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Too often, individuals with intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) are left out of discussions on romantic relationships and sexuality. However, many individuals with IDD want to become sexually expressive, fulfilled persons who are sexually active, yet they are often denied the sexual health education to support their sexual agency. Given this, we conducted a three-year disability Research-based Theatre (RbT) project in New Westminster, British Columbia to better respond to the needs of individuals with IDD, who refer to themselves as self-advocates—those who speak and act with agency—regarding their sexual agency. The project, entitled Romance, Relationships, and Rights ( RRR), sought to disrupt sexual ableism, and present the lived experiences of self-advocates on stage. Throughout the three phases of RRR, the themes of sexual agency, self-advocacy, and self-determination arose. As an extension of this previous work, we take up these themes in a critical self-study where we reflect on the project across, within, and between each phase by focusing on the implications for sexual health education. We present findings about the impact of creating RRR to engage in a retrospective dialogue across all three phases to offer recommendations for intersectional, accessible, inclusive, and comprehensive sexual health education. Key recommendations include recognizing self-advocates’ rights to self-determination and sexual agency, active involvement, and hands-on approach to sexual health education where accessibility, flexibility, and an awareness of needs are built in to lesson plans and curriculum.

Individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are often excluded from conversations about sexual health; when included, well-meaning researchers and support workers often speak for individuals instead of creating opportunities for their voices to be heard. To support the sexual agency of people with intellectual disabilities, who refer to themselves as self-advocates (SAs), we embarked on a Research-based Theater (RbT) project, Romance, Relationships, and Rights, with the goal to address misconceptions of individuals with IDD and sexuality. Throughout the project, ethical tensions percolated from ableist assumptions about “legal capacity,” consent both on and off stage, and conflicting perspectives on aesthetics. Throughout this article, we discuss these ethical dilemmas and offer recommendations for future work with SAs in co-creating RbT through the lens of disability justice and critical disability studies.

This article offers perspectives shared by self-advocates in the first phase of a community-based participatory research project untaken to address barriers that individuals with intellectual disabilities face with respect to sexual health knowledge. Using descriptive qualitative methods, we interviewed 19 individuals with intellectual disability about their experiences and knowledge related to sexual health. The research question guiding this project was: What are self-advocates’ with intellectual disabilities experiences learning about sexual health and sexuality? The findings highlight that participants faced barriers and lack of access to sexual health education, and while they learned about sexual health through formal sexual health education, frequently this knowledge came through lived experience. Finally, the findings underscore that participants knew what they wanted with respect to sexual health education and offered recommendations. The importance of accessible sexual health education for self-advocates that supports their rights and desires to express their sexuality and sexual agency is highlighted.

This research examined how stakeholders (n = 40) from one school district experienced “accountability” within a context where responsibility for student learning was being distributed across the system. Using a case study design, we examined: what conditions supported stakeholders in multiple roles to exercise responsibility for student learning? Analyses of documents and interviews revealed conditions that enabled teachers, instructional leaders, and administrators to share responsibility in relation to their roles, and empowered teachers to engage in inquiry for continuous improvement and build from their sense of professionalism and responsibility. Implications are discussed for empowering teachers, and other stakeholders, to exercise responsibility in the context of an accountability system.

Individuals with intellectual disability are often left out of and overlooked in discussions on sexual health and sexuality. Given this, we undertook a participatory theatre research project to better respond to the needs of the individuals with intellectual and developmental disability regarding their sexual agency and sexual citizenship. The project, entitled Romance, Relationships, and Rights arose when the executive director of a community living agency approached researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship to learn about how they, as an agency, could better support their community. To disrupt sexual ableism and traditional theatre hierarchies, we collaboratively turned to participatory and disability theatre with the aim to advance and promote the sexual citizenship of individuals with intellectual and developmental disability, who refer to themselves as self-advocates - those who speak and act with agency. The challenges of equitable co-creation arose throughout the theatre process; the themes of deconstruction/co-construction and uncertainty and liminality reveal the iterative process of centering self-advocate voices.

