Mobilizing A Global Citizenship Perspective with Educators: Curriculum Development, Equity and Community Partnerships

2011-2012

Project funded by KNAER Grant

Recent education program initiatives and curriculum (e.g. Character Development Initiative; School Effectiveness Framework; Equity & Inclusive Education Strategy; Social Studies & Science Curriculum) in Ontario call for school boards, principals and teachers to draw on emerging evidence-based knowledge to ensure every child and youth in Ontario schools see themselves as included, successful, as having a sense of place and an understanding of global citizenship and environmental stewardship. These initiatives lend strong support to the assertion by Mundy et al. (2007), that “there has never been a better time to pay attention to global education in Canadian schools” (p. 1). Developing a Global Perspective for Educators (DGPE) at the University of Ottawa together with its school board and NGO partners, is well positioned to take a leadership role in ensuring classroom teachers are supported to acquire evidence-based practices for developing a global citizenship perspective that addresses teaching and learning, student engagement and equity priorities.

In this project we (Sharon Cook (global cohort coordinator), Tracy Crowe (project manager), Lisa Glithero (project coordinator), Rita Forte (RA), Katrina Isaacson (RA), Ruth Kane (program evaluation consultant), Brian Kom (RA), Joanne Lauzon (RA), Lorna Mclean (GERN director and program evaluation consultant), Nicholas Ng-A-Fook(project lead)) build upon existing partnerships with Ottawa Carleton District School Board (OCDSB), the Ottawa Catholic School Board (OCSB), NGOs and the Centre for Global and Community Service (University of Ottawa) to extend and mobilize evidence-based research, curriculum design and assessment, critical pedagogy and resource development that will support teachers to meet curricular goals in elementary and middle school classrooms. Since 2002, the DGPE group has served as a knowledge mobilization and dissemination portal for the educational materials developed by local, national and international NGOs. We have worked collaboratively with NGOs, integrating “evidence-based best practices” associated with curriculum design (principles of backward design) and classroom assessment (as, of and for learning) and inclusive education, to translate their educational materials into lesson and unit plans that take up the Ontario curriculum expectations across the different subject areas (see www.developingaglobalperspective.ca).

In 2008 we created the Global Education Research Network (GERN) to institutionalize and support the conduct, mobilization and dissemination of research on global education. Our research illustrates how developing a global citizenship perspective makes a significant difference in the formation of pre-service teachers’ overall competencies in terms of engaging and preparing Ontario children and youth for the social, cultural and economic expectations of the 21^st Century. Consequently, GERN is well positioned along with our partners to play a key role in assisting KNAER with the mobilization of research on developing a global citizenship perspective in relation to teaching and learning, student engagement and equity. In turn, the funding provided by KNAER will enable us to extend our reach beyond student teachers into our partner school boards and school classrooms of practicing teachers. Through the creation of professional learning community teams of lead teachers, researchers and student teachers, we will work with the OCDSB and the OCSB to mobilize knowledge into experienced teachers’ classrooms and existing board programs. We commit to working with our partners to develop, implement and evaluate the following project deliverables:

1. Create a steering committee comprised of core DGPE faculty members and members of participating school boards, NGOs and teacher-candidates to oversee the design, implementation and evaluation of the project;
2. Establish collaborative professional learning community teams comprised of educational researchers, lead teachers and pre-service teachers enrolled in the 2011-2012 DGPE cohorts;
3. Facilitate two 2-day conferences and two 1-day workshops at the University of Ottawa for both the participating lead teachers and pre-service teachers;
4. Work with the professional learning community teams to develop classroom-ready teaching materials and web-based resources that are aligned with the Ontario curriculum expectations and address goals of current school board programs (e.g. Character Development Initiative, 2008; School Effectiveness Framework, 2010; Ontario’s Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy, 2009);
5. Draw upon “best practices” and Ministry policy guidelines for the 21^st century (backward design, assessment for, of and as learning, differentiated instruction, inclusive education and integration of 2.0 technologies to teach global education); and
6. Evaluate the overall project in terms of its impacts of mobilizing knowledge, enhancing teacher confidence and practice and as collaborative partnership with local school boards and NGOs.

The steering committee will oversee the dissemination of the different educational products developed by the professional learning community teams through the 2nd conference at the University of Ottawa (February 23, 2012), in schools, through lead-teacher workshops with colleagues in clusters of schools and via the DGPE website. We will also invite the university and local media outlets to showcase different elements of the project.

