Decolonizing Pedagogies: Interrupting the Settler Colonial Narrative of Landownership in Ontario Social Science and History Curriculum

Drawing upon Ontario Social Science and History curriculum documents and textbook imagery and language, this paper examines how narratives of settler landownership strategically present Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples within the Canadian grand narrative. The curriculum and text material educators and learners are guided by ignore ongoing colonial violence towards Indigenous peoples and perpetuate the ideology of inevitable ‘peaceful’ interrelationships in national contexts. Learners develop identities in relation to land and how land is acquired. They come to understand themselves as part of a just nation in the particular sequence of Canadian Social Science and History teaching and learning. To go beyond simply adding content about Indigenous peoples in the classroom, educators and learners must adapt a decolonial approach to instead learn from Indigenous perspectives. Such a methodology would require the opening of a “third space” where the transmission of western curricular knowledge is interrupted. Educators and learners must create a space for problematizing the source itself and deconstruct the national grand narrative using inquiry, questioning and reflection, rather than repetition and regurgitation. This analysis reveals that particular placements of Indigenous peoples and settler Canadians in curriculum and classroom text material must be challenged by educators and learners to disrupt colonial narratives and to seek ongoing reconciliatory opportunities in and beyond the school walls.

Performing Pedagogies and Exploring Embodied Knowledge

Performing Pedagogies was a week-long performance and exhibition series I organized that took place in Kingston, Ontario between March 15th - March 20th 2016. The motivation for this project came from a desire to explore performative modes of experiencing critical, embodied knowledge. The series featured five performances, a long distance collaboration between thirty-one Queen’s undergraduate students and a Vancouver artist-run free school (The School for Eventual Vacancy), a subsequent exhibition, a panel discussion, and a radical performance pedagogy workshop led by co-artistic director of the international performance art troupe, La Pocha Nostra. Artists featured included Golboo Amani, Basil AlZeri, Caitlin Chaisson, Justin Langlois, Saul Garcia-Lopez, Francisco-Fernando Granados, and Andrew Rabyniuk. By curating examples of performance art that variously incorporated embodied pedagogical interventions, I examined the processes of performance as pedagogy. Performing Pedagogies explored interventions into contemporary contours of neoliberal education paradigms through embodied encounters—fostering conversations about the meanings and limitations of knowledge dissemination and education today and posing questions about possibilities for radical pedagogies, embodied knowledge, and counter curricula.

Just Need Some Satisfaction: Examining the Relationship between Passion for Exercise and the Basic Psychological Needs

Individuals often pursue activities for which they are passionate about, and this passion is operationalized as being harmonious (an autonomous desireto engage in the activity) or obsessive (a controlled desire to engage in the activity) in nature (Vallerand et al., 2003). With regard to harmonious passion, Vallerand et al. (2003) suggests that it is fostered in environments that nurture innate needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The purpose of the present study was to explore the nature of the passion-basic psychological needs (competence, autonomy, relatedness) relationship. Kinesiology students (N = 917; Mage = 18.54 SD = 1.66) completed the Passion Scale (Vallerand et al., 2003) and the Psychological Need Satisfaction in Exercise Scale (Wilson et al., 2006). Results from the SEM path analysis indicated that harmonious passion was positively related to competence (SPE = .43) and relatedness (SPE = .43) and obsessive passion was negatively related to autonomy (SPE = -.18)(CFI = .90, RMSEA = .07, SRMR = .07). Implications for exercise participation/enjoyment are discussed.

UNDERSTANDING ESSAY RATING AS A SOCIALLY MEDIATED ACTIVITY: THE CASE OF A HIGH-STAKES ENGLISH TEST IN CHINA

Most essay rating research in language assessment has examined human raters’ essay rating as a cognitive process, thus overlooking or oversimplifying the interaction between raters and sociocultural contexts. Given that raters are social beings, their practices have social meanings and consequences. Hence it is important to situate essay rating within its sociocultural context for a more meaningful understanding. Drawing on Engeström’s (1987, 2001) cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) framework with a sociocultural perspective, this study reconceptualized essay rating as a socially mediated activity with both cognitive (individual raters’ goal-directed decision-making actions) and social layers (raters’ collective object-oriented essay rating activity at related settings). In particular, this study explored raters’ essay rating at one provincial rating centre in China within the context of a high-stakes university entrance examination, the National Matriculation English Test (NMET). This study adopted a multiple-method multiple-perspective qualitative case study design. Think-aloud protocols, stimulated recalls, interviews, and documents served as the data sources. This investigation involved 25 participants at two settings (rating centre and high schools), including rating centre directors, team leaders, NMET essay raters who were high school teachers, and school principals and teaching colleagues of these essay raters. Data were analyzed using Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) open and axial coding techniques, and CHAT for data integration. The findings revealed the interaction between raters and the NMET sociocultural context. Such interaction can be understood through a surface structure (cognitive layer) and a deep structure (social layer) concerning how raters assessed NMET essays, where the surface structure reflected the “what” and the deep structure explained the “how” and “why” in raters’ decision-making. This study highlighted the roles of goals and rules in rater decision-making, rating tensions and raters’ solutions, and the relationship between essay rating and teaching. This study highlights the value of a sociocultural view to essay rating research, demonstrates CHAT as a sociocultural approach to investigate essay rating, and proposes a direction for future washback research on the effect of essay rating. This study also provides support for NMET rating practices that can potentially bring positive washback to English teaching in Chinese high schools.