Education

Drawing on pedagogies of care, queer pedagogy and Foucault's concept of biopower, this critical narrative study of six women teachers at an Ontario school uses interview data to explore how teaching affects women's bodies. Findings include the dominance of men in schools; the high rate of violence against teachers committed by students; participants' unwillingness to show bodily discomfort to students; and the profound effect of motherhood on teaching practice. I call on educators and school administrators to embed care of students' and teachers' bodies into the practices of schooling. I also propose that instead of erasing teacher corporeality from classrooms, we allow students to care for teachers' bodies as part of a healthy, reciprocal caring relationship, developing students' and sustaining teachers' capacity to care. Given the underrepresentation of women's voices speaking about violence against teachers, this thesis is also a repository for women's narrated stories of assault in Ontario schools.

Author Keywords: biopedagogies, body, care, narrative inquiry, pedagogy, teacher

This thesis is about the negative impacts on queer identities caused by the lack of diversity related to sexual orientation within Ontario Ministry of Education curriculum documents, both at the elementary and secondary level. Curriculum documents as well as policy documents are analysed and compared in order to address the lack of diverse sexual orientation representation within Ontario's education system. The study is guided by the question: "who benefits from the current representations of sexual orientation in the curriculum?" This conceptual study advances autobiographical methodology and the concept of Currere in relation to queer theory that allows researchers to analyse their educational experiences throughout the course of their lives and then become agents of social change. The results of my personal curriculum analysis have shown that curriculum documents lack diverse sexual orientation representation and that this has negative impacts how LGBQQ people identify and on the course of their lives.

Author Keywords: Curriculum, Homophobia, LGBQQ, Ontario Curriculum, Ontario Education, Sexual Orientation

Ohwén:tsia Entsionkwarihón:nien is a project that explores the intersection of Kanien'kéha immersion, Kanien'kehá:ka culture and the potential impacts of experiencing Rotinonhsón:ni knowledge on the land. Students at the Akwesasne Freedom School are fully immersed in the Kanien'kéha language and the "curriculum" is centered around four Rotinonhsón:ni systems of knowledge. What is missing, as identified by the teachers, is consistent opportunities for students to physically be on the land.

This project asks how can we ensure that future generations of Onkwehónwe children can embody their language and their culture in connection to the land. The resulting "curriculum" then shifts from determining what students will learn, to listening to what the land has to teach. A land-based program by the AFS can translate to educational control, cultural sustainability, food sovereignty, environmental stewardship, community empowerment and linguistic revitalization; each of these is a critical component of building and rebuilding communities and nations.

Author Keywords: Indigenous methodology, Land-Based Education, Rotinonhsón:ni, Storytelling

Through narrative/life story research this study explores the educational experiences of six individuals identified as Deaf or hard-of-hearing. The research presented will be conveyed in the form of an autoethnography, an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and analyze personal experience to understand cultural experience. I will combine the views of participants who have been part of the Ontario Public School System within the last 10-15 years (2004-2019), with my own educational experience, learning with hearing loss. In this study, three interrelated concepts—student engagement, motivation, and resilience—are examined through the lens of "mindsets." Mindsets are "assumptions that we possess about ourselves and others that guide our behaviour" (Brooks, 2012, p. 1). The research reviewed in this paper, shows that students' beliefs about their academic ability can influence their academic tenacity. Academic tenacity refers to the mindsets and skills that enable students to: establish long-term goals and persevere in the face of adversity. I illuminate some of the systemic factors which impact the mindsets of students who are Deaf and hard-of-hearing. The design lies within the qualitative spectrum; data were gathered and analyzed from open-ended interviews conducted with purposively selected participants.

Author Keywords: Academic Tenacity, Autoethnography, Deaf, Education, Hard-of-Hearing, Mindsets

This thesis reports the outcomes of a mixed methods exploratory study on young children's spatial reasoning and mathematics involving unplugged (offline) coding with young children (JK-Grade 2). Intrigued by the increased push for coding in schools, teachers and researchers worked together in a collaborative research process to design a sequence of unplugged coding activities and document student thinking. Qualitative results include the mapping of a hypothetical learning trajectory for unplugged coding focused on location and movement, as well as an analysis of the computational, spatial and mathematical thinking in unplugged coding. The grid was found to be a fundamental spatial structure that supported student thinking across all domains. Quantitative data included a range of spatial and mathematics measures that were administered pre-post with a subsample of 55 students. Findings showed strongest gains in mental rotations/visualization and magnitude comparison, suggesting this as a promising area for further study.

