Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy

In this paper, Kamaludin Bahadin invites audiences to journey with him in a unique pedagogical space as he theorises himself as a teaching subject caught
within a range of discourses, each vying for supremacy. In a culture where classroom practice and pedagogy assume
a single, all consuming purpose, i.e of preparing students to solely pass the tests, he seeks to challenge the primacy of such a commonly held belief among Singaporean pedagogues by asking what should be the driver(s) of classroom instruction? This paper attempts a reflexive turn towards interrogating his own pedagogical premises with the aim of reimagining his future pedagogy despite dominant “educational” discourses. Central to reimagining pedagogy is the notion of teacher identity. Through his own lived-in experience he attempts to show how educational governance, one that instrumentalises assessment and test scores, play a leading role in subjectifying teachers like himself and in the process also shaping their professional and personal identities. He argues that when teachers subscribe to identities that draw on extrinsic factors at
the cost of ignoring the inner voices or personal convictions that led them to pursue a teaching career in the first place, the result could lead to emotional and professional dissonance.To facilitate documenting how his ‘coming to know pedagogy’ has changed, he will reference
personal journals kept during a six-month Management and Leadership in Schools course completed in 2011 and the write ups on his philosophy of pedagogical practice, which was a requirement for competing for the ‘Most Outstanding History Teacher of Singapore in 2009’
award. Written over a period of four years, these assignments, which express his personal views, offer insight into his thinking on pedagogy and on how he perceives himself as a teacher. The opinions expressed therein were used as reference points for a conversation with various theorists such as Smith (2006),  Dion (2008), Cole and Riley (2003) , Swanson (2007),  Aoki  (1992),  Pinar (2004) and Pitt (2003) with a view to re-thinking some of his  views regarding the transmission, production and reproduction of knowledge in the classroom.

In this paper, I draw on observations from sexual health workshops in an elementary school classroom in Vancouver, Canada and friendship pair interviews with four boys who attended the workshops. I examine how the educators organising the workshops constructed sexual health, highlighting their reliance on both a ‘gay is okay’ and a scientific
discourse. I argue that by locating their discussion of homosexuality within a values framework and striving to depict gay relationships as acceptable, they simultaneously constituted homosexuality as requiring acceptance. Likewise, by subsuming references to heterosexuality within their lesson on (hetero)sexual reproduction, they framed heterosexuality as an always already accepted scientific fact. Having set the scene in this way, I then explore the ways the boys both took up and deviated from these discourses when constructing their own narratives.

In this article, I draw on my experiences as a non-binary researcher in a high school to interrogate the normative construction of adulthood. I centre the discussion on the concept of adult-hood in order to interrogate a presumption within the field of education that all researchers are recognized as adults. I argue that a person’s adherence to cisheteronormative logics is an integral aspect of being recognized as an adult and that people who do not move in legible ways along a socio-culturally prescribed trajectory of growing up can instead be positioned as non-adults.I explore the complexities of generating research in an age-striated space as a person who is not read as an adult. I argue thatnon-adults navigate distinct challenges as well as unique possibilities in education research because of their divergent ways of moving through field sites. I assert that grappling with questions of adulthood is necessary for youth-focused education research and end with ideas on what this thinking may make possible for future methodological work.

This article focuses on the dynamics at play in a challenging lesson observed during the LGBTQ unit in a social justice-focused high school course. On the surface, the lesson was a chaotic struggle involving a tense intergenerational clash between the teacher and an outspoken group of students. Young people interrupted and refused the teacher's lesson plan. In response, the teacher raised his voice and consistently tried to redirect the students back to his priorities for the unit. In this article, I am interested in how the teacher and the students were limited in their engagement with each other by the distances imposed by the adult/youth binary that remains so central to schooling. This constraint participated in the failure of this lesson and, most importantly, the failure to communicate across divided understandings of queerness. Drawing on Quinlivan's framework of affective failure, I rethink the possibilities of this lesson, and the teacher/student relationship involved, through the three facets of affective failure: the queer art of failure; affective silences; and engaging otherwise. I seek to explore what relationships, pedagogical and otherwise, could become possible if we reject imposed hierarchies and make space for affective connection in the classroom.