PurposeThis research investigated whether structuring an inquiry-oriented professional learning network to include school-based co-teaching partners would amplify educators' success in taking up and adapting evidence-based understandings and practices as meaningful in their contexts. Our research questions were: (1) What conditions did educators identify in the PLN overall that supported their co-construction of knowledge and practice development together? and (2) How did including co-teaching partners in the PLN help participants to mobilize knowledge and/or practices in the contexts where they were working?Design/methodology/approachA qualitative case study design was used because of its potential to examine how and why questions about complex processes as situated in context (Butler, 2011; Yin, 2014). A case study methodology allowed us to collect and coordinate multiple forms of evidence (i.e. interviews, teacher reflective writing, classroom artifacts, field notes) to examine both how conditions created within the PLN supported learning and how co-teaching partners were mobilizing what they were learning in their school contexts. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and data was analyzed abductively through an iterative and recursive process (Braun et al., 2018).FindingsConditions within the PLN overall that participants identified as supportive to their knowledge mobilization and practice development included: having a shared focus, feeling accountability to the group, collaborative enactment of practices within the PLN, large group sharing and debriefing, sustained cycles of collaborative inquiry, affective support, valuing diversity and drawing from expert others as resources. Participants also identified the benefits that accrued specifically from working with co-teaching partners. In addition, findings showed how the degree to which partners engaged in rich forms of collaborative inquiry could be related to their learning and situated practice development.Originality/valueFindings show the generative potential of inviting co-teaching partners into a PLN to engage in collaborative inquiry with others. PLNs offer the benefit of engaging with educators from outside of one's practice context, which enables pushing their thinking in new directions. Our findings add to the literature by revealing how in situ knowledge mobilization can be amplified when educators participating within a PLN are also working through cycles of inquiry with a co-teaching partner. Overall, this study offers a PLN model where teachers have built-in support for knowledge co-creation and mobilization both within and outside of their school contexts.

In a time of rapid policy and curriculum change, teachers must be knowledge workers who continue to develop professionally. Professional learning networks (PLNs) offer teachers the opportunity to develop professionally by positioning them as inquirers into their own practice and authors and agents of situated innovation. Six examples of PLNs are introduced in this book to illustrate key attributes of PLNs that build educators’ ownership, practice, and expertise. Also highlighted is the potential of PLNs to address questions of equity, both for educators working in remote and rural communities who have limited access to professional development and other resources, and diverse learners and equity-seeking communities (e.g., Indigenous communities, non-dominant cultural groups). Scholar, practitioner, and policy audiences can benefit greatly from the PLNs described here and draw from these case studies to inform equity-oriented PLNs centering the importance of teachers, students, engagement, collaboration, and rural place in educational transformation efforts.

Educational renewal in rural schools and communities can be stymied by many challenges including teacher isolation, staff turnover, and failing resource-based economies. Education change networks within and across rural communities can nuture educators’ professional development through collaborative inquiry and connect educators interested in taking up equity-oriented, place-conscious pedagogies. This afterward draws from the chapters in this book to outline how rural education transformation can benefit from and be realized within education change networks that take up multiple perspectives including the more-than-human world, reconciliation with Indigenous communities, and service learning.

Narrative inquiry’s capacities to reveal relational complexities and nuances of individuals and settings in varied contexts purposefully shape the lived curriculum within a community middle school setting. The experiential narratives of students, teachers, administrators, parents, and mentors contributing to the curricular documentation of the makings of this community have not only provided a medium to access these relations but also become an educative catalyst, opening into ongoing deliberations concerning the nature of education, knowledge, and what it means to be a community, by all involved. Grounded in Dewey’s primary notion of experience, participatory practices position each community member to bring their narratives of experience into the makings and remakings of community, elucidating modes of being and associated habits. Representative voices illuminate the mobilizing potential of narrative inquiry as a vital medium for reframing education within all institutions, communities, and beyond.

This paper documents the first year of a qualitative case study investigating the experiences of reciprocal learning teams of teachers within a small, rural secondary school. The purpose of this st...

Intertwining case study with practitioner inquiry, a research team seeks language for the conduct of mindful curricular enactment in an alternative public middle school. The school is committed to valuing students’ narratives of experience, the resources all bring to the school, and the given particularities of contexts, subject matter, and situations, as the makings comprising learning within and through community. A collaborative approach to inquiry that involves all team partners in the research process and engages the unique strengths that each brings focuses on how this alternative school provides a case for accessing how and why mindful curricular enactment orients accordingly. It is the makings forming this curricular movement, and the room found within these makings to reorganize and reconstruct thinking, that primary attention is oriented towards. Deweyan ‘roominess’ negotiated through such curricular enactment is documented as mindful attention to curriculum-making that fosters the neede...

In this critical community self-study, we describe the development of the Interdisciplinary Disability and Inclusion Research Collaborative (IDIRC) at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. IDIRC is a self-organizing collective involving eleven faculty, students and staff devoted to Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and the relationships between CDS, practice and social change. We ask: What are the social relations, commitments, activities, and research needs of this university's researchers, students and staff in relation to disability and inclusion? Through a constant comparative analysis of interview data we surfaced themes related to the social relations, commitments, activities and research needs of our members. Our findings and discussion illustrate how similar cross-disciplinary groups might build inclusive spaces, which unite staff, graduate students and faculty towards disrupting normativity, interdisciplinarity, and praxis within and beyond academia. IDIRC attends to the embodiment of values and theoretical perspectives that are relational, diversity-positive, intersectional and advocacy-oriented.

