Looking back and learning from Indigenous knowledges in education holds the key to supporting change in educational spaces today to be more inclusive and wholistic. Indigenous practices, passed down from generation to generation, hold important knowledge that can be used in classroom teaching. My hope is that by using this Indigenous lens of…

Exploring built pedagogy, one college set out to disrupt structure and create a community of research by erecting a teaching lab yurt and inviting faculty to create a cohort of action researchers teaching in the yurt. The round shape of the yurt facilitated a more democratized learning environment where students found themselves a greater part of…

Using researched perspectives of bodies and embodiment, alongside dramatic structures, where bodies are foregrounded, this article looks closely at bodies and embodiment inside of school settings. Specifically, it investigates a community in Southern Ontario and the perceived, affective, relational, and critical ways that study participants story…

University can be a critical time for queer identifying youth as they attempt to navigate new relationships and heteronormative and, sometimes, hostile environments. Involvement in queer student groups is one strategy to develop protective mechanisms for these students. This research examines the effect of participation in a queer advocacy group…

This study employs ethnographic inquiry to present the lived experiences of Chinese international students while attending the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. The findings display the transformative experiences of this group, including language acquisition, academic and social challenges, and the strategies by which the cultural…

Purpose: This study is a quantitative exploration of a new construct the authors label as "academic culture (AC)." Treating it as generalized latent variable composed of academic press (AP), disciplinary climate (DC), and teachers' use of instructional time, the purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of this construct to be a…

An important element of doctoral studies is identification with the academic community. Such identification is often complicated by part-time student status. In this paper, two part-time doctoral students and their supervisor employ Lave and Wenger's concept of legitimate peripheral participation to explore, through a critical socio-cultural lens,…

The development of computer-mediated communication enables teaching and learning to take place across geographical boundaries. An online synchronous learning environment with cyber face-to-face features affords students the sense of learning together online. This study reports a novel design of organizing a 16-week seminar for doctoral students…

Learning, as Aboriginal people have come to know it, is holistic, lifelong, purposeful, experiential, communal, spiritual, and learned within a language and a culture. What guides their learning (beyond family, community, and Elders) is spirit, their own learning spirits who travel with them and guide them along their earth walk, offering them…

As secondary educators seek strategies to support reluctant and disengaged learners, a greater understanding of the learning sciences (how people learn) becomes more important. This article examines the emerging knowledge base on the learning sciences and investigates how what has been discoveries about how and why people learn have practical…

Schools are central, public institutions. On any given day, about 20 percent of the Canadian population spends at least part of its day in a school building. By age 18, students will typically have spent about 15 percent of their lives in schools. Administrators and teachers in contemporary schools face significant challenges. Globalization…

Across Canada there is increased attention to the important relationship between the quality of learning environments--particularly effective teaching--and student achievement. "What did you do in school today?" proposes a multi-dimensional framework of student engagement as a core idea for improving the quality of teaching and learning…

This study examined writings of Canadian adult educators for the purpose of describing their field of inquiry. The study described the field by its four basic areas of inquiry--learner, learning, process, and environment--and by the components of each area. The methodology was divided into three phases: creation of a glossary of descriptive adult…

The role that individual learning proficiency, individual personality characteristics, and chance occurrences in the learner's environment play in self-directed professional development was examined through semistructured interviews with a purposeful sample of eight professional men and women of high achievement with no postsecondary schooling in…

Ideas of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre are developed for application to education. The school implied by MacIntyre's philosophy emphasizes content, substance, virtue, the learning environment, and the learning process. In a pluralist society, a school of choice, rather than a common school, is preferable. (SLD)