This article explores the dynamics of inter-generational conversations between queer and trans youth and queer and trans adults through an analysis of a routine segment on the reality show, RuPaul's Drag Race. At the end of each season, the drag queen contestants are asked to give a piece of advice to photos of their younger selves and, by proxy, the young people who may be watching the show from home. This article positions this segment as a pedagogical moment where the queens are forced into the role of teacher. However, like the categories of child and youth, RuPaul's request of the queens is not as innocent as it appears. In turning to address children directly, the queens must reckon with cis-heternormative expectations of how adults can speak to children, about what topics can be discussed, and the tones such conversations must take. To explore these issues, the article examines this segment alongside scholarship about drag and ballroom cultures to place the show within larger contexts of queer and trans kinship structures. Then, turning to queer and trans studies in education and queer and trans childhood and youth studies, the essay examines the factors impacting how and when queer and trans youth and adults are allowed to be in conversation with youth, if at all.

Background: At 30 percent, British Columbia has the highest cesarean section rate in Canada. Little is known about the childbirth views and birthing preferences of collegeaged
women and men. The objectives of this study were to document (a) the prevalence of cesarean versus vaginal delivery as the preferred mode of delivery among nonpregnant university students without a history of childbirth, (b) the reasons for reported childbirth preferences, and (c) confidence in vaginal birth as a predictor of childbirth preference.
Methods: A cohort of 3,680 male and female university students without a history of childbirth participated in an online survey of childbirth preferences. The study used a mixed methods approach (quantitative thematic analysis and logistic regression modeling). Prevalence of, and reasons for, preferred mode of delivery were analyzed separately for male and female respondents. Results: Most men and women responded that they preferred vaginal delivery, with 9 percent stating a preference for cesarean delivery. Reasons for preferred mode of delivery were similar for men and women. For women, confidence in vaginal birth emerged as a significant predictor of childbirth preference. Conclusions: Results indicate that a preference for cesarean section is linked to fear of childbirth and driven by low confidence in vaginal birth. Educational strategies targeting university-aged men and women may be helpful in alleviating fears of vaginal birth and providing evidence-based information about different birth options. (BIRTH
36:2 June 2009)

This essay highlights aspects of my childhood in 1970s Toronto, Ontario (Canada), growing up as the daughter of an artist, and the ways in which I came to make ‘thinking’ as an artist and spiritually engaged education researcher. Reflecting on my multiple visits to the recent retrospective, multi-artist exhibition entitled WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Butler, 2007 - exhibited at Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, 2009), I realize how I am embedded within a lineage of women artists –how the tactile stimulus of viewing art embodies whole histories (her-stories) for me. As the daughter of an artist, and being a mother, artist and art educator myself, I cannot, or do not separate artistic praxis from the development of theoretical frameworks emerging within my research and life writing.

Through the literary practice of métissage, two educators situated within a West Coast Canadian urban neighbourhood braid different strands of stories that explore notions of migration, home, place, and familial relations. The authors draw from their own and others’ lived experiences while working with life writing of teachers and students in this mixed and mixing cosmopolitan site. They create dialogues with the multiple local issues and identities in this commons through narratives and images. Through and in these dialogues, they investigate the significance of life writing in creating new curricular and literacy theories and practices that seek to reshape education towards more inclusive and just schools and communities.

I want to reconsider and destabilize the meaning of this act of cutting beyond its current medically hypnotic grasp. The use of cesarean section is increasing worldwide beyond its statistical medical necessity. I posit the need for social and cultural perspectives from which to understand forces at play within this procedure - perspectives related to feminist readings of gender and practices of subjectification.

Drawing from the intersections of feminist performance art, ritual practice, and the field of arts-based research in education (i.e. a/r/tography, Irwin & de Cosson, 2004; Springgay et al, 2008)), we explore the labyrinth and ritual as artistic and visceral, tactile, verbal, aesthetic spiritual practices of identification of, and inquiry into, the ‘self’ as spirit, soul, and sacred. By re-working ritual art within embodied scholarship, by attending to a hermeneutics of the ritual body in education, we would transform and re-write the social body, our bodies, as text in this video essay.

"I've been coming to a realization in this last year, it’s this:
I study goddess. My scholarship is dedicated in heart and soul to goddess as mother, to her multiple forms, but especially to her expression as birth. Goddess in the context of my life is not a distinct entity or thing, or even one story of her incarnation. I follow a process-based, living inquiry into her forms."

