Education

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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.
Open Access
The Story of a Course, School, First Language and Home: A Qualitative Discourse Analysis of the Voices of Refugee Students and their Teacher
(2023-03-28) Duran, Marcela Sofia; Dippo, Donald A.
This study, seeks to understand the pedagogical and ethical dilemmas of the instructor when teaching an online undergraduate education course on multiculturalism and multilingualism in educational contexts to refugee students living in UNHCR refugee camps in Kenya. It asks questions about first-language loss, longing for home, and schooling experiences as expressed in the writings of students in that education course. The theoretical framework of the dissertation is informed by an ethical, social justice pedagogical perspective, refugee studies, postcolonial studies related to linguistic imperialism, and theories of bilingualism, multilingualism, and second-language acquisition. The dissertation intends to create a space for pedagogical inquiry through autoethnographic reflection, reflexive teaching, and discourse analysis of student and teacher voices. The study hopes to contribute new knowledge related to questions about first-language maintenance and second-language acquisition in the schooling of children in refugee camps.
Open Access
Overcoming and Re-envisioning White Resistance to Antioppressive Teacher Education: Creating Transitional Spaces to Process Difficult Knowledge in Small Groups
(2022-12-14) Singer, Jordan Elliott; Mishra Tarc, Aparna
This dissertation argues that a fundamental rethinking of how Antioppressive teacher education views white teacher candidate (TC) learning is necessary to diminish what has been called white resistance. Examining the inadequate models and methods deployed to transform TC thinking about difference and Otherness reveals how teacher educators (TE) adherence to traditional paradigms contributes to their refusal to learn and change. The addition of Psychoanalytic insights into subjectivity, thinking and learning, it is argued, can mitigate TC resistance while enhancing student engagement and instructor pedagogy. These insights are then further refined to frame a transitional space (in a small group setting) wherein TC's cognitive and emotional struggles can be attended to ethically. The body of this work draws directly on TC's experience in the highly lauded Urban Diversity Teacher Education Program (UD). Using a variant of discourse analysis informed by cultural theory and psychosocially defined ambivalence, TC thinking and their learning processes are considered within the UD curriculum, TE pedagogy, course work, and small groups. One year after the initial study, interviews and focus groups with former preservice teachers augment the research data while providing timely reflections on how small group processing impacts social justice teacher education. An analysis of how the particularized learning dynamics in small groups are informed by considerable external and internal forces throughout teacher training follows. This applied research concludes that if a transitional space within small groups is developed with care, white resistance decreases, and overall engagement with equity pedagogy increases. Consequently, UD graduates are more likely to reverse the disappointing outcomes for racialized students that birthed anti-oppressive efforts in their inception.
Open Access
This Book Will Destroy You: A Critical Comparative Analysis of YA Heroines
(2022-12-14) Malka, Natalie Rachel; Krasny, Karen A.
Despite the progress the Young Adult literary genre has made to diversify their characters and stories, the representation of a female protagonist has remained formulaic and predictable. YA commonly centers heroines who embody characteristics associated with female likability, resulting in the loss of authentic representations of teenage girls. Characters who do not personify these archetypes are often regarded as foils to the loveable protagonist, leaving readers with the impression that only idealized girls deserve to have their narratives told. This thesis analyzes quintessential YA heroines – Bella Swan (Twilight) and Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games) – and compares them to YA author Courtney Summer’s protagonists, Parker (Cracked Up to Be), and Sadie (Sadie). This work challenges the makings of a YA protagonist and explores the representation of an “unlikeable” female character in order to provoke a broader understanding of their behaviour and actions, and still embrace them for it.
Open Access
Pedagogies of Navigation: An Account of Difference
(2022-12-14) Khan, Noah Yusuf Hassan; Mishra Tarc, Aparna
The present thesis develops a pedagogy that responds to the finitude of the human, as approximated by its lived technological experiences. Prominent pedagogies that espouse rhizomic metaphysical conceptions are subjected to systematic doubt to determine whether they are consistent with these experiences. Then, these experiences are examined to discern the nature of sense-making from the lens of the individual, focusing heavily on the role of cognition. The author then furnishes an enactment of sense-making through the provision of a dialogue and commentary on both sense-making and the dialogue itself. It is found that the lived technological experience suggests a shift in pedagogical development away from metaphysical suppositions that divorce themselves from the lived technological experience and toward navigational considerations which, it is argued, more accurately reflect the lived technological experience. A pedagogy of navigation is then furnished that attempts to adequately reflect the lived technological experience.
