Loyalty conflicts. Resistance. Anger. This thesis will take you along on my journey as a South Asian woman and the mother and stepmother of a cross-cultural stepfamily. Through the form of an arts-informed auto-ethnography I will illustrate how I underwent personal and spiritual transformation while (step) mothering four children. It is a story that “both cuts and heals” (Luciani, 2000, p. 39). In this work I show how mothering and stepmothering can “deteriorate into martyrdom if a mother gives her children and spouse the love and care she doesn’t feel that she herself is worthy of receiving” (Northrup, 2005, p. 13). I explore how the pressure to be a “good mother” and “good stepmother” left me feeling inadequate, resentful, doubtful of my abilities and neglectful of my own needs. Hope. Solace. Spirituality. Love. This story is also about healing and renewal and my process of recapturing a sense of self by returning to spirituality. By sinking into my life as a mother and stepmother and viewing my life circumstance as a “vehicle for waking up” (Chodron, 1991, p. 71), I cultivated a conscious state in which anger and resentment was replaced by awe and wonder. I strengthened my agency by directing nurturing and caregiving to myself, pursuing my creativity, and sharing childrearing more equitably with my partner. Mothering and stepmothering became sites of empowerment as I found joy in my relationship with myself, my children, and the community around me. This research provides an example of how meaningful knowledge production can occur in alternative forms to mainstream academic discourse. Arts-informed, auto-ethnographic research offers insights on human relationships and interactions in the world by fostering an epistemological shift for the researcher as well as the reader. As Sameshina and Knowles note (2008) this methodology is “transformational in process and possibilities” (108).

This study is aimed to unpack the ‘black box’ that connects the grade-3 test-based retention policy with students’ academic outcomes. I theorized that the policy effects on teaching and learning may be modified by instructional capacity, but are unlikely to occur through enhancing teachers’ capability to teach. Analyzing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K) dataset, I first explored the relationship between the test-based retention policy and instructional capacity as indicated by teacher expectations of students’ learning capability and then investigated whether and how the expectations moderated the policy effects on instructional time reallocation, student academic performance, and student self-perceived academic competence and interests. To remove the selection bias associated with the non-experimental data, I applied a novel propensity score-based causal inference method, the marginal mean weighting through stratification (MMW-S) method and extended it to a causal analysis that approximates a randomization of schools to the test-based retention policy followed by a randomization of classes to teachers with different levels of expectations. Consistent with my theory, I found that the test-based retention policy had no effects on teacher expectations. Although the policy uniformly increased the time allocated to math instruction, it produced no significant changes in students’ overall performance and overall self-perception in math. In addition, I found that students responded differently to the test-based retention policy depending on the expectations they received from the grade-3 teachers. The results suggested some benefits of positive expectations over negative and indifferent expectations in moderating the policy effects, including more access to advanced content, higher learning gains of average-ability students, and more resilient student learning over a long term. However, the results also showed that having positive expectations alone is not sufficient for academic improvement under the high-stakes policy. If implemented by a positive-expectation teacher, the policy could be detrimental to students’ learning in the nontested subject or to their learning of basic reading/math skills. It would as well place the bottom-ability students at a disadvantage. The findings have significant implications for the ongoing high-stakes testing debate, for school improvement under the current accountability reform, and for research of teacher effectiveness.

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.

This dissertation is divided into three main components that each relate to the socioeconomic wellbeing of Aboriginal peoples in the Canadian labour market. Specifically, using data from the master file of the Canadian census for the years 1996, 2001 and 2006, the first section examines the wage differential for various Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups, including a comparison of those living on-and-off-reserves. The study finds that, while a sizeable wage gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal persons still exists, this disparity has narrowed over the three census periods for those living off-reserve. The Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal wage differential is largest among the on-reserve population and this gap has remained relatively constant over the three census periods considered in the study. The second study in the dissertation uses data from the master file of the Canadian Labour Force Survey for 2008 and 2009 to estimate the probability that an individual is a labour force participant, and, conditional on labour force participation, the probability that a respondent is unemployed, comparing several Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups. The results reveal that Aboriginal men and women have lower rates of labour force participation and higher rates or unemployment in both periods as compared to their non-Aboriginal counterparts. Aboriginal peoples were also disproportionately burdened by a slowdown in economic activity as measured by a change in the probability of unemployment moving from 2008 to 2009, as compared to non-Aboriginal people, who experienced a smaller increase in the probability of unemployment moving from a period of positive to negative economic growth. Finally, the third study examines the probability of high school dropout comparing Aboriginal peoples living on-and-off-reserve using data from the master file of the Aboriginal Peoples Survey for 2001. The findings reveal dramatically higher rates of dropout among Aboriginal people living on-reserve as compared to those living off-reserve. Limitations of all three studies as well as some possible directions of future research related to similar issues concerning Canada’s Aboriginal population are discussed in the concluding chapter of the dissertation.

