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Exploring past school experiences to shape the practice of anti-oppressive pedagogy

This research explores the use of memories of past school experiences to help identify unnamed and unchallenged incidents of oppression that occurred in elementary and high school. What are the implications for educators when past school experiences indicate that racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and other harmful practices took place, but went unexamined and unclaimed as such? Three inter-related reflective analyses are used to investigate the experiences of teacher candidates, the thesis author, and practicing teachers to fully explore this query. <p>The first section examines teacher candidates reactions to anti-oppressive education. Negative reactions by students are most often defined by scholars as resistance. This section reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of this definition. The memories students shared about their past schooling suggest looking beyond the current scope of theories that define negativity as resistance.
The second section includes a retrospective analysis of the authors past school experiences where oppressive practices went unidentified and unchallenged as such. In the third section, Narrative Inquiry is used to gather stories from practicing teachers whose memories also indicate unnamed examples of oppression. Participants identify school memories that helped shape their current teaching practices and enhanced their commitment to addressing racism, classism, sexism and other issues in schools today.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:SSU.etd-02212006-112853
Date21 February 2006
CreatorsMooney, Elizabeth
ContributorsNicol, Jennifer A. J., Miller, Dianne M., Collins, Michael, Wason-Ellam, Linda
PublisherUniversity of Saskatchewan
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-02212006-112853/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Saskatchewan or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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