LEARNing Landscapes

Statement of Purpose

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LEARNing Landscapes Journal is an open access, peer-reviewed, online education journal supported by LEARN (Leading English Education and Resource Network).

Review Board

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List of reviewers for this issue of the journal.

Editorial

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Editorial introducing this issue's theme, "Towards new futures of youth development: Critical and sustainable approaches to youth wellbeing in complex times," and the authors featured.

I Would Not Have Made That Leap: Art as the Vehicle to Tell Your Story, Connect and Build Relationships

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Our commentary includes an introduction to, and conversation sparked by, the Cree School Board’s Mikw Chiyâm, a secondary school program that engages in an artist-in-residence model. This is a dialogue between Melissa-Ann Pereira Ledo, settler queer educator/researcher/artist, and Siibii Petawabano, one of the first students who was part of the pilot program in the First Nation community of Mistissini in 2015. In 2021, after making “the leap” to become a professional artist-musician, Siibii returned to the program as one of the artists in residency themselves.

Airglow: Young People and Wellbeing

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In this dialogue, Karl-André St-Victor and Dr. Jessica Ruglis discuss the concepts of wellbeing for youth and supporting young people in being well. Karl is the Executive Director of Chalet Kent, while Jessica is an Associate Professor of Human Development at McGill University and a Board Member at Chalet Kent. They have collaborated for the past eight years, and in this commentary, they discuss supporting the wellbeing of young people through two recent community projects: Que du Love (Only Love), a multimedia project; and the newly founded Uptown Institute, which aims to support young adults into flourishing lives. The dialogue is facilitated by Dr. Bronwen Low, Associate Professor of Education at McGill University and a long-standing partner and former Board President of Chalet Kent. The conversation touches on aspects of education, relationship building, trust, power, change, art, home, and the future.

Que du Love

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This commentary presents six pieces from the Que du Love (Only Love) exhibition, which was led by photographer Amelia Segrera and Chalet Kent staff, multimedia director Marilia Beltrame, interviewer and writer Fabiana Diaz, and curator Karl-André St-Victor. The five original photographs featured here were taken on 35 mm film by Segrera, and each features a young person accompanied by their words about love, which are excerpts taken from their interviews. We also include three poems, in French, from student Rania Guerasse, exploring some of the visceral and spiritual intensities of love and heartbreak.

Safe Spaces and Critical Places: Youth Programming and Community Support

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In this article we explore the work of two after-school programs in Toronto, Ontario. Our Youth Success (OYS) is a community-based mentoring program dedicated to lowering the push-out rates of students of Spanish and/or Portuguese-speaking descent. In the Youth Speak Program (YSP), community activists use spoken word poetry and rapping as a vehicle for Black students to express their emotional lives. The data we present come from two separate studies which both used ethnographic approaches, focusing on observation and interviews with participants (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2019). Using Critical Race Theory (CRT), we examine interview data on how the pedagogical relationships developed in these spaces promote the wellbeing of Latinx and Black youth beyond academic outcomes. We argue that these spaces provide insight into the transformative possibilities of critical pedagogies for the wellbeing and healing of communities who have long been marginalized from mainstream institutions.

Why Teachers Integrate YPAR in Their Teaching: Cultivating Youth Wellbeing, Student Voice, and Social Justice

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In this article, the authors share what they learned from considering a collection of narrative reflections written by six high school educators, all co-authors, who have integrated youth participatory action research (YPAR) into their instructional practice. Taken together, the written reflections shed light on teachers’ reasons not only for pursuing YPAR but also for persisting with YPAR in their particular school context. The authors found that all teachers shared a commitment to social justice, yet their individual purposes for engaging with YPAR varied. Drawing on the teachers’ written reflections, the authors delve into teachers’ motivations for integrating YPAR into their teaching practice in order to conceptualize teachers’ reasons for facilitating YPAR in school.

The Kids Are Alright: Changing Perceptions for a New Wellbeing

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This work is an Indigenous Métissage weaving together poems, stories, scholarship, and images. It suggests that the distress, educational struggles, changes in traditional educational pathways, and other behaviors of current youth in response to social challenges offer ways out of these crises rather than being symptoms of them. This work offers pathways to learn from the wisdom of distress, and ways to create healing futures for ourselves, the land, waters, ancestors, and All Our Relations.