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 research investigates Japanese society's gaze towards those former colonized subjects, who now reside in Japan as foreign residents. More specifically, it explores the representations, in two leading Japanese newspapers and a popular internet discussion board, of a Filipino family facing deportation in 2009. Using Foucault's archaeology of knowledge as the main analytical framework, it examines emergent and silenced discourses in each media. While the newspapers generally reported in favour of the family, they often unintentionally constructed the child as innocent, and the parents as illegal. The internet discussion board tended to depict the family as criminals. By silencing the colonial history between the Philippines and Japan, both media outlets have failed to address the continuing neo-colonial relationships between the two nations. In conclusion, the various implications of this research on the strategies advocating citizenship rights of irregular residents are examined, by applying anti-oppressive education frameworks to the research findings.

Through Foucault’s genealogy and ethics of the self, I examine the experiences of Asian teacher candidates in the K-12 Canadian school system and how those experiences influence what teaching means for them. I look at the connections between race, the body and education and ask, how do the embodied experiences of racialized students inform the formation of the racialized teacher candidate? In my study I reveal that discourses of racism and discrimination are embodied and constitute racialized subjectivity. Through using individual interviews and a focus group, I listen to the narratives of my participants as they recount experiences in education. These stories and my analysis have important implications for educators, scholars, researchers and policy-makers interested in race, the body and education as well as concerns of diversifying the teaching personnel and transforming curriculum.

This study investigates how 4 newly admitted Chinese international graduate students participate in classroom discussions at a Canadian university. This qualitative research provides rich descriptions of their backgrounds and classroom participation, as well as their voices related to their classroom experiences. Framed by Language Socialization Theory, the study examines the classroom contexts where the students are socialized, particularly the social relations in the classroom that influence the 4 students’ participation. The study also investigates the role of the 4 students’ agency in the negotiation of access and participation in classroom discussions, as well as their identity formation in classroom communities. The findings of this research highlight the co-constructed and bi-directional nature of language socialization. The 4 students’ classroom experiences are not only shaped by their educational, cultural and social backgrounds, but are also jointly constructed by local contextual factors in Western classrooms. Pedagogical implications are also discussed.

The pressing environmental crisis compels educators to question the purposes and practices of formal education and to adopt environmentally-informed transformative approaches to education. Critical place-based learning refers to a wide variety of approaches to teaching and learning that take the local context as the starting point for curriculum that fosters a critical stance towards the status quo. There is a need for more research that brings together environmental and critical learning goals in the early years. In this qualitative case study, I explored critical place-based learning and teaching in kindergarten. I explored the parallels between critical place-based learning and a Reggio Emilia-inspired emergent curriculum approach. I considered how teacher researcher collaboration served to support teacher professional development. This study demonstrated the possibilities, benefits, and challenges, of critical place-based learning in the early years. I conclude with some recommendations for facilitating critical place-based learning in the early years.

This study investigates the challenges and opportunities of using the Aboriginal principles of “Respect,” “Reciprocity,” “Relationship,” and “Responsibility” (known as the “4 R’s”), Seventh Generation Stewardship, and an Aboriginal circle of giving and receiving, to teach Muslim students in one Islamic elementary school setting about environmental stewardship. The research tracked the thoughts and emotional connections of students as they undertook to establish the Aboriginal circle of giving and receiving, with plants they planted for their science unit. Through lessons and practices around the 4 R’s, the majority of students demonstrated an increased emotional attachment to the plants in their respective circles, which was documented in journals. While establishing these practices, the students expressed a heightened awareness of the various ways in which they may enhance the practice of environmental stewardship mandated in traditional Islamic texts.