LEARNing Landscapes

Statement of Purpose

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LEARNing LandscapesTM Journal is an open access, peer-reviewed, online education journal supported by LEARN (Leading English Education and Resource Network). Published in the spring of each year, it attempts to make links between theory and practice and is built upon the principles of partnership, collaboration, inclusion, and attention to multiple perspectives and voices. The material in each publication attempts to share and showcase leading educational ideas, research, and practices in Quebec, and beyond. We welcome articles, interviews, visual representations, arts-informed work, and multimedia texts to inspire teachers, administrators, and other educators to reflect upon and develop innovative possibilities within their own practices.

Review Board (Vol. 16)

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Review Board

Editorial

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Editorial

Teacher’s Choice: Agents of Harm or Help? Innovation as a Lever for Social Justice and Intersectionality

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As educators, the need to adapt, change, and help students is always at the forefront. Today, there is a growing demand for teachers to innovate the curriculum to ensure accessibility and representation of student diversity as well as address inequities in education. This is an educator’s professional reflections on the relationship between innovation in education and the use of social justice in Quebec’s pedagogy, how to reduce injustices in the classrooms, and why it is necessary.

Education [and Schooling] in a Pivotal Time

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While the terms “schooling” and “education” are often used as if they are synonymous, they name different, yet complementary, aspects of a child’s learning experience. Education is a birth--to-forever process that is undertaken by parents and family members. Schooling is just one part of that education process. To reach desired educational outcomes for students, it is imperative that we step away from “schoolcentric” practices and instead “walk alongside” parents and families as they work to realize their hopes and dreams for their children.

Poetic Inquiry as a Tool for Interrogating Mentoring Relationships in Teacher Preparation

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In this article the authors, a Mathematics education professor and two English education professors, describe how we used poetic inquiry in peer-led professional development workshops for field supervisors, who observe and evaluate teacher candidates. Poetic inquiry was taken up to better understand our shared experiences of mentoring teacher candidates and to deepen our thinking about our own pedagogical practices. The experience of writing and sharing these poems in our monthly workshops highlighted commonalities in our values and approaches to mentoring teacher candidates and allowed us to reflect on our own identities and how they influence our practices.

Fostering Hope and Resilience Through Children’s Literature

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Significant traumatic events affect communities and schools. Teachers need tools to help navigate challenging conversations with their students. Consequently, we utilized our children’s literature course on the use of picture books that would invite dialogue supporting children responding to traumatic events. Specifically, we reconceptualized an existing read-aloud assignment to focus on selecting and using literature that facilitates children’s responses to challenging life experiences. This article describes the read-aloud assignment, providing a content analysis of the books the preservice teachers selected, and examples of both preservice teachers’ responses and K-12 students’ responses to the literature.

Bigger Than a Cupcake: Reimagining Birthday Celebrations Through an Equity and Inclusion

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This article shares the story of a preschool teacher who courageously embarked on a yearlong journey of re-envisioning how an important milestone in children’s lives—their birthdays—were celebrated in the classroom. She accepted the preschool leadership’s invitation to align birthday practices with the center’s identity influenced by the Reggio Emilia Approach. What resulted was the teacher co-constructing a new set of rituals with the children that contributed to more equitable spaces that celebrated children’s individuality and fostered agency within an inclusive child-centered, children-driven learning environment.

Intentionally Collaborating, Instructing, and Reflecting: Core Principles of Teaching Practice

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Emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, a school’s teacher-leaders draw on an Interactional Ethnographic Approach to co-construct an inquiry community of Professionals Developing Professionals called Depth of Study (DOS). The study examines the three premises that undergird DOS: Making Visible the Invisible through an Interactional Ethnographic Perspective, Culture-in-the-Making, and The Over-Time Nature of Change: Periphery to Center. Through the analysis of three Telling Cases, the authors make visible how each of the three premises learned within the DOS setting affect student learning in the classroom setting.

Living Out-of-Doors: A Narrative Inquiry Alongside Nipugtugewei Forest Kindergarten Teachers

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In this paper, we draw upon a narrative inquiry alongside two creators of an out-of-doors Nipugtugewei Kindergarten program within a Mi’gmaw community, in northeastern Canada. Our intention was to understand their schooling, educational, and communal experiences over time. Diverse field texts were composed and interpreted alongside participants. We turned towards narrative conceptions of knowledge to show how attending to teachers’ personal practical knowledge and stories to live by on their professional knowledge landscape is sustaining who they are as teachers and people. It is also a way for teachers to live their responsibility to Indigenous communities and students.

By Way of the Heart: Cultivating Empathy Through Narrative Imagination

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When trying to promote empathy, it is not sufficient to merely learn about other people and cultures if we seek to understand them better (Case, 1993). As a language arts teacher and researcher, the author sought to explore the potential for multicultural literature to expand adolescent learners’ worldviews and shape their perceptions as global citizensthrough classroom inquiry. This doctoral research features the case study of her Grade 8 class. Findings revealed that through narrative imagination (Nussbaum, 1997), learners’ experiences led to emerging themes of empathy, insight, and agency. This article focuses on the most prominent of these themes: empathy.

Finding Our Co-: Witness Blanket as Co-curricular Making for Local Indigenous and Settler Relations

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This paper reveals the journey of two settler-researcher-educators supporting learning in preparation for Carey Newman’s Witness Blanket Art Exhibit. Invited to create curriculum for students and educators of K-12 who would visit the exhibit, the authors describe co-curricular making as a living, re-generative, re-cursive experience. The learning alongside diverse perspectives of educators and community partners in circle—including Syilx Okanagan, School District, Art Gallery, Museum, and University—led to reconsidered understandings of co-curricular making. Relational commitments that invite co-curricular engagement with the Witness Blanket foreground Syilx Knowledge toward resisting colonial ways, and supporting tmixʷ, the life forces of Syilx Okanagan Territory.