Making Digital Histories:

Virtual Historians, Historical Literacies, and Education

2011-2013

In 2010, Mark Zuckerman was chosen as Time Magazine’s person of the year. By 2012 Facebook will have an estimated 1 billion users worldwide. Emergent 2.0 web technologies such as Facebook, MySpace, and Google are changing the ways in which humans both interact and communicate with each other over the Internet on personal computers, IPods, and Smartphones. Up until the digital revolution of the 1990s, communication was slower and information harder to find and retrieve. Now, the explosion of the Internet has brought with it an amazing mass of information, being generated at an astounding pace. Even domains of knowledge such as history have been affected directly by the digital revolution. Instead of searching for old scraps in archives, historians are now confronted by an overwhelming amount of sources, and what is worth preserving needs to be decided as people go along. The multiple types of technological skills and literacies Canadian citizens must now learn in order to acquire information, to complete school degrees, or to secure employment have changed radically since the time of the Industrial Revolution. Ministries, school boards, and teachers across Canada are in the midst of restructuring their systems, updating their physical infrastructure with wireless technologies and SMART boards, revising their curriculum guidelines, as well as experimenting with the pedagogical practices necessary to address the societal, cultural and technological demands of the 21st century. However within the contexts of educational research there is still relatively little experimental research on how teachers and students, within a specific subject area like history for example, are developing the necessary curricular and pedagogical strategies for responding to the new demands of the current digital media integration across the public school system. Therefore, this Making Digital Histories pilot initiative seeks to examine how educational researchers and pre-service teachers can utilize the various digital media available to develop the necessary innovative research methodologies, teaching practices and respective digital literacies to critically consume, produce and disseminate historical knowledge on the Internet. Cognizant of these sweeping societal, cultural and technological changes, the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa has established the Faire de l’histoire: Récits et mémoires collectifs en éducation/Making History: Narratives and Collective Memory in Education Educational Research Unit. This bilingual Research Unit seeks to strengthen links between educational researchers and teachers in the public schooling system and to address critical issues in the field of history education that have regional, national and international impacts. Our Research Unit aims to make significant contributions to the overall mandate of research organizations like SSHRC by bringing together educators from across Canada to assess and improve the digital processes for conducting research and disseminating historical knowledge within the context of history education. To do so, we propose to take up the following two initiatives: 1) Work with pre-service teachers at our Virtual History Lab to study the digital practices and historical literacies they employ to construct historical knowledge; 2) Collaborate with pre-service teachers at our Digital Oral History Lab utilizing digital storytelling software to produce digital oral histories with elders from the Outaouais region. This pilot initiative promises to contribute “insight” in terms of what integrating digital media can bring to history education, and what such processes of historical thinking can bring to future digital practices and literacies associated with constructing Canadian history.

SSHRC Insight Grant: Nicholas Ng-A-Fook (PI) and Stéphane Lévesque (Co-PI)

Engaging Youth Activism (2008-2010)

Funded by Council of Ontario Directors of Education

The failure of schools and after-school programs to address the media as predominant language of youth today, or to recognize the social and cultural contexts in which students live, has resulted in a profound disconnect. It’s a disconnect that occurs between the experiences that most students have during their time in school and those they have during their time outside school. Until corrected, this disconnect will lead to the increased alienation of low-income urban youth from the dominant social, political, and economic mainstream. (Goodman, 2003, p. 2)

Curriculum needs to reflect the interests of youth who are disengaged with the official content and school programming. (Bosacki et. al., 2006, p. 372)

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 wired into these multiple forms of media literacy. However, the school curriculum often fails to address and/or incorporate the media literacies youth already experience daily outside of school. Instead, many students are asked by teachers to communicate their knowledge and understanding through a standardized literacy of writing and reading in English through for example the manipulation of digital Word processing software.

This is a joint community service-learning project between the Council of Ontario Directors of Education, Community Service Learning Project and Professor Nicholas Ng-A-Fook, Dr. Linda Radford, and Tracy Norris at the Faculty of Education of the University of Ottawa, and an adaptive high school. Drawing on the larger Character Development ministry initiatives this action research project seeks to engage grade 9 and 10 students, who currently have poor attendance records, low credit accumulation, low self-esteem, experience sociocultural marginalization from the school curriculum, and/or are deemed “at risk” by the irrespective student success team. This experimental program is currently taking place with students enrolled in a grade 10 Communications Technology course at a vocational high school.

