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The learning ministries in Ontario have made a concerted effort to underscore Aboriginal learners' needs and preferences in publicly-funded and assisted schools and training services throughout the province. Through a trilogy of policy documents, the Ontario Ministry of Education (OME) and the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU) have addressed expanded definitions of learning and sought to unfold the socio-cultural and epistemic values related to Aboriginal student and community worldviews. The policies in many respects represent a poised effort on the part of the learning ministries to improve educators' awareness of culturally-responsive pedagogy, as well as to bring Aboriginal peoples' socio-historical traditions to the fore. While the policy initiatives by Ontario's learning ministries undoubtedly represent a collective attention to Aboriginal learners, the author's line of inquiry is revealing some noteworthy initial findings that are deserving of further analysis. The policy documents reflect a dominant discourse of an assumed normative educative stance; more precisely, the jargon of data-driven outcomes and evaluative statements throughout all three policies seem to implicate upon normative educative paradigms that, in turn, creates a conceptual tension with the self-declared intentions of the policies themselves.

This paper is a response to an article, "Creepy White Gaze: Rethinking the Diorama as a Pedagogical Activity" (Sterzuk & Mulholland, 2011), published in the "Alberta Journal of Educational Research," in which Sterzuk and Mulholland critiqued a heritage fair entry, "Great Plains Indians." I report on a school-university collaborative research project that examined the ways in which out-of-school practices and knowledges of Canadian Aboriginal students might provide these students with access to school literacy practices. Grounded in a "funds of knowledge" approach, this paper presents an alternative reading, explaining how students' linguistic and cultural resources from home and community networks were utilized to reshape school literacy practices through their involvement in a heritage fair program.

This paper explores the increasingly prominent role of research brokering organizations (RBOs) in strengthening connections between education research, policy and practice across Canada. This paper is organized in three sections. First, it provides a literature review of research mediation--exploring terminology, models and empirical work (albeit sparse) across health, business, education sectors. The second section provides three conceptual contributions to the field: RBOs' roles in knowledge mobilization occurring in the white space of broader public service systems, a typology of Canadian RBOs that exist in education using four broad categories: governmental, not-for-profit, for-profit and membership RBOs, and a knowledge brokering framework along seven dimensions: mission, resources, staff roles, political affiliation, autonomy, message and linkages. The third section provides empirical data about the frequency and types of RBOs that exist across Canada.

While the landscape of postsecondary education in Alberta continues to expand and diversify, there seems to be very little written about the organization of postsecondary education in the province over the past 15 to 20 years (Wimmer & Schmaus, 2010). This paper provides an analysis of postsecondary education in Alberta over the past 15 to 20 years using social theory, specifically "thinking tools" (Grenfell & James, 2004) provided in Bourdieu's Field Theory to reveal power struggles in the system. Government policies that drive postsecondary institutions to struggle for position in market-like conditions while tightly controlling the parameters of that market are explored. We discuss the role government policy plays in the reproduction of power structures and their distribution of capital in the province of Alberta.

An account of three researchers' efforts to make sense of preservice teachers' assessment practices reveals how methodologically diverse investigations emanated from the context of a single study. Developments, findings, and warrants that characterize this inquiry are presented, as well as arguments describing this study as exploratory, mixed-method, and non-foundationalist research. Contains 26 references. (Author/SV)