Approximately one in two parents across the province of Ontario, regardless of personal religious beliefs, now choose to enrol their children in a public Roman Catholic secondary school over the public secular school counterpart. The Ontario Roman Catholic school system has historically struggled for recognition and independence as an equally legitimate system in the province. Students in modern schools regard religion and spirituality as critical aspects to their individual identities, yet this study investigates the language and knowledge delivered within the systemic marginalization and colonial framework of a Euro-centric school system and the level of inclusivity and acceptance it affords its youth. Using a critical ethnographic methodology within a single revelatory case study, this study presents the voices of youth as the most critical voice to be heard on identity and identity in faith in Ontario Roman Catholic schools. Surveys with students and student families are complemented with in-depth student interviews, triangulated with informal educational staff interviews and the limited literature incorporating youth identity in modern Ontario Roman Catholic schools. Through the approach of an anti-colonial discursive framework, incorporating a theology of liberation that emphasizes freedom from oppression, the voice of Roman Catholic secondary school youth are brought forth as revealing their struggle for identity in a system that intentionally hides identity outside of being Roman Catholic. Broader questions discussed include: (a) What is the link between identity, schooling and knowledge production?; (b) How do the different voices of students of multi-faiths, educators, administrators, and so forth, contradict, converge and diverge from each other?; (c) How are we to understand the role and importance of spirituality in schooling, knowledge production, and claims of Indigenity and resistance to colonizing education?; (d) What does it mean to claim spirituality as a valid way of knowing?; (e) In what way does this study help understand claims that spirituality avoids splitting of the self?; (f) How do we address the fact that our cultures today are threatened by the absence of community?; and (g) What are the pedagogic and instructional relevancies of this work for the classroom teacher?

Social reproduction is well established in educational literature. Diminished outcomes for students marked by class and race persist despite analysis and educational policy. Teachers articulate discourse to explain student success and failure and satisfy personal and professional investments (Miles, 1989; Popkewitz, 1998). Interviews with teachers in urban secondary schools point to the operation of discourse in the reproduction of inequality with profound effects on students on the margin. Meritocratic, individualist discourses privilege white, middle-class students, excluding others. Constructing students as Other and beyond reason (Popkewitz, 1998), teachers articulate discourses of motivation as explanatory of student success and failure and posit a neoliberal normative subjectivity as explanatory of success. Social, historical and economic factors are silenced. The instability and arbitrary closure of discursive articulation offer possibility for a progressive, ethical pedagogy.

Il est difficile, en sociologie, de parler des problèmes éducatifs sans remettre sur le tapis les définitions de la socialisation, des normes et des valeurs; sans faire un détour sur le passé en rapport avec l’avenir; et sans questionner le rôle des sociologues dans la société. Notre travail vise à faire état des débats sur ces questions délicates, tout en proposant d’autres pistes pouvant alimenter la réflexion. Ainsi, à partir d’une étude de terrain avec des enfants du primaire, on essayera de mettre de l’avant ce qu’on appellera des problèmes culturels, dont la résolution est fonction de la capacité humaine d’innover. Le regard tourné vers les nuisances, pratiques nocives au développement de cette capacité, on s’interrogera sur les conditions de maintien de la vie sociale humaine. / Discussing educational problems in sociology is difficult without once again defining expressions such as « socialisation », « norms », « values » and without considering the relationships between the past and the future nor questioning the sociologists’ role in society. Our work intends to expose the debates regarding these delicate questions while suggesting other ideas that may further develop the reflection on that matter. Thus, through a field study involving primary school children, we shall bring forth what we label as cultural issues which solving depends on the human innovation capacity. Considering unwholesome practices hazardous to innovation’s development, we shall reflect upon the conditions for the safeguard of the human social life.

This study examines the dynamics and implications of trans-spatial subordination in/across the lived experiences of six incarcerated participant youths in a secure custody facility for juveniles in Louisiana. Five male teenagers (four African American, one White) and one female teenager (African American) discuss the limitations, harassment, and confinement in various aspects of their lives and speak about the impact on their expectations for the future. The author employs several methodologies in order to develop a multimedia, multifaceted representation of their lives. The narratives elicited through interviews provide the bulk of the data as the participants describe this perpetual subordination. The photographs, resulting from the implementation of a visual ethnographic methodology, provide images that serve as catalysts for introspection and analysis of significance in the mundane and routine, particularly as they apply to the carceral facilities, structures, and policies themselves. Film viewing and discussion offer an array of depictions of youth and criminality to which the youths responded, granting a simultaneous peek at how these marginalized youths viewed themselves and how mainstream media productions depict them. After a particularly provoking viewing session of an animated film, the author expands the preliminary boundaries of the work beyond cells and the walls of the prison. The expanding focus examines subordinating elements in their lives with their families and in their neighbourhoods. The challenges, harassment, and obstacles experienced in their communities continued in their schools and during their encounters with law enforcement, the latter of which often led directly to imprisonment. Finally, the youths reflected on the confining subordination that existed in the facilities, the product of the combination of: their discomfort with the surveillant structure, their perceived arbitrariness of privilege, and the lack of any relevant education. They also identified opportunities for voicing their opinions and recognized the relative safety of this facility compared to others. As the participants conceptualized their futures and articulated their relatively narrow and often ambiguous hopes, the sobering influence of such perpetual subordination is evident. The author closes with a discussion of the study’s importance to future research with marginalized youth in a society of increasing surveillance and security as well as implications for teacher education.

