” that occur within the collaborative writing group. I also investigate how the theoretical works on utopia by Cvetkovich (2008) and Muñoz (2009) might be utilized as a way to re-imagine the rural queer experience.
Open Access
Alternative Public Education and Solidarity Economy: Values, Ideologies, and Looking for Spaces of Change
(2023-08-04) Pearson, Megan Marie; Dippo, Donald A.
Violence and exclusion are experienced by children of colour in the Toronto public school system through disproportionate suspension, expulsion, dropout rates, police presence and the streaming of Black youth. The solidarity economy has a long history of organizing through education programs that serve to teach and mobilize groups of oppressed peoples as well as to instruct the masses about their ideological agendas. Grounded in critical theoretical approaches, this dissertation explores if and how the solidarity economy might intersect with public education in Toronto, Canada. Through analysis of empirical interview data from Toronto alternative public-school actors, and thematic analyses of policies informing the establishment of alternative public schools, the values and ideologies of the policies are uncovered, along with the logistics of how others have navigated these policies. It arrives at an understanding of the values and ideologies of the solidarity economy through brief case studies. The study concludes that while there are pockets of struggle and resistance within individual schools and classrooms in the Toronto District School Board, the values and ideologies of the solidarity economy are not able to inform a different vision of schooling, within the current Toronto alternative school system and its establishment policies.
Open Access
Teacher Identity and Ethical Responsibility: An Exploration Through Literary Representations
(2023-03-28) Schwartz, Lisa Simpson; Farley, Lisa H. E.
This dissertation investigates the meaning of ethical responsibility as a fundamental feature of teacher identity. While there is a tendency to construct both responsibility and teacher identity in terms of instructional practice, agency, and competency, this research foregrounds understudied complexes of dependency, uncertainty, and failure. Drawing on continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, I frame teacher identity from the vantage of concepts of natality, hospitality, and relationality to illuminate a central conflict of responsibility that places the teacher in a tension between an idealized conception of egoless passivity and the emotional situation of an ego-based affect of self-preservation and ego interests. Conflict and anxieties result, constituting the teacher’s emotional world. Through my investigation of this tension, I offer critique of the all-loving teacher figure by exposing how this idealization conceals the implication of education in discourses of aggression, exclusion, and social control. Literary portrayals of child/adult and student/teacher relationships in novels provide novel data to examine these tensions.
Open Access
Archaeology Education in Ontario: A Relational Inquiry of Indigenous Museums and Artifacts
(2023-03-28) Martinello, Christopher Stefan; Farley, Lisa H. E.
Many sectors of society, such as justice, health care, and education, are moving towards a relationship of Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Ontario’s secondary school History curriculum, however, especially that which concerns the deep history of Turtle Island, is still almost exclusively based on the findings of Western scientific archaeology and methods of artifact interpretation generated by colonially-trained archaeologists. Writers of this curriculum have traditionally not included Indigenous worldviews, ways of knowing, and relationships with artifacts in course content, even as professional archaeologists, historians, and curators are moving to more collaborative research frameworks with Indigenous communities. This research project investigates what Indigenous archaeologies entail, and how Indigenous approaches to understanding archaeological artifacts in museum contexts (re)centre, (re)member, (re)cognize, and (re)present Indigenous ways of knowing to decolonize my teaching of the history curriculum. Since I am not an Indigenous person, the research method and paradigm of my research is a Western qualitative approach based on critical and decolonizing methodologies that is affected by and respectful of Indigenous methodologies. Specifically, I conduct fieldwork in a selection of museums organized by Indigenous archaeologists/educators to learn how Indigenous experts are using artifacts to narrate history. One goal of the fieldwork is to identify themes, concepts, and approaches that Indigenous educators have selected to represent Indigenous histories to diverse public audiences. My dissertation applies that learning to consider what it means to change how I teach the history curriculum that spans the time before colonization. Drawing on concepts of multivocality, storytelling, fencing, and Métissage, the study interprets museum galleries as research data and recommends new directions in teaching the history curriculum of the time before colonization that align with the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its Calls to Action.