This critical case study (Grosvenor & Pataki, 2017; Merriam, 2009) examines how taking up diversity and plurality within in situ literacy and language arts courses in a Bachelor of Education program created a critical discursive space within mainstream teacher education. Data in this research included interviews with teacher candidates and course assignments. Findings suggest that teacher candidates learned to seek and value diverse students’ funds of knowledge, grappled with inclusive practices, and developed equity-oriented pedagogy within in situ teacher education coursework. Through this project we contribute to the rising recognition that in situ teacher education through a lens of diversity can generate curriculum drawing from the literacies and lifeworld experiences of all learners (Grant & Agosto, 2008; Moll, 2014).

Professional development for teacher educators must recognize and account for how aspects of our pedagogies often run counter to institutional, managerial, and bureaucratic demands. We need professional development that nurtures our minds, hearts, and spirits, and that is congruent with our values. In this paper, three teacher educators who co-teach an intensive, interdisciplinary, inquiry-based semester in a secondary teacher education program, explore how collaborative approaches to narrative forms of inquiry and reflexive analysis supported them to enact their learning, as well as helped them to surface the situated, complex, and emergent aspects of their own—as well as their students’—identities.

Teacher professional development has been identified as essential to educational reform. Moreover, research suggests the power of inquiry communities in spurring teacher professional learning and shifts in classroom practice. However, not enough is known about what conditions within a community of inquiry might be necessary to inspire, support, sustain, and coordinate educators’ investment in systems-level change. To fill this gap, this article reports findings from the last year of a longitudinal case study of a school district seeking to advance adolescent literacy in subject-area classrooms. We extended from prior findings to investigate whether and how educators’ self-perceptions of efficacy and agency could be related to their engagement in a district-level, inquiry-based initiative. Participants were 43 teachers and school- and district-based leaders. Multiple forms of evidence (i.e., interviews, artifacts, field-notes) were collected and coordinated within a case study design. Findings suggested that the vast majority of participants experienced increases in efficacy that could be associated with their engagement in collaborative inquiry, which in turn had potential to fuel on-going change efforts. At the same time, leaders’ careful attention to preserving teachers’ agency appeared to support their sustained investment in continuous cycles of goal-directed practice improvement. Implications are discussed for structuring professional development within systemic improvement initiatives.

This article presents an in-depth case study of a complex community of inquiry. In this community, teachers worked collaboratively to build from situated assessments of students' learning through reading to refine and monitor practices designed to enhance student learning in their subject-area classrooms. In this report, we present evidence to address three questions: (1) What did inquiry look like within this community?; (2) How was collaboration implicated in teachers' inquiry?; and (3) How was engagement in inquiry related to meaningful shifts in teachers' practice and learning? This research contributes by uncovering important links between teacher inquiry, collaboration, and educational change.

This research examines how engaging teachers in collaboratively constructing situated assessments enhances teacher professional development, fosters meaningful shifts to practice, and supports productive conceptions of accountability. We conducted case studies of six teachers engaged as partners in investigating new approaches to assessing and fostering literacy. Findings suggested that supporting teachers to generate, interpret, and act upon assessment data within instructional change cycles assisted them in monitoring student performance, grounding instructional decisions in data, and enacting changes to practice. We also document how collaboratively constructing assessments with teachers supported conceptions of accountability considered meaningful by individuals adopting differing socio-political perspectives.

This paper reports findings from a longitudinal project in which secondary teachers were working collaboratively to support adolescents' self-regulatedlearning through reading(LTR) in subject-area classrooms. We build from prior research to “connect the dots” between teachers' engagement in self- and co-regulated inquiry, associated shifts in classroom practice, and student self-regulation. More specifically, we investigated whether and how teachers working within a community of inquiry were mobilizing research to shape classroom practice and advance student learning. Drawing on evidence from 18 teachers and their respective classrooms, we describe findings related to the following research questions: (1) While engaged in self- and co-regulated inquiry, what types of practices did teachers enact to support LTR in their subject-area classrooms? (2) How did teachers draw on research-based resources to inform practice development? (3) What kinds of practices could be associated with gains in students' self-regulated LTR? In our discussion, we highlight contributions to understanding how teachers can be supported to situate research in authentic classroom environments and about qualities of practices supportive of students' self-regulated LTR. We also identify limitations of this work and important future directions.