How has your upbringing/schooling shaped how you “read the world?” What biases and lenses do you bring to the classroom? How might we unlearn / work against these biases? I, like many others who have grown up in the province of Saskatchewan, grew up in a small town.  The people I interacted with were mostly white, the teachers I had were all white, and my classmates were primarily white as well.  Because of this, it would be hard to argue that I do not have a “white lens” covering my view on the world. Growing up, I had never really experienced people that had come from different cultures until I…

Part 1: At the beginning of the reading, Leroy Little Bear (2000) states that colonialism “tries to maintain a singular social order by means of force and law, suppressing the diversity of human worldviews. … Typically, this proposition creates oppression and discrimination” (p. 77). Think back on your experiences of the teaching and learning of mathematics — were there aspects of it that were oppressive and/or discriminating for you or other students? During my school experience, I was the type of student that did not particularly like math, but I did not struggle with it.  When a teacher taught us how to do math in a certain way, I understood…

What is the purpose of teaching Treaty Ed (specifically) or First Nations, Metis, and Inuit (FNMI) Content and Perspectives (generally) where there are few or no First Nations, Metis, Inuit peoples? What does it mean for your understanding of curriculum that “We are all treaty people”? “It is our story: the one about the commons, what was shared and what was lost.  It is an elegy to what remains to be lost if we refuse to listen to each other’s stories no matter how strange they may sound, if we refuse to learn from each other’s stories, songs, and poems, from each other’s knowledge about this world and how to…

[Culturally relevant pedagogy and critical literacy in diverse English classrooms: A case study of a secondary English teacher’s activism and agency]: What will culturally relevant pedagogy look like, sound like, feel like, in your future classroom? “Diverse student populations are now one of the distinctive features of schools in North America” (Lopez, 2011, p. 90).  It does not take this article for us to realize that.  Multiculturalism has always been, and likely will always be, a major aspect of Canadian culture.  Because of this, racism is not seen as a problem in Canada and is constantly dismissed.  Lopez (2011) mentions this in her article. “Multicultural education within the Canadian context…

Before reading the article, “Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis” by A. Akom, I had no idea how I was going to answer this question.  To be honest, I was quite critical about the subject before I read the article.  It’s just a genre of music, how could it possibly promote social justice and critical pedagogy?  After reading, I can conclude that hip hop is more than just a genre of music, and it can be promoted to bring about social justice and youth activism in the classroom.  One quote that really stuck out to me was this.  “Through engagement in real-world issues that shape their…

[What kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy]: What examples of citizenship education do you remember from your K-12 schooling? What types of citizenship (e.g. which of the three types mentioned in the article) were the focus? Explore what this approach to the curriculum made (im)possible in regards to citizenship. What does the approach we take to citizenship instruction in any given place tell us about that place? About what the curriculum makers value? About what kinds of citizens they want to produce? In the article “What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy,” Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne make mention of three types of democratic…

Although curriculum is a fundamental part of the framework of schooling, curriculum decisions and choices are shaped in large measure by other considerations—ideology, personal values, issues in the public domain, and interests. Curriculum decisions are often part of a much larger public debate that often extends beyond education to larger questions of public goods. Curriculum is complicated. At first glance, one might think that curriculum is just a set of documents to be taught to students. However, as you delve deeper and consider everything that is taught and learned in a classroom, curriculum becomes much more involved … Curriculum is ‘a complicated system of interpretation, interactions, transmissions – planned and…

How might we begin to address the ways in which the systems that we teach our curriculum in are intrinsically homophonic, transphobic, biphobic and oppressive towards queer and trans people? What does integrating queerness into curriculum studies mean to you? What will it look like, sound like, feel like in your classroom?  Which rule/discourse should the teacher follow: providing the duty of care for all students, or maintaining a classroom free from any notion of sexuality? I believe that the first step towards addressing the ways in which the systems that we teach our curriculum in are intrinsically homophonic, transphobic, biphobic and oppressive towards queer and trans people has already…

What does it mean to be a “good” student according to the commonsense?  Which students are privileged by this definition of the good student?  How is the “good” student shaped by historical factors? To be a “good” student, according to the commonsense, is a student that is able to succeed through traditional teaching and learning styles.  In chapter 2 of Kumashiro’s book, Against Common Sense, Kumashiro shares his experience of a student who does not respond well to traditional methods.  “For me, M’s behaviour was a sign that I was not being an effective teacher, that I was not reaching M, and therefore that M was not learning and becoming…