Peer Review Collection, 2012

Peer Review Collection, 2012 Catherine Broom, PhD, Editor David Reid, Masters Student, Assistant Editor Citizenship Education Research Network (CERN) Collection 2012 Table of Contents Editorial Introduction 3 About the Authors 5 Citizenship, Nationalism, “Nation-building” Stories, and the “Good Citizen”: Associating Citizenship Education and Public Schooling; Catherine Broom 7 The Militarization of Canadian Citizenship and Immigration; Trevor Gulliver 18 Free The Children and Popular Media: Maintaining Relations of Power and Dominance; Lynn DeCaro 32 Intercultural Journey: Understanding Students' Experiences Abroad; Larisa Hayduk 48 Factors Contributing to Current Aboriginal Language use in Canada: A Call for Social Justice; Olenka Bilash 62 Performing the Innocent Stranger: Exploring Immigrant Identities and Education; Christine Cho 76 Justice-orientated Citizenship and the History of Canadian ESL and Literacy Instruction; Douglas Fleming 90 Capacity Building: Teaching from a Global Citizenship Perspective; Katrina Isacsson, Lorna R. McLean, and Joanne Lalonde 105 While copyright of these papers belongs to CERN, the authors retain the right to share their papers with their students and post them on their personal websites. The authors are also solely responsible for the content that is included in their papers. Scholars may quote from these papers and include them in their courses, as long as recognition is given to both the author and to CERN. 2 Citizenship Education Research Network (CERN) Collection 2012 Editorial Introduction This is the second annual CERN Collection to be compiled from papers presented at the year’s CSSE conference. The authors were given the opportunity to update and expand on their original presentations, and were subject to blind review by two peers prior to the posting of this collection. Those interested in contributing or reviewing are encouraged to contact the editor ([email protected]) prior to July 5, 2013. It is the idea of identity that stands out most strongly throughout these articles. Each author is able to touch upon the construction, elaboration, manipulation or analysis of identity with direct focus or tangential reference, and together create a brief narrative. The articles in this collection are thus ordered according to themes surrounding identity, with transitions provided by the natural intermediaries emerging from the authors’ independent focuses. The collection begins with three articles discussing Canadian identity, loosely and variably defined, and how it is distinguished and upheld. First, Broom’s research delves into history and the use of textbooks as a means to instill solidarity into citizens and create a myth of the Canadian: peacekeeping, proud, and pluralistic. This picture of Canadian identity is, at least partially, the product of a continuous flow of deliberately manufactured valiance in the retelling of the ancient Greeks through feudalism to contemporary Canada, with missteps such as residential schools mentioned as overcome obstacles. The subjectivity and opposition of this material, detailed in the article’s conclusion, applies heavily to the same idea of uncritical thought in public arenas found in Gulliver’s work. Moving from the classroom to the Citizenship Ceremony, Gulliver describes a nearly identical presentation of Canadians, although the revisionism is concentrated on military and recent government decisions. The concerns are similar; those new to Canadian culture, due to youth or immigration, are confronted with officially approved images of stoic soldiers. Regardless of the verisimilitude of the image, no means of confirming or confronting the provided identity are forthcoming. Broom and Gulliver’s articles suggest that critical thought, a cornerstone of education and several of the following articles in this collection, appears not to be a component in select pieces of literature intended to create a quintessential Canadian. DeCaro’s work carries that idea outside of the public body and into non-governmental organizations, exploring how the same peacekeeping, proud and pluralistic identity can support and alter fundraising and activist activities. Working within the framework of the ‘Good Citizen’ as opposed to the ‘Bad Activist’, DeCaro notes the risk involved in creating a Canadian identity; the helpful Canadian contrasts with the needy third-world citizen. Coupling the difficulty of impacting change without critical analysis and the possibility for philanthropic NGOs to be labeled as bad activists when applying that same criticism to governmental actions, the literature presented in DeCaro’s work suggest that large organizations such as Free the Children may perpetuate the exoticism of those receiving its aid. Considering that Free the Children is maintained primarily by youth, the issue is brought closer to the heart of this collection. The second portion involves the creation of Others, within or outside of Canada, as identities often without agency. As was the case with DeCaro, such a creation may occur with a simultaneous reinforcement or alteration to Canadian identity. Hayduk’s article describes this co-creation in an academic and intentionally supportive setting, wherein Canadian youths were immersed in a foreign culture and asked to reflect regularly and through multiple media. Not only was the behavior of the others scrutinized, but the expectations and assumptions of the students were considered with an informal critical stance. Although all the Canadian students have ancestral connections to the other culture, the issue of mixed identities is not one that arises; Canadian identity stands firm. Hayduk and 3 Citizenship Education Research Network (CERN) Collection 2012 DeCaro, despite supporting the efforts and intentions of their respective subjects, both note that the identities of Others, and Canadians, requires deliberate, critical thought. Bilash and Cho take the approach of creating an Other from opposite, yet immediately corresponded, sides. Bilash focuses on the history, political overview and continuous struggle of Aboriginal languages, including figures to illustrate the potentially dire situation; unlike other languages in Canada that have small or shrinking bases of first language speakers, Aboriginal languages lack a source of continual immigration from which to draw. Since the newer generations have little support to learn native languages, the time to save them is extremely limited. This, however, is the peculiarity; according to the article, the First Nations of Canada are treated, in so far as governmental language support is concerned, as outsiders, or non-English speakers. As described in the first several articles, Canadian identity was created, and it does not appear to speak Cree. Cho instead focuses on newcomers to Canada. The issue of identity is confounded by this newness, as established Canadians have a personal identity as Canadians, and presumed identity for newcomers, and an unintentionally clumsy and inherently problematic manner of determining identity specifics: “Where are you from?” On the other hand, newcomers are busy decoding Canadian identity, masking their own identity as a matter of courtesy, and pigeon-holing themselves by answering such questions. The author presents a third problem: these newcomers are teachers and must adopt the additional identity of a teacher. Taken together, the task for such immigrant teachers is daunting, and not one they can expect to overcome. Instead, the onus lies on Canadian education programs to encourage critical analysis of discourse in order for established Canadian teachers to better communicate with their newly arrived peers. The final portion of this collection, as introduced by Cho’s concept of educating student teachers about effective interaction with immigrant teachers, deals with honing the ability to dissect an identity belonging to either oneself, an other, or a collective Other. Fleming looks at a small sampling of ESL and literacy education teachers and, through a series of interviews, notes that trends popular in academic circles already exist among teachers, if without the formal labels. Specifically, critical literacy and justice-oriented citizenship are considered essential by many of the interviewed teachers, although neither term was widely used. The disconnect between pedagogical researchers and ‘field’ teachers is a concern to the extent that new theories or concepts with promise, or perhaps offering superior means to teach in areas as typically multicultural as ESL and literacy education, may have no means of reaching teachers. The exceptions are student teachers, since innovative BEd programs can bridge this gap between cutting edge academic theory and the applied world of the classroom. The final article, by Isacsson, McLean and Lalonde analyzes the impact of a two-day global education institute which comprised a series of workshops and panel discussions that brought together student candidates, teachers, professors and NGO representatives. The results demonstrate how the institute significantly impacted the student teachers’ capacities to critically reflect on issues of global citizenship. Based on this experience, a majority of the participants saw themselves as capable of integrating these topics into their future classrooms. These articles explore a variety of other topics not touched upon here, and readers may find comprehensive themes neither noticed while editing or intended by the authors. It is the variety of such writing

Load more