Reframing Youth Wellbeing Through Community-Engaged Learning

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In recent years, discourses about youth have been mired in narratives of learning loss and mental health crises. These cultural stories often pathologize youth, offering little in the way of generative pathways for educator practice to aid young people as they navigate the very real challenges in contemporary society. The experiences and reflections shared by a young man, Alberto, about the work he did with his peers and teacher demonstrates the power of community engagement, collaborative art, and responsive teaching to reframe the “problems” of education, offering new pathways to “do wellbeing” in learning spaces.

Nature-Based Physical Activity in Pictures: A Photovoice Unit in (and Beyond) Physical and Health Education

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Experts in public health and education alike have long advocated for the engagement of youth in nature to foster movement, human–nature connectedness, and mental wellbeing. Physical and health education teachers in school-based programs continue to find a variety of ways to help their students be physically active in the natural environment due to the plethora of positive benefits. This paper describes a unit entitled Nature-Based Physical Activity in Pictures that utilized Photovoice to engage youth and foster human–nature connectedness.

Towards a Theory of Collective Care as Pedagogy in Higher Education

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This piece offers a conceptual framework for collective care as pedagogy in higher education, and a proposition of how to theorize its orientations within anticolonial and feminist work on affect in education. First, I spotlight work that helps to define collective care. Next, I call on the concept of affective individualism as a way to describe what is: the taken-for-granted affective governmentality (Zembylas, 2021) that shapes how we often come together in our classrooms. Finally, I ground collective care as pedagogy as the building of affective solidarity, an affective conceptual framework for what could be, grounded in the feminist work of Clare Hemmings (2012).

Making With Place: Community Artists Theorizing Change

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This article confronts tensions of “risk” and “change” in youth engagement and community arts, towards insights for alternate world-building. We problematize overly instrumental approaches, by examining aesthetic and inductive theories of change arising from Making With Place, a research creation initiative based in Toronto, Canada. From Spring 2020 to Fall 2022, we engaged diverse young people as artist-researchers in community arts production experiments exploring concepts of place from individual and collective perspectives. We draw here on resulting public artworks, discussions with the artists, and our own field notes to surface the theories of change arising from this work. We identify three emergent metaphors—the garden, the bridge, the margins—and the ways in which they resist dominant discourses in favor of new practices of imagination and repair. We explore how these creative explorations articulate theories of change that refuse forgetting and call forth desire.

Reimagining Educational Success: Lessons on Support, Wellbeing, and Trust from Community-Grounded Research with Black Families and Gender-Diverse Youth

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We present a dialogue between two community-based scholars in Tio’tia:ke/Montréal, who are examining the experiences of low-income Black families and youth, and gender-diverse, homeless youth. We argue that success must be understood differently in light of the systemic discrimination many youth navigate in schools and explore how research may mirror experiences of discrimination and lack of access that youth navigate in schools. The article highlights how relational research approaches may provide lessons for supporting youth and community leadership and posits that we must foster deep practices of trust-building, shared aims for research impact, and trust in youth.

Attuning to Children’s Layered Life-Making Through Relational Learning and Assessment

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Interweaving my thinking with childhood stories of schooling, familial narratives, and experiences as a teacher alongside children, this article makes visible how my pedagogical approaches and desires for children to experience belonging shape my intentional work to recraft marginalizing curricula and assessment practices. In sharing my learning, unlearning, and continued growth, I endeavor to prompt a rethinking of how we, pre-service teachers, fellow educators, and school leaders, support children’s life‑making and wellbeing on school landscapes and offer approaches for all children to be centered as knowledge holders.

Come, I Will Walk With You

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A cancer diagnosis enlivens the question of what it means to live well with the Earth and its multidimensional beings, including the children I teach. A cancer diagnosis provides a necessary push to step out from the confines of a self and toward and into the wild fray of this life. I interpret my lived experiences through the practical philosophy of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics has helped me perform and write my lived experience, which I hope will draw in readers and listeners to a recognition of their inescapable ecological interdependence. Cultivating an ability to listen and interpret the world and the human and more-than-human kinships is important to me. Listening to words that children speak helps me learn to be open to the fullness of life, how life is lived, how life can be remembered and suffered and let go. I am gathering sense of being in the world and of understanding the offering that arrives when I nurture a commitment to care for the Earth.