This program is designed to reflect and target the specific Character Development goals set by the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat of the Ontario Ministry of Education.

• Improving students’ attendance;
• Fostering a sense of community and safety;
• Creating spaces with students for their voices to be heard;
• Validating multiple representations of students’ literacies; and
• Becoming politically engaged citizens.

The project also seeks to disrupt the various ways in which the institution of schooling situates and defines the concept of literacy and in turn determines “what” and “who” counts as being literate within school context. Therefore this project seeks to understand the various ways teachers can integrate students’ interests into its curricular designs and in terms of how the curriculum is then experienced with students. It also seeks to understand the curricular and pedagogical effects that integrating emergent technologies in a classroom setting have in terms of disrupting traditional conceptions of students’ production of literacies within the context of schooling.

Click here to read a more thorough description of this project: Empowering Marginalized Youth.

For sample unit plan created and published by Tracy Norris and Nicholas Ng-A-Fook click here: My Digital Identity

Associate Members

Linda Radford is an associate member of A Canadian Curriculum Project. She is currently a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. Her journey within the field of teacher education began in 1991 when she studied with Ursula Kelly at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. Having just completed her Master’s thesis at Dalhousie University on the value of regionalism in Canadian literature, she found Kelly’s introduction to a critical literary pedagogy as a transformative framework that inspired her own teaching of literature with a wide range of student populations from the elementary to the college level. Curious about the dynamics of resistance in reading and learning about difficult knowledge, Radford began another adventure of insight by taking courses with Deborah Britzman and Alice Pitt at York University. Inspired to further explore readings’ inner drama, in the fall of 2000, she began he PhD in Education with Judith Robertson at the University of Ottawa. Her doctoral dissertation, which received numerous awards such as International Reading Association, Canadian Association of Teacher Education and Truda Rosenberg Scholarship for Research on Discrimination, explored questions of aesthetic provocation and beginning teacher’s reading practices and offers a model of how objects of the curriculum can be used to discuss the implications of identification within the framework of learning to teach others to learn.

Since completing her doctorate, Linda Radford has been teaching a variety of courses at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education. As co-investigator, she has been working with Nicholas Ng-A-Fook on a media studies, social action research project entitled Engaging Youth Activism, which explores the use of 2.0 technologies with ‘at risk’ learners who struggle with traditional literacies and also explores the challenges new technologies bring to our changing understanding of youth’s relation to fiction. Working with Grade 10 classroom English teachers to develop and support differentiated instruction in order to help foster open learning environments where students can engage and perform multiple literacies, Linda Radford has been working to support the aim of this curriculum project – to empower the lived experience of students at school and encourage advocacy by and for these historically marginalized youth. From this research, she plans to turn her attention to a new project on how digital storytelling is being played out in the classrooms and how teachers can explore its democratizing potential.

Additionally, as an educational consultant, she has been working with a team from the research firm Contentworks for the Qikiqitani Truth Commission to examine the impact of government decision-making on Baffin Inuit in the 1950-75 period. The findings will become part of the Qikitani Inuit Association’s archive and augment cultural sensitivity of the current issues facing the Inuit by describing their recent past and the many challenges they endured as a nation.

Graduate Student Research Projects

The following graduate students’ curriculum theory projects were either completed and/or are ongoing under the supervision of Professor Nicholas Ng-A-Fook.

Kathryn Galvin (MA in Education):

Kathryn Galvin successfully defended her master’s thesis titled Environmental Education From a Postcolonial Perspective: Analyzing the influence of UNESCO’s discourse on the Ontario elementary science curriculum. Over the past three decades curriculum scholars have failed to address environmental education through joint local, national, and/or global research initiatives, leaving UNESCO as an underpinning force in legitimizing and institutionalizing environmental education globally. This critical discourse analysis examines the connection between UNESCO’s historical discourse on environmental education and the Ontario elementary science and technology curriculum. As a study grounded in curriculum theory, it leads to a nuanced understanding of the extent to which the local discourse reinscribes and/or subverts the global discourse on environmental education. The study also engages a postcolonial deconstruction of the discourse, exploring how the global and local discursive trends work to colonize or decolonize our relationship with the environment. This study reveals that what is important is not whether or not UNESCO’s dominant discourse on environmental education is reinscribed and/or subverted in the local curriculum. But, rather how both contribute to the complicated discussion on environmental education. This research was funded by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship grant.

