Performance appraisals have far reaching consequences on people. If evaluators in any way discriminate against employees, these individuals can suffer devastating and potentially debilitating consequences. This thesis investigates elementary teachers’ perceptions of and experiences with Ontario’s Teacher Performance Appraisal system (TPA), used to appraise teachers in Ontario from 2001 until 2007. I used quantitative data obtained from a sample of 132 teachers to investigate their perceptions of TPA with respect to four dimensions of organizational justice; outcome fairness, procedural fairness, informational fairness, and interpersonal fairness. Using oppression and critical theories as the theoretical framework, my analyses of my data allowed me to compare mainstream and minoritized teachers’ perceptions of their experiences with TPA. I also conducted follow-up interviews with three mainstream and three minoritized teachers. Analyses of my data enabled me to investigate how each group experienced TPA in terms of the four dimensions of organizational fairness. Analyses of the quantitative data revealed that minoritized teachers perceived their experiences less favourably than mainstream teachers. In addition, from my analyses of the qualitative data, I found that minoritized teachers tended to experience mistreatment, including manifestations of racism and homophobia from the administrators who conducted their TPA. The implications of this study call on administrators to disrupt the cycle of oppression by thinking about the biases, prejudices and stereotypical attitudes they bring intentionally or unintentionally to appraising teachers.

This research focuses on the role that trust and its component facets - competence, benevolence, openness, reliability and honesty (Tschannen-Moran, 2004) - play in affecting teachers’ inclination to exercise informal leadership. Teachers in the elementary sections of three elite urban independent schools in Ontario nominated colleagues as informal teacher leaders in their schools and a total of nine teachers, who received multiple nominations, were selected for interview. The interviews unexpectedly revealed two distinct experience-based groupings of informal teacher leaders, with the members of the two groups exhibiting distinctive leadership behaviours. Trust was an important factor affecting all of the teacher leaders’ inclination to exercise informal leadership, but the two experience-based groups revealed different patterns of emphasis for the trust facets (for example, the less-experienced leaders highlighted benevolence above all other facets while the more-experienced teachers considered openness to be the most important). The findings have implications for the ways in which schools can promote the exercise of informal leadership.

Internationalization of higher education has become a priority for many universities. It provides them with educational models that can respond efficiently to current issues and challenges of globalization. International academic collaboration plays an important role in the creation of such models and prepares educational systems to act effectively in foreign environments. This study explores the Canadian-Ukrainian curriculum development partnership through the specifics of institutional culture, power and joint project management. Canadian and Ukrainian educators participated in semi-structured, open–ended interviews to reveal processes associated with their joint venture. The findings indicate that the project was largely influenced by Canadian and Ukrainian university conceptualization of internationalization and involved multiple cultural and professional perceptions of the partnership context and developments. Diversity of expectations, commitment, acceptance of differences practiced in this collaboration revealed the importance of academic dialogue among developed and developing countries and suggested possible standards for future international curriculum development joint ventures.

Recognition that social and global issues are important to education has re-ignited interest in policy approaches to controversial and sensitive issues(CI).Without a policy framework for CI education, educators become 'de-skilled' by their working conditions. This qualitative study researches teachers and school administrators' understanding of CI policy (CSI 2003) using a theoretical framework structured on critical democracy and a conceptual lens of critical discourse and narrative analyses. Research findings reveal CSI lacks a cogent conceptual framework; it supports curricula and board policies. Some school administrators use CSI to support the system against community-based challenges to policy and programs. In this way, the process of CSI is not democratic. Further, a critical discourse analysis reveals deeply-embedded contradictions through competing voices for authority. Teachers report feelings of fear and experiencing surveillance in conditions of inadequate and inequitable CI policy support. The findings locate inattention to students' roles is defining what (and how) CI enter the classroom. The research findings sharpen our knowledge of local-level policy activity among users. For these and other reasons, the work censures CI policy for 'white privilege' and 'liberalism.'From a theoretical perspective, the thesis asserts the need for more work on the intersections of critical policy, critical democracy and citizen engagement in policy processes.

Performance appraisals have far reaching consequences on people. If evaluators in any way discriminate against employees, these individuals can suffer devastating and potentially debilitating consequences. This thesis investigates elementary teachers’ perceptions of and experiences with Ontario’s Teacher Performance Appraisal system (TPA), used to appraise teachers in Ontario from 2001 until 2007. I used quantitative data obtained from a sample of 132 teachers to investigate their perceptions of TPA with respect to four dimensions of organizational justice; outcome fairness, procedural fairness, informational fairness, and interpersonal fairness. Using oppression and critical theories as the theoretical framework, my analyses of my data allowed me to compare mainstream and minoritized teachers’ perceptions of their experiences with TPA. I also conducted follow-up interviews with three mainstream and three minoritized teachers. Analyses of my data enabled me to investigate how each group experienced TPA in terms of the four dimensions of organizational fairness. Analyses of the quantitative data revealed that minoritized teachers perceived their experiences less favourably than mainstream teachers. In addition, from my analyses of the qualitative data, I found that minoritized teachers tended to experience mistreatment, including manifestations of racism and homophobia from the administrators who conducted their TPA. The implications of this study call on administrators to disrupt the cycle of oppression by thinking about the biases, prejudices and stereotypical attitudes they bring intentionally or unintentionally to appraising teachers.