Collaboration Beyond Words: Using Poetic Collage to Cultivate Community With Students and Colleagues

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In this article, we illustrate the experience of three literacy educators who harnessed online, collaborative platforms to cultivate community within their classrooms and with their colleagues. Through the use of creative practices including digital poetry, selfie collage, and curriculum sharing through video conferencing, the authors invited their students and professional peers to reflect on their perspectives and experiences related to social issues through the use of multimodal and media resources for composing. This article includes examples of creations from this context, including mentor text work, as well as implications for creativity and collaboration with students and colleagues.

Resisting Concepts as Starting Points in a High School Leadership Pathway Alongside Indigenous Youth

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This writing draws on an ongoing narrative inquiry with 10 Indigenous youth as they negotiated their lives within a high school leadership pathway. Our research demonstrates the need to resist starting in concepts as an intentional shift to being and becoming wakeful to storied lives on and off school landscapes. Three resonant threads are highlighted as we listened across the youths’ lives. These threads are framed as pathways the youth asked us to consider in terms of reimagining schools as places of unfolding kinship, reimagining schools beyond notions of becoming responsible adults, and reimagining in-between spaces as landscapes that matter.

Capturing the Shift: Interviews During Pivotal Covid-19 Debut

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During a two-term observational study of my Secondary English Language Arts (ELA) class, I introduced “surrealism” to the existing curriculum. Jot notes, personal interviews, and a self-study comprised my data strands. The Covid-19 pandemic struck shortly before my scheduled in-person interviews. This uncertainty disrupted my doctoral study plans, but offered a valuable opportunity for critical reflection. The fears and questions prompted by the pandemic were captured in the vulnerable “safe space” of our at-home Zoom interviews. This process thus prompted my contemplation about interviews as a continued method for combatting the stagnancy of educational spaces.

The Magnus Effect Behind the Transition to Higher Education in Türkiye: Uncovering Equity Issues

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We analyzed the links between access to higher education, exams, and equity in education in Türkiye. Next, we made numerous recommendations and referred to a phenomenon: ”The Magnus Effect” to delve into the problems of the relevant processes. After conducting a review of the literature, we came up with four core sources that produce equity issues: tracking, stratification, socioeconomic status, and the qualifying elimination system. One of the ironies was that access to higher education institutions is enabled via high-stakes national exams, which seem to legitimize the process while leading to countless more inequities.

Meaning and Making: Laying the Groundwork for Community-Based Research-Creation

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Research-creation practices have long consulted the public in the process of research, yet the act of making often rests in the hands of the individual researcher. This paper proposes a more integrated and collaborative framework for arts-based researchers and educators called Community-Based Research-Creation, which extends the collaborative logic of oral history into the realm of creation by encouraging art educators to develop focused and prolonged workshops and classes with community. I draw from my own practice as a community art teacher working primarily with adults and propose methods and frameworks for developing community-engaged studies using artworks.

Theories of Motivation to Support the Needs of All Learners

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The increasing number of students requiring special education support is a plea for students to be taught the way they learn best. Through the authentic educational experiences of a diverse family, this paper explores the impact of theories of motivation to support all learners. This exploration proposes that educators may be able to support the needs of all learners in inclusive classrooms by integrating the theories of self-efficacy, self-determination, and implicit theories of intelligence.

Exporting Educational Change: Unexamined Assumptions

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This paper takes a philosophical look at what it means to talk about educational change in the context of the global proliferation of Western secular liberal democratic values. A handful of challenges, contradictions, and incoherencies that potentially impede the success of educational change projects in developing countries are examined with a view to furthering discussion about what vision of the learner and society they promote, either implicitly or through taken-for-granted assumptions. Politics, leadership, and timelines become impediments to real change. Brief reference is made to these concepts. The author provides examples from 10 years of international curriculum work on several continents in an attempt to highlight some of the latent irregularities that impede the progress of educational change endeavors.

Uncovering Embodied Community Cultural Wealth: Hung dee moy Brings Forth New Possibilities

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In this paper, educators unpack their community cultural wealth, also known as hung dee moy 同姊妹, a Toisanese-Chinese sisterhood support system. I narratively inquire alongside my participants Felicia and Mary, uncovering their embodied experiences of hung dee moy knowledge, passed from their mothers to them and onto the next generation. In attending closely to their experiences as expressions of hung dee moy, their narratives illuminate the interconnections between micro and macro contexts, showing how patterns of race-based exclusion and interpersonal and institutional racism affected generations of Toisanese. Participants highlight the power of hung dee moy to cultivate collective strength through intergenerational resistance.This paper discusses the process of uncovering generational wealth and holds the possibilities of others articulating their ancestral knowledge.

How Does It Feel To Be a Design Thinking Teacher in Changing Times in Nepal?

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Design thinking is emerging as a popular student-centric teaching approach in Nepal. However, limited research has been done to understand how teachers feel about using these approaches in their classrooms. In-depth interviews with five design-thinking teachers revealed that cultural context plays a crucial role when new teaching approaches are used. The pedagogical and mindset shift required by teachers when exploring new teaching approaches directly affects their emotions, resulting in varying levels of joy or frustration. Critical reflection helps teachers manage their emotions, which is crucial in navigating challenges and emotional exhaustion.

Are We in This Together? Why Embracing Aspects of Child Care in School Is Vital to Reimagining Education

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Child care and school are similar and interrelated, yet the comparison of school to child care seems contentious. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed pressure points in labeling these educational and care institutions essential—or not. This paper encourages collaboration between schools and child care as a vital component to reimagining education.