Author Keywords: Early Years, Learning Trajectories, Spatial Reasoning, Unplugged Coding, Young Children

This thesis explores the neoliberal governmentality approach to education for Northern economic development that was prevalent from 2006 to 2015, during Stephen Harper's period as Prime Minister of Canada. Using a grounded theory approach, this thesis identifies three themes – Indigenous integration, education, and employment for labour force/ economic development – to direct an analysis on programs and funding supported by the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, Employment and Social Development Canada, and Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. This examination suggests that Federal programming and funding encouraged neoliberal governmentality approaches to Northern development and education. Specifically, the former Government interest in developing an Indigenous work force to serve labour market needs is brought to light.

Author Keywords: Economic Development, Indigenous Education, Labour Force Development, Neoliberalism, Territorial North

In 2015, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission called upon Canadians to reconcile relationships between Settlers and Indigenous peoples in Canada. Education for reconciliation is one important element of this process. However, critical questions arise when education is undertaken by and for Settlers such as myself: Are our undertakings actually fostering reconciliation? According to whom? Drawing from reconciliation theory and decolonizing Indigenous methodologies, a reconciliation methodology is created to consider this question in the context of three reconciliation workshops for Settlers. Indigenous perspectives and pedagogies are prioritized. The emerging understandings of reconciliation as relationship and relationship as pedagogy reframe some prevailing Settler thinking about reconciliation, unmask latent assumptions linked to the colonial habits of mind and affirm the need for personal responsibility in the reconciliation relationship. The Indigenous norm of learning in-relation is found to be a powerful experience for Settlers participants offering valuable insights for reconciliation education in Canada.

Author Keywords: decolonizing, education, Indigenous, relationship, Settler, Truth and Reconciliation

This study examines how student activism around the closure of Peterborough Collegiate and Vocational School (PCVS), an inner-city school in a medium–sized Ontario town has influenced youths' life experiences, views on power, political engagement, and personal agency. Following a critical narrative methodology, this qualitative study, conducted four to five years after the school closure, focuses on interviews with fourteen participants who were part of the high-school group Raiders in Action and explores both what they learned from their protest and its influence on their lives over the ensuing years. The study identifies the researcher's subjective position as a teacher and an adult in solidarity with the group's work. Critical pedagogy, critical youth studies, and feminist approaches inform the researcher's perspective. This project is inspired by an image of young people as citizens who actively challenge and change educational institutions to create a more participatory democracy in our city, country, continent, planet.

Author Keywords: critical pedagogy, critical youth resistance, neoliberalism, school closure, student activism, youth organizing

In this thesis, I use "Trump's Wall" between Mexico and the US to resist Eurocentrism and the challenges Eurocentric pedagogy poses to the research-practitioner. In my method, I reimagine C. Alejandra Elenes' borderlands theory as a zone of empowerment within a multicultural Canadian classroom, and braid it in a hybrid assemblage with the rhizome.

The "rhizo-borderlands" assemblage uses selected field notes gleaned from my teaching practice to develop themes of a critical pedagogy of globality in personal, local and international dimensions. These are further braided with a "day-in-the-life" narrative of a fictionalized student (Ellie) who navigates her way towards a world literature classroom where the focus is The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

This assemblage affirms my belief that teaching and learning provides a context where students become "border crossers" and navigate points of intersection between their local and global selves, in order to develop intercultural competencies.

Author Keywords: Action Narrative, Critical Pedagogy, Rhizomes

Using data drawn from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board's (WSIB) Survey of Workers with Permanent Impairments, this thesis explores if and how the human capital associated with education mitigates the realized work-disabling effects of permanent physical injury. Using Cater's (2000) model of post-injury adaptive behaviour and employment dynamics as the structural, theoretical, and interpretative framework, this thesis jointly studies, by injury type, the effects of education on both the post-injury probability of transitioning from non-employment into employment and the post-injury probability of remaining in employment once employed. The results generally show that, for a given injury type, other things being equal, higher levels of education are associated with higher probabilities of both obtaining and sustaining employment.

Author Keywords: permanent impairment, permanent injury, post-injury employment