As an artist and fledgling midwife turned scholar-researcher, I love placentas—yes, that miraculous round blood-pie that emerges only after the baby is born, with a stage of labour all its own. Of all the many amazing facets of birth, I am truly awed by the placenta and what it does to nourish and support new life. In fact, this often misunderstood and ignored little organ of gestation has become a central metaphor in my scholarly and artistic work about midwifery and birth. I love the placenta as a literal metaphor for communication and communion, for reclaiming birth, midwifery and women’s body knowledge in a society that seems to have lost connection to the earthy mother-fabric of our origins.

This essay conveys an embodied, relational view of contemplative practice in education through my experience of a “Goddess puja.” I undertook this puja with two other women in the context of exploring and documenting the experiences of seven faculty and student alumni, myself included, within a Women’s Spirituality Master of Arts (WSMA) degree program located in the San Francisco Bay area. I highlight a holistic, ritual scope for considering “contemplative practices,” by engaging an embodied view of contemplative practice based from Women’s Spirituality education. The practice of Goddess puja or worship is a devotional, contemplative ritual offering of flowers and substances made to the deity in order to receive her blessing. The practice of supplicating Goddess impacts my work in midwifery and my lived philosophy, where ritual contemplation evokes further learning and inquiry about the nature of birth and birth-giving.

Often in my midwifery work, people had expressed their disgust at the placenta's blood filled mass. Now I wondered if, upon seeing this sacred cedar, people would understand the life-giving mystery of the placenta. These roots reached into the earth mother, just as we reached for nourishment into the bodies of our own mothers, through the root-like veins of the placenta. Form within form, transforming form, a synchronicity of forms where oxygen and nutrients are
transported from mother to child, from earth to green fronds of the cedar tree and back again, a continual dialogue of liquid love, respiration, life's regeneration and gift, held and offered by the mother

This essay forwards the notion of “mother-centred” birth by engaging with contemporary placenta practices in a North American context, as grown from the revival of midwifery-based care. As a midwifery advocate and birth scholar, I want to reevaluate “birth” as a central category for social philosophy and human thriving. I want to see respectful, compassionate care for mothers’ wellbeing and quality of experience become central to the birth-giving and postpartum period. Enacting social philosophy through placental thinking, I extend the literal and metaphoric power of placentas toward the empowerment of mothers. Placentas have a tree-like structure and relational design that is a literal and metaphorical tree of life—nourishing roots that gestate the earliest gifts of mothering. Placental thinking for mother-centred birth considers mothers to be at the centre of birth, and seeks to empower mothers by highlighting the importance of the lived qualities of mothers’ birth and postpartum experiences.

Birth-giving, or birth-gifting, is an embodied gift economy, wherein mothers gift their life force to the babies they gestate and birth. This essay explores placental roots for honouring an embodied gift economy of birth, through holistic, mother-centred birth and its care. Mother-centred birth contrasts with the medicalization of birth as tied to patriarchal exchange economies that appropriate mothers’ birthing gifts. Mothers can recuperate positive experiential potentials for relief and pleasure in giving birth through an embodied gift economy, with access to the resources of their own bodies.

This qualitative historical context case study examines the factors that influenced the establishment and expansion of the International Baccalaureate (IB) in British Columbia (BC) from 1974-2016. This study’s historical case, the IB in BC from 1974-2016, was examined through documents and 24 interviews, in the context of international IB policies and experience, as well as the BC educational environment (including BC Ministry of Education policy, University of British Columbia policy, population demographics, and local school configurations). The period 1974-2016 was chosen as 1974 was the date that the first IB school in BC was established, and because the International Baccalaureate Organization provided registration data on BC schools through October of 2016. After an overview of the history of the establishment of the IB in BC, the findings were organized into the “factors/reasons” that influenced the establishment and expansion of the IB. These included the impact of the Global Education movement, the IB philosophy, its curriculum and pedagogy, legislative factors, economic factors, tertiary education policies, and alumni reflection/programme reputation. These findings were followed by an analysis of how the new 2015 BC Curriculum (BCEd Plan) impacted and could continue to impact the IB in BC. Overall, the IB was established and expanded in BC in this time period as the various school stakeholders who adopted it were looking for a well-developed, cyclically reviewed, externally accountable curriculum. Though the IB is expensive to implement and is often academically demanding, its expansion was encouraged by various legislative and administrative changes that helped it to become an attractive curricular option. The history of the IB in BC has implications for educational reform initiatives elsewhere in Canada and internationally.