Search

The world, influenced by 21st century technologies and ecological challenges, has rapidly changed with more ability to "connect" locally and globally and more opportunities to learn from a range of sources. As a result, our learners and their needs have changed. With such rapid changes, conceptions of educational leadership need to reflect these changes utilizing the complexities of the role in society. As a group of educators who work in a School District, Ministry of Education and University teacher education programs, we ask how educational leaders in school districts and teacher education programs can design spaces that engage everyone, recognize everyone's expertise and share responsibility for growth and development, and how in teacher education we can begin to move away from the hierarchical, industrialized model of management to one where everyone feels engaged, valued, and heard. In this paper, we draw on sustainable and distributed leadership ideas, termed by Wheatley (2010) as the "new sciences," informed by tenets from complexity theory. Using a case study approach and narrative insights, this paper elucidates how an ongoing Professional Learning Network (PLN) called Link-to-Practice (L2P) offers an alternative conception of educational leadership.

In this paper we share findings from a historical investigation into changing expectations regarding teacher conduct as connected to the evolving Saskatchewan Teachers' Federation Code of Ethics and the eventual proclamation of a Government-mandated teacher regulatory board. This study was based on the idea that views of appropriate conduct embedded in ethical codes evolve in relation to shifting societal norms and values. We demonstrate that the tone and content of ethical codes of conduct for Saskatchewan teachers transformed from explicit and concrete to abstract and ambiguous.

Culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) has been implemented in classrooms and schools across Canada and the United States to address the inequity that has caused an academic achievement gap between Black and Indigenous students and those students who self-identify as White. The purpose of this paper, which draws upon a larger instrumental case study that investigated CRP as a district-wide change, is to demonstrate an effective model for sustainable, deep-level educational change to address systemic racism through CRP. The primary research question from the larger study was: How do people with different roles throughout the hierarchy of the school district make sense of CRP? In this paper, I highlight two of the key findings from the larger study. First, in order for CRP as a district-wide reform mandate to be implemented effectively, the steps of the reform must be diffused throughout the district rather than decreed from the top of the hierarchal chain of a typical public school system. Second, in order for change that impacts an entire school system to occur, there must be a mechanism for deep learning prior to and during the implementation stage for members of the district.

This paper is a collective attempt to respond creatively to a research project we were part of entitled Sketching Narratives of Movement: Towards Comprehensive and Competent Early Childhood Educational Systems Across Canada. We share our slow process of thinking, collaborating, wondering, and pausing along with the figure of the snail as we improvise a nonlinear path towards an unknown future. We think-with various theories of change as a response to narratives shared by participants in the project's knowledge mobilization events: two public webinars and the production of a series of short video interviews. The pandemic simultaneously (re)inscribed ECEC with familiar discourses and narratives, yet, it also issued forth the potential for new imaginaries. ECEC was suddenly positioned as a critical community life-sustaining space for entire systems stressed by a pandemic. Amidst the attention, however, "slimy" traces of chronic neglect, underfunding, and undervaluing of ECEC were gleaming. Given the unpredictable momentum, we argue that it is "essential" that we open up ECEC to different narratives of movement. To this end, we offer five theoretical capsules titled: Slowing, Desiring, Haunting, Hospicing, and Longing as provocations for storying care otherwise and for stirring ethical consideration with potentialities for slow activism in ECEC.

Utilizing the parameters of the dreaming phase in the decolonizing framework developed by Poka Laeuni (2009), this paper investigates how culturally inclusive education and anti-racist education philosophies have been posited as potential approaches to decolonizing Canadian K-12 schools. To examine how culturally inclusive education manifests in Ontario's K-12 system as a result of the "Ontario First Nation, Métis, and Inuit Educational Policy Framework," this paper explores three topic areas. First, I provide a literature review of culturally inclusive education; second, I offer a literature review of anti-racist education; and third, having assessed the shortcomings of the two pedagogies previously, I conclude that neither culturally inclusive education nor anti-racist education is sufficient alone as decolonizing strategies. From this analysis, I hypothesize that by weaving components of the two pedagogies together, a possible decolonizing framework may be created.

This paper proposes a rationale that supports a renewal of our predominantly 19th century curriculum for Grades 7-12, identified as Mathematics 1.0. It was originally established in the mid 1800s to prepare learners mostly from upper-class families to succeed in a post-industrial society. Today's digital revolution has changed society remarkably, and the variety of learners has certainly broadened, but Mathematics 1.0 fundamentally remains the same Plato-based (Platonist) curriculum due to its social-political power, which is documented in the article. The major changes to society's culture and the composition of learners have caused faults in Mathematics 1.0 (e.g., a relevance deficit). For the majority of learners, school mathematics has mostly become an obsolete, inequitable, and harmful rite-of-passage into adulthood, to varying degrees. A renewed curriculum, Mathematics 2.0, is rationalized and specific suggestions are offered. The minority of learners who successfully pursue mathematics to varying degrees would experience small changes in their new Mathematics 1.2.