How African Nova Scotians envision culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as civic repair

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>This article presents findings that connect cultural trauma, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy and Black Canadians ' aspirations. African Nova Scotians constitute the largest multigenerational Black Canadian community, with 400years of presence in Atlantic Canada. Despite the end of de jure school segregation in 1954, African Nova Scotians’ social and cultural capital were not incorporated in curricular and pedagogical practices. Using the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this article draws from a qualitative study conducted using semi-structured interviews and focus groups with sixty participants. A cultural trauma process takes place after a traumatic event and involves a cycle of meaning-making and interpretation that can result in demands for reparation or civic repair. This study illustrates how through the cultural trauma process grounded in their collective memory, African Nova Scotians articulate an aspiration for culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as a form of civic repair. This transformative pedagogy would facilitate a reconnection with their heritage and a fulfilment of the democratic goals of public education. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div>

How African Nova Scotians envision culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as civic repair

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>This article presents findings that connect cultural trauma, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy and Black Canadians ' aspirations. African Nova Scotians constitute the largest multigenerational Black Canadian community, with 400years of presence in Atlantic Canada. Despite the end of de jure school segregation in 1954, African Nova Scotians’ social and cultural capital were not incorporated in curricular and pedagogical practices. Using the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this article draws from a qualitative study conducted using semi-structured interviews and focus groups with sixty participants. A cultural trauma process takes place after a traumatic event and involves a cycle of meaning-making and interpretation that can result in demands for reparation or civic repair. This study illustrates how through the cultural trauma process grounded in their collective memory, African Nova Scotians articulate an aspiration for culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as a form of civic repair. This transformative pedagogy would facilitate a reconnection with their heritage and a fulfilment of the democratic goals of public education. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div>

An analytical review on rethinking service-learning as critical transformative paradigm in higher education

In recent times, service-learning has emerged as a popular community-based instructional pedagogy. However, scholars have a sharp contention about the role of service-learning as a community engagement paradigm in higher education. Furthermore, limited studies exist on service-learning as a transformative instructional pedagogy in higher education. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by presenting an analytical review on the potential of service-learning as a transformative pedagogy in higher education. A traditional narrative review method was used to survey on the theme of the study to establish a theoretical framework and draw conclusions. An extensive survey of existing literature was conducted on the role of service-learning as transformative pedagogy in higher education. This research may help answer the following two critical questions: What are internal and external limits to service-learning in higher education? To what extent can service-learning replace the traditional mode of teaching and learning in higher education successfully? The review shows that service-learning is a critical transformative pedagogy that helps achieve the boarder goals of higher education in a more effective way. The review further informs that service-learning is a community engagement approach that can also be used as a teaching method for achieving specific civic and democratic goals of higher education.

Integrating disability and developmental theories for an equitable inclusive education: towards transformative educational praxes

The US higher education institutions are legally bound to provide equal educational opportunities for diverse learners. This paper contends that despite the growing interest in implementing more inclusive pedagogy, those efforts still fall short of systematically addressing intersecting, oppressive, and anti-ableist practices in the classroom. I call for a theory that frames disability in the context of learning and development and overcomes dichotomized, reductionist and individualistic notions of disability and learning. Drawing on Critical Disability Studies, Vygotsky’s theory of defectology and the Transformative Activist Stance, this paper outlines a transformative pedagogy framework for inclusive, equitable, and anti-ableist education for all learners.

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Liberation

To highlight the significance of Freire’s pedagogy, this article draws from the work of decolonial thinkers in Latin American and Enrique Dussel’s philosophy in order to understand Freire’s pedagogy of liberation. Two concepts in Freire’s work, conscientização and praxis, are key to understanding how awakening the consciousness of teachers and learners can empower them in transforming an unjust world. For Freire, the collaboration between teachers and learners is essential to the self-transformation of leaners for their own liberation. This innovative and transformative pedagogy inspired literacy campaigns and social justice movements around the globe and constitutes Freire's legacy.

Pedagogical Transformation and Teacher Learning for Knowledge Building: Turning COVID-19 Challenges into Opportunities

This paper reports on the continual effort of the Knowledge Building Community (KBC) connecting teachers within and across schools for knowledge creation and community building during the COVID-19 disruptions. During this crisis, schools around the world are challenged with the issues of implementing online learning. Three areas of misalignment were identified: disjoint in learning with home-school separation, piecemeal technologies to mimic physical teaching, and disconnect between teacher professional development and classroom practices and we discussed emerging realignment efforts for transformative learning. Through analyzing the three case examples of how teachers responded to COVID-19 challenges in inter-related areas of curriculum, pedagogy, technology and community, we identified several themes on emerging alignments conducive for transformative pedagogy and technology through community advancement. These themes include: innovating practice around the centrality of ideas; perceiving knowledge building as pervasive; transformative use of technology, and symmetrical advancement of knowledge. These case examples show that in these disruptive times, the teachers were more actively building new practices supported by community dynamics and systemic processes of the KBC. Consequently, the interactions between stakeholders shifted from disjointed relations in different hierarchical levels to a networked community of people, ideas, and resources, and teachers continually advancing their knowledge-building practice in these challenging times.

Talk the Poem: Re-positioning Poetry Recitation as Transformative Pedagogy

Poetry is often perceived by many as the genre of Literature, which is only accessible to specific kinds of individuals, with special artistic sensibilities. As much as we have moved away from formalistic notions of engaging with poetry, the text or written word itself, continues to be treated as an isolated substance, awaiting profound interpretation from those who are gifted with the skills of response. This article explores the importance of offering encounters with poetry which will enable sustainable transformation and growth for both teachers and students. The Talk the Poem (TTP) National Poetry Project was established to provide secondary students from across the island with the space and opportunity to engage with and recite Caribbean and British poetry, through interactive workshops and a national recitation competition. Through a series of critical self-reflective moments, core members of the TTP project attempted to determine the role and scope of the project in the lives of the secondary school teachers and students. This article reports findings on the positive and insightful outcomes of the TTP experience for teacher and student participants, deciphered through document analysis, team discussions, interviews, and surveys.

An Ethnomathematical Perspective of STEM Education in a Glocalized World

An Ethnomathematics-based curriculum helps students demonstrate consistent mathematical processes as they reason, solve problems, communicate ideas, and choose appropriate representations through the development of daily mathematical practices. As well, it recognizes connections with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Our pedagogical work, in relation to STEM Education, is based on the Trivium Curriculum for mathematics and ethnomodelling, which provides communicative, analytical, material, and technological tools to the development of emic, etic, and dialogic approaches that are necessary for the elaboration of the school curricula. STEM Education facilitates pedagogical action that connects ethnomathematics; mathematical modelling, problem-solving, critical judgment, and making sense of mathematical and non-mathematical environments, which involves distinct ways of thinking, reasoning, and developing mathematical knowledge in distinct sociocultural contexts. The ethnomathematical perspective for STEM Education proposed here provides a transformative pedagogy that exposes its power to transform students into critical and reflective citizens in order to enable them to transform society in a glocalized world.