A deeper look at predicting outcomes for future educators

Because educator licensure is gained by passing licensure examinations in most states, scores on high stakes tests are determining factors as to who will be teaching in America’s classrooms. Due to a focus on program graduation rates, state funding cuts, and production of quality teachers, it is vital that teacher preparation programs produce the quality and quantity of teachers needed to fill the educator deficit. The purpose of the study was to analyze various performance variables of pre-service teachers enrolled in a teacher preparation to identify predictors of performance on required licensure examinations. Findings of the study revealed there is a relationship between Praxis I: Reading scores and Praxis II scores, Praxis I: Writing scores and Praxis II scores, Praxis I: Mathematics scores and Praxis II scores, GPA and Praxis II scores, and CBASE scores and Praxis II scores. The strongest relationships that exist between variables and Praxis II scores are initial Praxis I: Reading scores and overall CBASE scores.

Reflections on Conducting Community-Engaged Research During COVID-19

As an emerging scholar committed to social justice and anti-oppressive praxis, I entered my master’s program in Geography at York University, Toronto, with the goal of contributing to new theoretical insights and meaningful outcomes for research participants in Thailand. While initially the concept of communityengaged research appeared to alleviate the tensions between these two goals, the realities of the university’s constraints on graduate student research coupled with those of the COVID-19 pandemic have made it clear that this endeavor would not be straightforward. The inherent messiness of balancing academic matters (e.g., contributing to new theory and demonstrating an adequate level of rigor) with social justice concerns (e.g., eliminating epistemological violence and contributing meaningful outcomes for research participants) in community-engaged research has only intensified as COVID-19 has reconfigured our social relations, exacerbating existing inequities and restricting our social mobility, particularly across international borders. In this reflection, I consider how remotely collaborating with local research assistants in my own graduate research project typifies these tensions. More specifically, I posit that the COVID-19 pandemic has further underscored the importance of researchers, particularly white men researchers such as myself, to be willing to consistently re-evaluate our projects, and embrace flexibility, accountability, and the removal of ego from our work.

Mentoring at the Boundary: Interdisciplinarity and the International Student of Color in Communication

In this paper, I will discuss mentoring within the discipline of Communication by centering international scholars, who are translated as people of color in the U.S. and are engaged with questions drawn from the context of their nations of origin. How do you enable such a scholar to traverse boundaries – national and disciplinary with the selfassurance that ostensibly comes from feeling at home? Briefly discussing the history of the institutionalization of Communication as an academic discipline, I ask what it means to mentor scholars of color engaged with transnational work within a space that centers the nation-state as a bounded territory, in general and the U.S. in particular. Drawing on transnational and women of color feminist theorization and praxis, I also draw out the productive collaborations and relationships forged when mentoring reveals the processes through which the discipline reiterates its boundaries.

Facilitating departures from monolingual discourses

This article locates and critiques monolingual discourses within applied performance praxis in the United Kingdom and South Africa, suggesting starting points for facilitating multilingual actors’ vast linguistic resources. Set out as a theorized reflection of praxis, I interrogate how the facilitator can draw from actors’ linguistic resources without perpetuating dominant and potentially damaging language ideologies, by which I refer to the socially shared beliefs about language that shape and are shaped by language use. I discuss the powerful language ideologies connected to so-called ‘standard’ English and constructed by dominant institutions to discover how they are reproduced in performance praxis. I also analyse performance examples engaging complex linguistic conditions related to both student and refugee groups in the United Kingdom and South Africa to discuss varied facilitation approaches in context. Through my reflection, I reveal the complexities and opportunities for the facilitator navigating the socio-culturally and politically fraught terrain of language.

The Way of the Cross in the Ordinary: Ethnographic Attention to the Good as Invitational Ethics

This essay develops the idea of ‘invitational ethics,’ engagement with ethnographic description as normative praxis. I argue that by attending to ways in which people exercise practical wisdom in ordinary moments, the ethnographer and reader alike are invited to engage their own processes of ethical self-making. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with the Way of the Cross for Justice, an annual Good Friday public liturgy in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a site for invitational ethics in the frame of what anthropologist Joel Robbins has called an ‘anthropology of the good.’ I conclude by reflecting on how this invited me to engage my own ethical self-making.

Applying feminist principles to social work teaching: Pandemic times and beyond

It took a global pandemic for me to recognize how my social work teaching was an act of feminist praxis. I have long identified as a feminist and regularly engage efforts to advance equity for women, primarily centered on the abolition of prisons which disproportionately incarcerate Indigenous and Black women in Canada. Surprisingly, I have never considered how my feminism shows up in my teaching. The following reflexive essay explores the ways in which the feminist principles of centring emotions, rejecting patriarchal hierarchy, and challenging white feminism were embedded into the development and delivery of a graduate level social work research course that was rapidly adapted to being taught online during a global public health crisis. It ends with a call to action for social work educators to incorporate feminist principles into their pedagogies, not only in times of crisis, but as standard practice.

Moments of Critical Self-Reflection of a Transformative Mathematics Teacher

I have been travelling through a transformative research journey since the beginning of my MPhil study. It allows me to understand my past and present strengths and limitations in learning and teaching of mathematics, thereby envisaging alternative practices for futurist education. As my research involved critical self-reflection on my professional praxis, I used a multi-paradigmatic (interpretivism, criticalism, postmodernism) research approach and autoethnography as a research methodology. Thus, the main purpose of the paper is to portray the moments of critical self-reflection on my experiences of doing mathematical activities during my childhood and learning mathematics during my early days of schooling, aiming at improving my practices as a teacher, a practitioner-researcher and an educator. I used Habermasian knowledge constitutive interests (i.e., technical, practical, and emancipatory) and Schubert’s curriculum images (i.e., content or subject matter, experiences, cultural reproduction, etc.) to interrogate my experiences of doing and learning mathematics. As a mathematics teacher and practitioner-researcher, reflections on my childhood experiences as well as early days of schooling ultimately opened up somewhat closed box of my personal and professional practices. This paper in/directly indicates the enhancement of the students’ engagement in mathematics through context-based activities. Moreover, the selection of the contents should be based on learners’ experiences which might be experienced through mathematically rich activities such as games, daily household works, etc.

Spivak's Planetarity and the Limits of Professional Reading

This article argues that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of planetarity is premised on a practice of reading. Reading for the planet involves deferring the world in order to participate in the text world and its latent re(-)production of ourselves and our world. To the extent that this ethical attention moves us toward different horizons of thinking and feeling, it may also engender political action in the public realm. Reading for Spivak is therefore an important foundation for revolutionary politics and, ultimately, the production of the planet to which we aspire as readers. I proceed to evaluate the planetary efficacy of Spivak's complementary teaching praxis. I show that the aesthetic education she provides does not enable but rather forecloses the experience of literariness and its associated ethics and politics. In response to the limits of professional reading and the worldliness of Spivak's fieldwork in India, I conclude by thinking about the value of deprofessionalization.