Internationalization of higher education has become a priority for many universities. It provides them with educational models that can respond efficiently to current issues and challenges of globalization. International academic collaboration plays an important role in the creation of such models and prepares educational systems to act effectively in foreign environments. This study explores the Canadian-Ukrainian curriculum development partnership through the specifics of institutional culture, power and joint project management. Canadian and Ukrainian educators participated in semi-structured, open–ended interviews to reveal processes associated with their joint venture. The findings indicate that the project was largely influenced by Canadian and Ukrainian university conceptualization of internationalization and involved multiple cultural and professional perceptions of the partnership context and developments. Diversity of expectations, commitment, acceptance of differences practiced in this collaboration revealed the importance of academic dialogue among developed and developing countries and suggested possible standards for future international curriculum development joint ventures.

Recognition that social and global issues are important to education has re-ignited interest in policy approaches to controversial and sensitive issues(CI).Without a policy framework for CI education, educators become 'de-skilled' by their working conditions. This qualitative study researches teachers and school administrators' understanding of CI policy (CSI 2003) using a theoretical framework structured on critical democracy and a conceptual lens of critical discourse and narrative analyses. Research findings reveal CSI lacks a cogent conceptual framework; it supports curricula and board policies. Some school administrators use CSI to support the system against community-based challenges to policy and programs. In this way, the process of CSI is not democratic. Further, a critical discourse analysis reveals deeply-embedded contradictions through competing voices for authority. Teachers report feelings of fear and experiencing surveillance in conditions of inadequate and inequitable CI policy support. The findings locate inattention to students' roles is defining what (and how) CI enter the classroom. The research findings sharpen our knowledge of local-level policy activity among users. For these and other reasons, the work censures CI policy for 'white privilege' and 'liberalism.'From a theoretical perspective, the thesis asserts the need for more work on the intersections of critical policy, critical democracy and citizen engagement in policy processes.

The general question guiding this research is: how do equity minded administrators lead for social justice? The following specific questions are addressed in this study: How have participants become oriented to social justice? How do educational administrators conceptualize leadership for social justice? What are the barriers and supports that participants experienced in leading for social justice in diverse contexts? What are some (participant-identified) examples of how they lead for social justice? From a critical perspective this study examines the experiences of educational administrators leading for social justice. Vital to this examination are analyses of power relations and the locatedness of participants within those relations. At the core of these power relations are participant experiences of social justice as contingent on the interconnectedness between their lived realities and the “doing” of social justice as espoused by and evidenced in their approaches to leadership for social justice. For this study I have interviewed ten administrators from Southern Ontario, who self-identify as being committed to and leading for social justice and have been in formal positions of leadership for at least five years. Interviewees were able to identify and articulate the interconnected experiences of lived realities and their commitments to leadership for social justice; critical examples of social justice praxis; and facets of the educational systems which supported and, conversely, erected barriers to their leading for social justice. Conclusions, implications and recommendations can be broadly organized as issues related to systemic and structural processes, support and accountability for the hiring, retention and promotion of diverse school personnel who have evidenced commitments to social justice, the retraining and retooling of educators and leaders through curriculum centred on social justice, the dramatic restructuring of educational administrative thought by practitioners and researchers, and the critical inclusion of the community, students, parents and trustees in roles that substantively impact the decision making power within the educational system (from the overall governance of the educational system to everyday activities).

This paper explores character educations policy documents from two Ontario school boards as well as several published articles that report on results from research related to implementation of character education programs in Ontario and the United States. This paper examines the connection between school board documents of two school boards with the Ontario Ministry of Education character education initiative that was put in place during the 2008-09 school year. It also includes interviews with three principals at one school-board as to how they approached implementation of character education and its relationship to the goal of the school and provincial policy directives.

This paper explores character educations policy documents from two Ontario school boards as well as several published articles that report on results from research related to implementation of character education programs in Ontario and the United States. This paper examines the connection between school board documents of two school boards with the Ontario Ministry of Education character education initiative that was put in place during the 2008-09 school year. It also includes interviews with three principals at one school-board as to how they approached implementation of character education and its relationship to the goal of the school and provincial policy directives.