Learning From Indigenous Perspectives: Wellbeing in the Early Years

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This three-year qualitative research study examined the knowledge and experiences of 20 early years educators while introducing Indigenous perspectives and pedagogies on Land-Based Learning in 10 urban childcare centers. Educators were introduced to Indigenous perspectives and pedagogies through workshops with Indigenous speakers and Indigenous-authored picture books. These perspectives included the importance of supporting children to develop responsive and caring relationships to the Land for their own wellbeing and for the wellbeing of all their fellow creatures. Supported by their educators, the children increased their sense of belonging in the world, expressed gratitude for their fellow creatures, and recognized and enacted their responsibility to care for nature.

Seeking Care: Youth’s Counterstories Within the Context of Mental Health

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In this article, we draw on a narrative inquiry into the experiences of children, youth, and families waiting for mental health support during the COVID-19 pandemic in Western Canada. We foreground two youths’ experiences (Gillian, who self-identifies as transgender, and Malek, who self-identifies as racialized) to highlight the complex barriers and supports each encountered while attempting to secure appropriate care as they navigated moments of crisis within their worlds of home, school, and communities. By inquiring into their mental health stories, we foreground the unique ways these youth enacted counterstories to disrupt hegemonic constructions of their identities, build agency, and support their wellbeing.

An Early Childhood Educator’s Learning Story in the Time of COVID

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While it began with a variety of narrative representations of writing personal experiences, since Ellis (2004; Bochner & Ellis, 2016), evocative, performative, and creative nonfiction forms of storying have coalesced to form contemporary autoethnography. For over a decade, Canadian arts education researchers have blazed trails to employ those forms of autoethnography as “learning stories” (Carr, 2001; Carr & Lee, 2012) to study teaching and learning practices in a variety of school and community educational contexts. Learning stories enable educators to reveal teaching and learning experiences that cannot be represented by, or communicated through, other research forms. The present inquiry, which begins with the story of an early childhood educator, is rooted in the fusion of evocative autoethnography and learning stories with arts-based research, particularly a/r/tography.

Reflexive Inquiry’s Impact on Mindful Teaching for Student Wellbeing

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This inquiry investigates the effects of trauma on students by analyzing personal experiences and teaching methods. Through the lens of autoethnography, a nonfictional storytelling approach, I reflect on my learning journey to identify compassionate and mindful teaching practices, aiming to foster a trauma‑sensitive classroom environment. Emphasizing the significance of teachers sharing their stories through autoethnography, this exploration contributes valuable insights to the ongoing discourse on trauma-informed pedagogy for student wellbeing.

School Sport for All: An Inclusive Developmental Framework to Improve Participation

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Recognizing the contributions that school sport can make to the wellbeing of students, this paper proposes a “re-imagined” school sport framework. School Sport for All (SS4A) places students at the center of building a program where development and wellbeing are prioritized. The SS4A framework fully integrates and promotes key aspects from comprehensive school health, whole-child education, and long-term athlete development throughout all its features. As a whole, SS4A aims to ensure the benefits of sport can be experienced by all, within a school system where teaching and learning are prioritized in the classroom and in the school community.

Maintaining Playground Relationships Through Music During a Pandemic: An Action Research Inquiry

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The COVID-19 pandemic’s restrictions for schools and playgrounds threatened children’s social and emotional wellbeing. In response, Grade 4/5 students created music-based activities through action research to sustain playground interactions. This study explored the crucial yet fragile playground relationships and the children’s determination to maintain them. Findings indicate that the student‑initiated projects were not only a medium for self-expression and maintaining friendships, but also served as an important tool for reinforcing the inherent social fabric of the playground setting. Notably, this study underscores the significance of collaborative learning, interpersonal skill development, and intrinsic motivation in fostering social skills and enhancing self-confidence.