Beyond the Binary
Effect of Drama on Learning Identities and Learning Preferences
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Charlotte Sannier Bérusseau
During his/her curriculum, a student meets a lot of topics, teachers, contexts. In this communication, we explore how a new learning identity emerges from the interaction between the individual and the learning context, and how learning preferences are affected by this new learning identity. We adopt a systemic view, which allows us to think the learning identity as a whole, formed from multiple specific identities corresponding to each learning context and influencing one another. We present here our research and our preliminary results about the effect of the introduction of drama as a sociocultural activity, in secondary schools, on the emergence of a new learning identity, the evolution of global learning identity, and their effect on learning preferences.
Teachers' Understandings and Beliefs about Inclusion
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stuart Woodcock
This paper presents research into Canadian elementary and secondary teachers’ understandings of inclusion. The research investigates how a sample of 120 teachers in the southern part of Ontario defined inclusion, and the extent to which they believed an inclusive classroom is an effective way to teach all students. The study employs Nancy Fraser’s conception of justice as requiring redistribution, recognition, and representation. The findings reveal teachers’ relative lack of attention to issues of resourcing, but considerable emphasis upon issues of representation. While issues of recognition are largely valued, there is a tendency to reify categories of student identity, rather than challenging concerns about the lack of social status attending such foci. The research reveals a push ‘beyond the binary’ of considering teachers’ practices as either inclusive or exclusive, and how teachers’ engagement with resource provision, recognition of learners, and representation of student needs exists along contingent and intersecting spectra.
Designing Rubrics: Equitable Measures and Assessments
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carrie Wastal
Rubrics serve a necessary and oftentimes contentious purpose. Simplified, these tools for assessment provide instructors, students, and schools with a way to quantify student products and learning. Complicated, rubrics can be viewed more productively through other frames. For example, Peter Gallagher (2012) conceives of rubrics as an “articulation” between institutional constraints and writing program aims whereas Asao Inoue (2016) argues for assessment that acknowledges the racialized and politicized hegemonic underpinnings of traditional assessments of student writing. This paper addresses the needs of educators to develop rubrics that help us to assess the diversity of students and their work in the social milieu of today’s diverse society. Each academic quarter, writing program directors critique and revise the program rubrics to ensure that the rubrics assess program’s objectives for student writing. Yet, these rubrics show that MCWP has privileged a “white racial habitus” (Inoue 2016) that determines what we value in writing. Therefore, in order to better support student writers, rubric revision needs to address the following: In what ways do our current rubrics discount the experiences of students? How have we advantaged or disadvantaged students by holding them accountable to how well they learn to work within a potentially racist framework? Put another way, how can programs design fair and equitable rubrics that reflect an “articulation,” of the institutional pressure to meet a valued hegemonic ideal and the role race plays in the development and assessment of what constitutes “good” student work in today’s increasingly globalized societies.