Open Access
Teaching Cultures: Teaching Orientations, Rewards and Social-Political Influences
(2022-12-14) Fockler, Melissa Catherine-Anne; Alsop, Steven John
For decades, scholars have studied the experiences of early childhood educators, schoolteachers, student teachers, professors, and so on. However, the experiences of teaching assistants (TAs) have largely been under-explored. By TAs, I mean graduate students who work part-time as educators, assisting undergraduate courses. In this research, I interview [N = 17] current graduate students at a university in southern Ontario, Canada, about their recent experiences working as TAs on campus. The purpose of this interviewing is to gain insight into what teaching activities TAs do, how and why, and how their broad commitments to environmental/sustainability education impact their teaching. From analyzing interview data, drawing on principles of grounded theory, I find my interview data supports, extends, and refutes how Lortie (2002) and followers (i.e., Hargreaves and Shirley, 2009) depict teaching cultures. Discussions of teaching cultures are situated in broader conversations of neoliberalism and sustainability. Research results are arranged in a didactic model, to help TAs, along with a broader audience of educational stakeholders, make more informed teaching decisions.
Open Access
Centering Girls' (Media-Making) Stories: A Pandemic Exploration of Video-Storytellers and their Practices, Personas, and Projects
(2022-12-14) Terzopoulos, Tatyana Zofia; Jenson, Jennifer
This interdisciplinary, feminist-informed research explores racialized tween and teen girls’ video-based storytelling and considers how extracurricular programs can support their media-making. Drawing from youth media cultures and media education scholarship, this work aligns with and builds upon research about community-based youth documentary media-making initiatives and limited yet pivotal scholarship that centres girls’—marginalized girls in particular—experiences, including as media-makers. It was further motivated by the prevailing lack of diverse representation in key creative and leadership roles in media industries, my experiences as a woman working in media, and the paucity of research on Canadian youth and their experiences learning about and making media. My inquiry was underpinned by feminist theory, public pedagogy, and feminist media. Utilizing a qualitative case study design, I designed and facilitated a virtual digital storytelling program in Spring 2021 of the pandemic; four ethnoracially-diverse and marginalized girl-identifying youth from Toronto participated in both the program and research study. Research methods included interviews, vlogs, participant-created media, observational footage, and researcher notes. Analysis involved immersing myself in each participant’s data to holistically consider the creative, technical, and social dimensions of her video-storytelling; I also coded interviews and vlogs to identify themes that united the participants. Inspired by Lange’s (2014) exploration of youth technical identities and Lawrence-Lightfoot’s (1983) narrative portraiture methodology, I crafted a video-storytelling “persona” for each participant, weaving in her own words and media project images. Next, I note the broader significance of relationships and connection as well as video storytelling-specific peer and mentor support for participants. I then discuss their video-making in relation to postfeminist-influenced and video-based social media ecologies and girls’ informal, self-directed media education. This research honours participants’ stories and critically reflects upon the wide-ranging nature of their video-storytelling experiences and approaches. It also offers initial recommendations for girl-centered programs that emphasize community, support skills development, and provide safer spaces for their media-making and learning. I advocate for girl-specific media-making communities of practice—particularly for marginalized girls—as necessary interventions in evolving media industries and culture to more fully include, support, reflect, and represent diverse populations of girls and women and their stories.
Open Access
"Put Together": Black Women's Body Stories in Toronto, (Ad)dressing Identity and the Threads That Bind
(2022-12-14) Andrew, Jillian Laura-Lee Bianca; Stanworth, Karen S.
