Socially Engaged Art as Creative Pedagogy in Educational Spaces

This chapter looks at socially engaged art to realize and explore pedagogical creativity. Socially engaged art is interested in creating art that can be viewed as a process to navigate a deeper understanding of individuals and society. As this process relates to pedagogical creativity, the social practice artist is engaging the participant in a creative activity or process that often calls for a reflective notion. The essential shift socially engaged practice offers is a variant on the reflective process from self to a community, social, and collective reflective practice. This process of engaging with the community is critical for gaining community participant input to direct the practice. When applied to educators, teaching through a social practice lens can offer students a culturally responsive curriculum. Remote and virtual experiences can offer diverse opportunities for creativity, engagement, and discourse.

Aboriginal cultural educators teaching the teachers: mobilisng a collaborative cultural mentoring program to affect change

This paper discusses an Aboriginal cultural mentoring project for non-Aboriginal teachers that positions Aboriginal people front and centre as cultural and educational experts. In so doing it sets out to contribute to work in Australia that challenges ‘common’ understandings about mentoring in educational contexts where the expert is usually a western-educated non-Aboriginal teacher. In this project, non-Aboriginal teachers are supported in implementing culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogies into their classroom through building relationships with Aboriginal mentors and students. Analysis of thirteen pre and post surveys, four mentee interviews and one mentee focus group, illuminated the emergence of collaborative cultural mentoring processes, where teachers developed trusting, reciprocal and respectful relationships with Aboriginal people. We argue that a systematic, well-supported Aboriginal cultural mentoring program can be used to create and convert new knowledge into practice, and that this can have a positive impact on teachers’ understanding of teaching/learning processes thereby contributing to Aboriginal student engagement in their learning.

Multicultural Education from the Private Sphere: Growing Up Filipino-Canadian in a Third-Tier City School

This Major Research Paper is a call for multicultural education in areas that are not perceived to be ethnically diverse. Through my elementary school artwork, journals and notes from St. Therese Roman Catholic School from 1987 to 1997 in Sarnia, Ontario, I suggest that even in classrooms with few racialized minorities, there is still a need for a culturally responsive curriculum to teach all students about transnationalism and self-awareness. Using the terms “public sphere” and “private sphere” to denote the borders of school and home, I emphasize the unification of these spheres to enrich the curriculum. With autobiographical methodology and reconstructed memory, I seek to create meanings in my experiences as a second-generation Filipino-Canadian in a third-tier city school. I aim to shed light on the issues facing minority children in the school system, and to provide practical approaches for bringing multicultural education beyond Canada’s first-tier cities.

Multicultural Education from the Private Sphere: Growing Up Filipino-Canadian in a Third-Tier City School

This Major Research Paper is a call for multicultural education in areas that are not perceived to be ethnically diverse. Through my elementary school artwork, journals and notes from St. Therese Roman Catholic School from 1987 to 1997 in Sarnia, Ontario, I suggest that even in classrooms with few racialized minorities, there is still a need for a culturally responsive curriculum to teach all students about transnationalism and self-awareness. Using the terms “public sphere” and “private sphere” to denote the borders of school and home, I emphasize the unification of these spheres to enrich the curriculum. With autobiographical methodology and reconstructed memory, I seek to create meanings in my experiences as a second-generation Filipino-Canadian in a third-tier city school. I aim to shed light on the issues facing minority children in the school system, and to provide practical approaches for bringing multicultural education beyond Canada’s first-tier cities.

A bilingual university student’s acculturation process in the United States: A linguistic case study for culturally responsive curriculum development

The present study explores and investigates how a Korean-English bilingual speaker is influenced by her native culture during her acculturation process in the United States (U.S.). This linguistic research study is designed around three main themes. The first theme is the cultural adaptation process of the participant, which is analyzed based on the participant’s perceptions about Korean daily life and customs. The second theme refers to exploring the participant’s acculturation process within the U.S. along with her socialization stages. For the third theme, the participant’s intercultural awareness towards her native culture is explored. The interview data analysis confirmed that the participant experienced a culture shock within her first school year in the U.S. The findings of the interviews indicate that the participant applied particular strategies to overcome her culture shock in order to adapt a new way of life, which would be informative for improving culturally responsive curriculum development strategies.

Prospective Teachers’ Views on Courses for Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

While there is a growing body of researches on culturally responsive curriculum, nonetheless, the efficacy of culturally responsive curriculum courses for prospective teacher in preparing these soon-to-be teachers to teach culturally responsive have not been examined thoroughly especially from the perspectives of these teachers. This study was undertaken to fill these gaps and to improve understandings of culturally responsive curriculum. Furthermore, it is hoped that the outcomes of this study could potentially help teacher training programs to understand their effectiveness in training teachers for implementing culturally responsive pedagogy and further improve their programs

Dynamics of Culture and Curriculum Design

The population of the United States of America is becoming more diverse ethnically, racially, and linguistically (Hobbs, Stoops, & Long, 2002). The challenge this poses to faculty of teacher education programs is to edify teacher candidates who are prepared to teach children who might be from a culture other than their own. In this chapter, the author presents a curriculum design model and describes course implementation for exploration of the topic of culture with undergraduate early childhood teacher candidates in a foundations course. Through the course design the preservice teachers are offered an understanding of what is needed to develop the knowledge and skills to be a culturally competent teacher capable of developing a culturally responsive curriculum.