Seamfulness is a narrative-based and arts-informed inquiry into young women's "depression" as pedagogy. Unfolding in rural Nova Scotia, this research is rooted in my experience of depression as the most transformative event in my life story. While memoirists tell me I am not alone, there is currently a lack of research on personal understandings of depression, particularly for young adult women. Through storytelling sessions and self-publishing workshops, I explored four young Nova Scotian women's depression as a productive site for growth. Participants include four young women, including myself, who experienced depression in their early 20s, and have not had a major depressive episode for at least three years. Aged 29 to 40, we claim Métis, Scottish, Acadian, and British ancestries, and were raised and lived in rural Nova Scotian communities during this time. At the seams of adult education, disability studies, and art, I ask: How do young women narrate experiences of "depression" as education? How do handmade, self-published booklets (or “zines”) allow for exploring this topic as embodied, emotional and critical transformative learning? To address these questions, I employ arts-informed strategies and feminist, adult education, mental health, and disability studies literatures to investigate the critical and transformative learning accomplished by young women who experience depression. Through a feminist poststructuralist lens and using qualitative and arts-informed methods, I situate depression as valuable learning, labour, and gift on behalf of the societies and communities in which women live. I argue that just as zines are powerful forms for third space pedagogy, depression itself is a third space subjectivity that gives rise to the "disorienting dilemma" at the heart of transformative learning. I close with "Loose Ends," an exploration of depression as an unanswered question. This thesis engages visual and verbal strategies to disrupt epistemic and aesethetic conventions for academic texts. By foregrounding participant zines and stories, I privilege participant voices as the basis for framing their experience, rather than as material to reinforce or contest academic theories.

Through an analysis of Social Studies textbooks of the government primary school curriculum of Bangladesh, this thesis highlights the role of the education system in pushing poor and ethnic minority children out of school. The texts and graphics are analyzed in order to examine the ways in which they oppress and exclude these children by perpetuating dominant ideologies of nationhood, constructing a notion of the “ideal citizen,” and criminalizing those who do not fit this category. Using an anti-colonial and post-colonial theoretical framework, the study situates the education system of Bangladesh within its histories of colonial domination and argues that the discourses present in these textbooks reflect colonial forms of racism and oppression, and reproduce class and ethnic hierarchies characteristic of the larger Bangladeshi society. Most importantly, this study advocates the need for a just and equitable education system that respects all children of Bangladesh as citizens of the country.

This analysis is concerned with the spatially-anchored hierarchies of power that organize Ontario’s current schooling model. Using the experiences of four young Latina girls, it questions how current school safety discourses function as barriers to educational success, vis-à-vis their role in reconfiguring these students’ identities through narratives of danger, menace, and unruliness. Specific safety and security related practices are explored as sites through which marginalized students are produced as dangerous bodies who are undeserving of full educational opportunities. It is argued that these practices (as manifest in current approaches to surveillance, policing, discipline and punishment, and the restriction of educational mobility) all work to produce the school space as dominant space. Rather than offering youth the opportunity to overcome inequalities, schools and education instead play a definitive role in their continued propagation by sanctioning the control, containment, and eviction of those who are deemed to be deviant.

This paper focuses on issues of Jewish identity, whiteness and victimhood within hegemonic Holocaust education. I argue that today, Jewish people of European descent enjoy white privilege and are among the most socio-economically advantaged groups in the West. Despite this privilege, the organized Jewish community makes claims about Jewish victimhood that are widely accepted within that community and within popular discourse in the West. I propose that these claims to victimhood are no longer based in a reality of oppression, but continue to be propagated because a victimized Jewish identity can produce certain effects that are beneficial to the organized Jewish community and the Israeli nation-state. I focus on two related Holocaust education projects – the March of the Living and the March of Remembrance and Hope – to show how Jewish victimhood is instrumentalized in ways that obscure Jewish privilege, deny Jewish racism and promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state.

Critical Indigenous scholars and their explicit allies have emphasized the need for curriculum and pedagogy in teacher education to address settler colonialism in Canada (Cannon, forthcoming(a); Cannon and Sunseri, 2011; Dion, 2009; Friedel, 2010a; Haig-Brown, 2009; Schick, 2010; Schick and St. Denis 2003, 2005; & St. Denis, 2007) . This thesis is primarily concerned with the existence of and possibilities for such a curriculum. In this thesis, I analyzed the curricula used in the three required courses of the secondary consecutive Initial Teacher Education (ITE) program in the 2011-2012 year at OISE for representations of settler colonialism in Canada. This study finds that while the curriculum in the ITE program at OISE focuses broadly on social justice, it shies away from addressing the ways that Canadians are complicit in ongoing colonialism. The thesis ends by highlighting some clear possibilities and challenges for a curriculum of settler colonial responsibility.

It has been argued, albeit with some degree of success, that the challenges facing the 21st century Canadian classroom are highly complex. A troubled economy riddled with cutbacks to the education system, ongoing enrolment decline and challenges in embracing a growth in the diversity of students are among the changes that have made classrooms increasingly difficult to navigate. Though the last assertion may be true, disciplinary policies and the tools used to address unwanted student behaviour have remained relatively unchanged within the education system. Using Critical Race Theory, the author examines the implications of school suspension and expulsion programs on students and provides an analysis of current literature on alternative disciplinary methods in public schools. Findings suggest that a mixture of strategies within various disciplinary programs can benefit some students, but more work must be done to address socioeconomic disparities plaguing the majority of students found in these programs.