“Put Together”: Black Women’s Body Stories in Toronto, (Ad)dressing Identity & The Threads That Bind centers child and adult body stories shared by eight Black women, including the author, 29 to 39 years of age living in Toronto – one of the most diverse cities in the world. Historically, the lived experiences and ‘body talk’ of Black women and girls have been routinely marginalized and tangentially documented within dominant monochromatic body image literature which usually centers the experience of white women and girls. The geography of the seven participants is intentional as it further destabilizes the Americentric lens of fat studies and Black feminist scholarship by adding to the canon the stories of Toronto-based women who self-identify with both blackness and fatness : two embodiments often misperceived, misrepresented and constructed as excess(ive) in need of repair and regulation. Through a hybrid, intersectional framework, informed by tenets of fat studies, anti-racist, Black feminist thought, symbolic interactionism and sartorial scholarship this dissertation intends to demonstrate the socially constructed educational ‘societal curriculum’ – the everyday and systemic ‘good body, bad body’ lessons - learned through social interactions with significant and generalized others and through the symbolic and cultural currency of objects such as clothing and self-fashioning practices that help to shape how these participants think, feel and remember their bodies through the qualitative, unstructured interview. Their stories are thematically analyzed and the threads that bind and bound them are made apparent. Participants’ accommodation and resistance of normalized body ideals and social forces are explored. Particular attention is paid to their material self-representation as impression management through dress since respectability politics and appearance factor significantly in their body stories along with various activisms that help them ‘buck the system’ through self-definition and valuation. Participants’ raced, gendered, and sized body stories are shaped through their family, schooling, workplace, public space, intimate relationships, community activism and sartorial engagements among other key influencers and as “Put Together…” unfolds, their experiences with racism, sexism, class bias, fat phobia and other intersectional forms of body-based discrimination, harassment and gender-based violence, and the mental health implications of these embodied traumas are laid bare. Traditionally, it is postulated that Black women have little worries about their weight, their bodies and are more welcoming of fatness. However, “Put Together…” demonstrates the falsehood of this essentializing assumption and addresses the paucity in the research. The “double whammy” of fatness and Blackness and the accompanying stereotypes set up a scenario where the Black women in this research are arguably engaged in a heightened awareness – a ‘triple consciousness’ of size, gender and race corporeality. This qualitative research can support educators, activists and policy pertaining to appearance-based discrimination, equity and inclusivity. It also supports the need for more inclusive sizing, good quality and affordably-priced clothing options for fat bodies. Body-based bullying, size discrimination and anti-Black racism are inextricably linked in this study. The outcome of that to future studies can be more comprehensive, culturally-relevant and size diverse research, images, analyses and conversations on body image which includes race and representation, in school curriculum, in workplace human rights, heath and wellness and in fashion industry policies and practice for instance.
Open Access
Herbert Marcuse, Subjectivity and how Eco-Narrative can Provide New Pathways of Education
(2022-08-08) Bannon, Michael John Oldfield; Alsop, Steven John
My project examines how Herbert Marcuse’s notion of subjectivity can create a space in narrative fiction to read the relationship between humanity and the environment with an ecocritical lens. I then advocate for a reimagining of narrative fiction’s role in environmental education, and discuss how these understandings can be turned into praxis. The two texts I explore are Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o A Grain of Wheat and The Lamp at Noon by Sinclair Ross. These texts present two different yet related narrative stories in which people collide with the natural world, and in this relationship there are significant opportunities to expand our own understanding of environmental subjectivity. I delve into the space where humanity and nature meet, and what it means to consider nature as the other, independently of humanity’s wants and desires. Marcuse provides a theoretical yet active perspective of radical subjectivity, and this allows these narratives to inform on how to build a more equitable relationship with the environment.
Open Access
"Cruel Optimism," Burnt-out-souls, and the Ruptured Fantasy of Education
(2022-08-08) Azzarello, Louise; DiPaolantonio, Mario G.
This dissertation conducts a philosophical political inquiry into ways in which the “pervasive atmosphere of capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009) infiltrates and impedes public education and thus generates a “ruptured fantasy” of education. My project seeks to critically expose an exhausted depressive sensibility, promoted and perpetuated through the logic of neoliberalism, which gives way to what Byung-Chul Han (2015) terms the “burnt-out-soul.” Late critical theorist Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” offers a conceptual framework through which I critically consider the “double bind” induced through attachments to education. I particularly focus on the pernicious effects that result when education forges optimistic attachments, via the pervasiveness of “critical pedagogy,” to enact social transformation in our increasingly menacing times. “Cruel optimism” in education, I argue, is not only instituted through neoliberal rationality but also through mechanisms of neoliberalism, which exacerbate the pre-existing structural and systemic violence historically normalized in education (violence perpetuated on the basis of racism, classism, ability, gender, and through the colonial project). Tracking the trappings of an optimistic relation to education from an interdisciplinary perspective I wonder what it takes for educators to counter this wearing down of our souls that engenders a sense of hopelessness, and which impedes the “educational” (Di Paolantonio 2016, 2018; Biesta, 2013, 2018, 2020). Drawing on theorists both within and outside of education, and on my more than twenty-five years of experience as a high school educator, I consider the following questions: What happens when it is our “optimism” that provokes the cruelty of despair? What are the depressive repercussions of the “soul at work” (Berardi, 2009)? How do critical educators survive as they attempt to disrupt, fight, and hope for possibilities within public education while existing in a constant state of exhaustion and despair as they “manage” and negotiate education’s compromised conditions? Ultimately, I seek to think through how the “educational” can appear only in brief, fleeting moments given education’s present conditions. Finally, in the last part of the dissertation, I offer my concept of thinking with images. Thinking with images, I argue, provokes pedagogical moments of interruption that give students time and space to attend to what they see, thus affording them the chance to think differently about the violence they live in these wretched times when the “past not yet past” (Sharpe, 2016) impacts them daily.
