This paper examines the role of story in educational research as an empowering method of inquiry. By stepping back and remembering why, the author retells a professional story of practice between her and a colleague, exploring Vivian Gussin Paley’s story play in a Grade 1/2 inner city classroom. Moving in and through past and present experiences illustrates the need for story in researching professional practice, the significance of story as a powerful research tool, and the profound understanding of teaching and learning that unfolds as a result of such collaborations. Story creates an ethos in the teaching and research community, uniting theory and practice into a visible partnership.
 

This paper uses a dialogic approach following duoethnography to report on a research study conducted in a charter school offering a locally designed social justice course.  This narrative approach involves a critical dialogue between two people, each of whom pushes the other to further insights and understandings.  The urban prairie school under study focused on gifted learners and was funded as a public school.  Multiple methods of data collection included document and policy analysis, field observations, and open-ended interviews with administrators, teachers and students who were directly involved with the social justice program.  The results and discussion focus on student engagement in schools on issues of human rights and social justice, inquiry-based approaches to the curriculum, and include implications for educational policy and practice.

Keywords: alternative school programs, social justice, duoethnography, inquiry learning

A power shift is occurring in higher education, driven by two trends: (a) the increased freedom of learners to access, create, and re-create content; and (b) the opportunity for learners to interact with each other outside of a mediating agent. Information access and dialogue, previously under control of the educator, can now be readily fulfilled by learners. When the essential mandate of universities is buffeted by global, social/political, technological, and educational change pressures, questions about the future of universities become prominent. The integrated university faces numerous challenges, including a decoupling of research and teaching functions. Do we still need physical classrooms? Are courses effective when information is fluid across disciplines and subject to continual changes? What value does a university provide society when educational resources and processes are open and transparent?

Today, it is important to acknowledge our investment in the technologized visual culture world, but at the same time within that investment, allow for active participation in forms that press for engagement and reflection.  Theorized through phenomenology, embodiment, and performative inquiry, Arts’ Educational Relevance in a Technocratic World presents an awakening of space moments of possibilities through active and interactive participation in installation art forms that press for participatory inquiry, engagement, and reflection with our close entanglement with the technologically driven visual culture world, the world in which we dwell, in relationship to our selves and others.

Keywords: visual culture, installation art, phenomenology, enactivism, performative inquiry

“We must educate to survive, critique and create.” (Berry, as cited in O’Sullivan, 1999, p. 8)

Transformative educators such as Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and Edmund O’Sullivan believe that the time has come for a shift away from the dominant Western educational ideology that focuses on achievement, individualism, and material success.  They propose that education must become more than a system of banking information and standardized testing, and educators must be prepared to operate out of a much larger integrated worldview.  They suggest that schools must provide balanced non-dualistic education that values students more for who they are than what they can achieve.  In June 2008, the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education published a document which addresses similar concerns to those raised by Berry, Swimme, and O’Sullivan.  The document entitled Renewed Objectives for the Common Essential Learning of Critical and Creative Thinking (CCT) and Personal and Social Development (PSD) recommends a number of key changes to existing educational policy in the areas of emotional, social and spiritual formation.  The recommendations place emphasis on spiritual development, environmental awareness, ecological principles, human diversity, creative-ability development, and community-based achievement.  This paper analyzes the educational need for renewal of current Western ideology and it supports the revamping of policy as proposed by the 2008 Ministry of Education document.  It also discusses how the three principles of O’Sullivan’s (1999) integral development theory towards transformative education may be helpful for enhancing the effective implementation of the 2008 CCT and PSD Ministry of Education document.

Keywords: integrated education, transformative education