Katrine Cuillerier (MA in Education):

Katrine Cuillerier successfully defended her master’s thesis titled Framing a Curriculum of Queered Performance(s): Problematizing the Language of “Tolerable” Queerness within Mainstream Classrooms. Her thesis explored among other things expressions and representations of heteronormalized gender and sexuality discourses constructed by a group of students and educators involved in a pilot program at an eastern Ontario vocational high school. These performances of stereotyped “queer identities” or “experiences” overpower and silence the performances of identities outside the “norm.” Moreover, by defining what “queerness” is through a heterosexual frame, the explicit school curricula often defines what is acceptable, and what is perceived as unwanted deviant queerness within the context of Catholic and Public schooling here in Canada. Within this study Katrine reiterated the students’ and educators’ responses, reactions and opinions on a range of queer issues through autoethnography and currere research methodologies. In turn, drawing on the theoretical works of Janet Miller, William F. Pinar, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler she analyzed her past and present reactions to social and cultural narrative framings of “queerness” within the classroom in order to inform the pedagogical strategies that one could possibly negotiate when taking up complicated conversations that challenge a “hetero/normal” matrix of the curriculum within the institutional context of public schooling. This research was funded by the Council of Ontario Directors of Education and a Claire M. Morris Graduate Scholarship.

Virginia Gluska (MA in Education):

Virginia Gluska defended her thesis Fiddling With a Culturally Responsive Curriculum in Northern Manitoba. She is currently conducting her field research in Northern Manitoba with the support of an Association of Canadian Universities for Northern Studies (ACUNS) grant to study if fiddling with the school curriculum provides an educational space of empowerment for Aboriginal students. The discourse on education for Aboriginal people has long been limited to a curriculum of cultural assimilation often resulting in an erosion of self-esteem and disengagement. Consequently, this research puts forth narratives of how fiddle programs in northern Manitoba work as a culturally responsive curriculum that in turn address such curricular erosions. As a research methodology, Metissage afforded me pedagogical opportunities to weave the various perspectives of community members, parents, instructors, and former students into an intricate story that attempts to represent some of their social, cultural and historical experiences within the north. Braiding stories of the historical and present impacts of fiddle playing reveals the generative possibilities of school fiddle programs in Canadian Indigenous communities. In addition to building intergenerational bridges, the stories put forth in this thesis demonstrate how the fiddle has become a contemporary instrument of social change for many communities across northern Manitoba.

Gluska, V. (2011, November). The Meeting of Four Strings and A Bow. Shaping our Schools/Shaping our Selves, pp. 102-113.

Major Research Papers:

Jessica Azevedo: The 2009 draft of the Ontario Ministry of Education’s secondary level ‘Gender Studies’ course is currently undergoing review. Consequently, What Is Liberatory in Feminist Theory Might Be Limiting When Administered On Paper is a major research paper that facilitates a (re)reading of this draft with and against the Miss G__ Project’s ‘course objectives’ and ‘suggested topics of study’ put forth on their respective website. To do so, Jessica Azevedo uses an intersectional and interlocking antiracist postcolonial feminist theoretical framework to analyze both the strengths and limitations of this first draft in relation to the feminist tenets proposed by the Miss G__ Project. In turn, she employs this theoretical framework to critically deconstruct the ways in which this draft of the policy document represents various social issues.  Within a standardized Euro-Colonial white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal framework, the Miss G__Project envisions this course to challenge oppression in and through the school curricula. Thus, she utilizes this study to examine how ‘discourses of domination’ circulating within such a framework can foster the institutional appropriation of Miss G__’s feminist politics as an alternative discourse throughout this particular course draft.

Committee Member:

In Responsible Stewards of the Earth: Narratives, Learning, and Activism Ashley Lima studies what the engagement in environmental activism can offer valuable insights into how Ontario’s young people come to be responsible stewards of the earth. This research seeks to understand the narrative complexities put forth by teachers and students (Gr. 11-12) about the influence school plays for environmental activists. The teachers’ involvement with activism is mediated by students and the social networks that support their actions. The students’ involvement in action is influenced by teacher mentors, learning about/in the environment, and having a venue for activism. These findings suggest that in order to live up to Acting Today, Shaping Tomorrow schools should be seeking to have at least one environmentally literate teacher who wants to provide students with a venue for action. To assist the teachers and students with activism, there needs to be support for environmental action initiatives from the school administration and the community.