Open Access
The Forms of Capital and Intergenerational Change in Higher Education Access: A Case Study of Aranguez
(2022-08-08) Ramlal, Sabita; Trilokekar, Roopa
The study explores higher education access in a marginalised community within a post-colonial context, specifically, why access was low given supportive government policies. The case study of Aranguez, a former sugar-cane plantation in Trinidad, involved interviews with descendants of East Indian indentured labourers of all ages, which allowed insight into intergenerational changes in education and impacts of policy shifts. The conceptual framework combined Bordieuan analytical concepts of social and cultural capital and postcolonial theory to analyse the data. Findings show a critical role for the mother and extended family (kin and non-kin) in first generation students' transitions to higher education. History, economics, and politics shape education policy formation and enactment from colonial to the post-colonial context, which provide new insights for critical education policy research. First, it expands our understanding of how intersections of race, class, religion, and geographical location operate as axes of marginalisation and discrimination resulting in inequitable access to education. Second, findings demonstrate how colonial legacies persist in education policy and the education system, operating to reproduce social inequality. In addition, a culture of violence lingers in the community along with intergenerational trauma, which have negative implications for educational access and life trajectories. The research challenges the global discourse to expand higher education in developing countries, as community members prefer informal training and and self-employment without formal higher education credentials. Findings demonstrate a need for education policy fit for the local context, addressing issues such as outreach and engagement of families; recognition of informal training; legacies of post-colonial trauma; brain drain; and the need for decolonisation of education. Keywords: higher education access, social capital, cultural capital, post-colonial, Bourdieu, indentured labourer, intergenerational trauma, education policy
Open Access
Relationality over Coloniality: An Inquiry into Decolonizing Settler-isms with Indigenous Futurisms
(2022-08-08) Koelwyn, Ryan Ayva; Haig-Brown, Celia
Reconciliation between non-Indigenous/settler peoples and Indigenous peoples has become a central tenet of Canadian education. In this dissertation I examine the ways a settler-colonizer's capacity to dream a vision of reconciliation into being is fractured. The ways schooling is stuck between, the potential for education to labour a decolonial future and the crisis of responsibility that ensues when education continues to be informed by settler ideologies that reinforce white supremacy and the superiority of Euro-western knowledge, come into focus. In the first two chapters I address colonial inheritances regarding the epistemic violence embedded within normative structures of contemporary society as barriers to relationality. Specifically, shame in schooling and the way settlers engage with positionality shapes and reflects how stolen land and relationality are understood. Decolonization offers some consolation, but how can a non-Indigenous settler person unsettle colonial ways of knowing, being, thinking, and doing while operating within these systems? From there I build an argument that Indigenous Futurisms is a catalyst for new ways of questioning and practicing decolonizing work, driving Indigenous resurgence and re-imagining reconciliation as a generative and relational praxis. In the last two chapters I bring into dialogue Indigenous Futurist artwork to show how these artists' socio-political interventions foreclose colonial ideology and machinations of future without conflating the ongoing dispossession and colonial violence(s) while creating a sense of hope and possibilities for otherwise futures. Zombie counter-narratives presented by contemporary painter, Bunky Echo-Hawk and filmmakers, Lisa Jackson and Jeff Barnaby, reframe Indigenous inheritance as the medicine needed in the post-apocalyptic world. Multidisciplinary artists, Nicholas Galanin, Steven Paul Judd, and Andy Everson reimagine Star Wars with space NDNs (N-D-N-s) highlighting the connective tissue of Indigenous living presence in past-present-future timelines. In conclusion, I suggest that if there is to be any hope of developing a decolonizing practice and an ethical space of engagement, non-Indigenous/settler peoples must step into the void working to un-learn, within educational institutions and beyond.
Open Access
Giving Pause: Epistemological Diegesis and Self-Sentience created through the novel Our Life in Red Jello
(2022-08-08) Greco, Kerry Marie Frances; Popovic, Celia
The effect of the global pandemic on systems of education in Ontario has renewed the call for mental health resources in schools. The detrimental impact of Covid-19 on mental-health related issues for students resulting from school closures and lockdowns raises awareness to the importance of mental health and wellness for students in Ontario schools. For my masters thesis I have written a novel called Our Life in Red Jell-O to foster a diegesis of mindfulness. The litmus test for the aforementioned creation of a space of mindfulness that happens is ones own personal response to the content of the novel. If reader response reveals a reception to a feeling of mindfulness, or freedom from thought, in the transactional analysis between reader and text on any level, we have a mindful diegesis, or from an epistemological standpoint, a way to know what mindfulness means through experience.
Open Access
Hybrid Feedback: The Efficacy of Combining Automated and Teacher Feedback for Second Language Academic Writing Development
(2022-08-08) Woodworth, Johanathan; Barkaoui, Khaled
While researchers and practitioners agree that students need more writing practice and feedback, overburdened teachers often do not have sufficient time to read, mark, and give feedback on students' multiple drafts. Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) systems have emerged as a possible solution to give immediate feedback to writers. However, AWE systems lack individualized feedback and feedback on content and can diminish the social and communicative dimensions of writing. Thus, some researchers have advocated that AWE should be construed primarily as a complement to, rather than a replacement of, teacher feedback. Currently, there is a lack of research on the effectiveness of hybrid feedback, or the combination of teacher and AWE feedback, in the academic writing classroom for supporting the development of second language writing. The current study has started to address this gap by examining if hybrid feedback resulted in differences in approaches to writing, language, content, and organization of writing between a class that received hybrid feedback and a class that received only teacher feedback. A mixed methods design first collected quantitative data and then augmented the quantitative results with in-depth qualitative data. First, pre, post and delayed post-treatment writing tasks were administered to both groups to compare writing in terms of scores and various fine-grained writing indices. A questionnaire on changes in cognitive processes was conducted for both groups, and questionnaire data on the perception of AWE was collected from the experimental group. Second, a focus group interview was conducted as a follow-up to the quantitative stage from the experimental group. A mixed MANOVA comparing changes between and within groups was used to analyze the questionnaire data and changes in writing, and thematic analysis was used to interpret the qualitative data. The findings suggest that although AWE feedback has limitations, including insensitivity to context, learner needs, meaning, and inability to provide dialogic feedback, combining it with teacher feedback may address some of its limitations, help motivate students to revise and write more often, facilitate autonomous learning, and reduce teachers' workload.
Open Access
Unthinkable, Indescribable, Unknowable: Thinking with Hannah Arendt About School Shootings Through Concepts of Unacknowledged Shame, Violence and Forgiveness
(2022-08-08) Chappel, Wendy Mary; Mishra Tarc, Aparna
The figure of the rampage school shooter continues to present a challenge to educational thought and research. This dissertation examines discursive representations of unacknowledged shame, violence and forgiveness in young adult fiction written about rampage school shootings. I frame my thinking of concepts and analysis through Hannah Arendt's discussion of shame, violence, and forgiveness. To explore these concepts, I will engage with literary pedagogy, to examine the potential for fostering dialogue with students to think about the combined role of the emotional and social realms of the school shooter and finally how young adult fiction about rampage school shooting can be used to initiate classroom discussions.
Open Access
Towards a Language Acquisition Pedagogy of Performance
(2022-08-08) Di Chiazza, Margaret Bronwyn; Schecter, Sandra Ruth
This thesis is a theoretical exploration of integrative drama and performance techniques that address the learning journeys of English language learners in mainstream classroom settings. It also explores the translatability of performance pedagogy for online learning platforms. Premised on principles embedded within two conceptual frameworks, Gibbons's (2015) Mode Continuum and Boal's (1973/2008) Theatre of the Oppressed, it aims to illuminate the benefits of an integrative performance approach. I bring these two disparate frameworks together in a way that is integrative, innovative, and inclusive for diverse student communities. Two major contributions of this thesis are (a) to underscore the capacity of drama pedagogy techniques to enhance and reinforce other subject matter areas and (b) to illuminate the social justice and liberating potential of drama pedagogy in creating a venue for youth to imagine other scenarios than those that constrain their ability to be themselves and belong to a community of learners.
Open Access
"We Don't Need the Key, We'll Break In": Learning about the Occupation through Aesthetic Encounters with Three Artists
(2022-08-08) Merucci, Amber Noelle; DiPaolantonio, Mario G.
This dissertation explores developing a pedagogy that is concerned with what might be learnt about the Occupation of Palestine from artists and their work. I consider the pedagogical significance of imagery in relation to loss by examining art as having a transformative potential. The dissertation draws on literature, artworks, and interviews that I conducted with three Palestinian contemporary artists: respectively, Ayed Arafah, Hamza Abu Ayyash, and Majd Abdel Hamid. I do so in order to explore how people find themselves caught in history and how these three post-Nakba artists nevertheless navigate and challenge the Occupation while calling for democratic and political freedom. Through my thinking with the artworks, I offer a new reading on how experiences with insurmountable loss are traversed and contested through art that resists. In particular, I seek to explore the pedagogical potential of political aesthetic practices in spaces of confinement: how art that resists can illuminate complex ideas and so unveil that which is hidden or muted, thus making room to reimagine alternative ways of thinking, doing, or being that are not limited to the confines of colonial logic.
Open Access
e-Learning Quality during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond: Ontario's Policy Response to School Closures and Implications for Critical Democratic Education
(2022-03-03) Brathwaite, Leah Alexandria; Winton, Sue
According to Naomi Klein's (2007) conceptualization of disaster capitalism, neoliberal policies tend to emerge and take hold during times of crisis and shock. In the months following March 2020, public education policies emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, e-learning, a delivery model that was strongly opposed by teachers, students, and parents prior to the pandemic, was implemented as a solution for Ontario public schools which were closed longer than schools in any other province or territory between 2020-2021. This study examined how Ontario's e-learning policies defined quality and implications of this conceptualization for critical democratic education.
Open Access
On the Education of a Psychiatrist: Notes from the Field
(2022-03-03) Harms, Sheila Christine; Britzman, Deborah P.
The overarching borrowed question that frames the work of this PhD asks, "What does an education in psychiatry do to a psychiatrist?" Early in my practice of child and adolescent psychiatry, the "know how" in the custodianship of care neither readily nor easily translated into "show how," resulting in a pedagogical conundrum that belatedly registered as uncomfortable emotional symptoms about my education. This nidus of professional confusion and uncertainty creates the context for my inquiry into the complexities and dilemmas of contemporary matters of medical education, specifically as it pertains to my identity as a psychiatrist. To probe these queries, three non-traditional, blended methodologies are relied upon. John Forrester's "thinking in cases" is utilized in reading memoirs and critical histories in psychiatry, such that the thesis can be read as a case of many educational cases. I stay close to the reading of Oliver Sacks' memoir whose work in neurology also grapples with questions of the mind; an idea which becomes a leitmotif in my own autoethnographic reflections for re-constructing my education in psychiatry and its potential beginnings as a trainee and educator in both Canada and Uganda. Weaving in and out of historical observations made by Foucault about psychiatry and linking them to Sacks' recall of numerous medical institutional encounters, I tackle the problem of matricide in an educational arena weary of newness and how this deadly curriculum can be generative in its intent. Through attempts at engaging a decolonizing discourse about my experiences as a clinician educator in Uganda, the concept of an educational void and how it was both ruthlessly encountered as a situational dilemma but underwent a thought transformation to understand it as a survival tactic, is described. Psychoanalytic orientations are heavily leaned upon in my interpretations, highlighting the emotional logic inherent in the transference sites constituting the human work of medical practice and education. Broad themes emerge focusing on history, place, gender, and positioning of the body as educational markers speaking to a different kind of experiential pedagogy predicated on somatic revelations to make the mind intelligible in its relevance to the temporality of education. I arrive at the fault lines of education, difficult knowledge, and the uncertainties, including the frailty of my own self as a resource for the mind, that form educational myths needed to tackle obstacles to learning. Through this process, a personal and professional awakening occurs.