The overarching objective of this study is to become more closely attuned to the politics of curriculum by identifying the discursive practices employed by governments to position curricular reform. In particular, this analysis aims to show how the twinning of neoliberalism and neoconservatism has served to justify shifts in curriculum at three…

With the rise of neoliberal reforms and efforts to privatize education, there is a growing need to examine how actors and groups from the public and private sectors influence educational policy change together. In this article, we advance a critical approach to understanding the changing discursive space of educational politics by following…

"Call to Action 93" requests revision of the Canadian citizenship materials to include more information about treaties and residential schools. Although the citizenship materials have been analyzed in terms of how they present the concepts of citizenship, multiculturalism, and Canadian values, little work has been done on how…

This article uses the theoretical perspectives of critical discourse analysis (Mayr, 2008; Fairclough, 1992) and critical pedagogy (Pagowsky & McElroy, 2016; Accardi, et al., 2010) to explore how language is a socially regulating structure used to represent and maintain power within the academic context. These perspectives are applied to two…

Adult education programs are often grounded in problematic assumptions about learners' inadequacies. The purpose of this article is to critique such assumptions through presenting a history of the manner in which representatives of Canadian governments conceptualized the education of Inuit adults from the 1940s through the 1980s. Using…

The residential school system is one of the darkest examples of Canada's colonial policy. Education about the residential schools is believed to be the path to reconciliation; that is, the restoration of equality between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in Canada. While the acquisition of the long-ignored history of residential schools has…

This paper addresses language policy and policy-making in Canada as forms of discourse produced and reproduced within systems of power and racial hierarchies. The analysis of indigenous language policy to be addressed here focuses on the historical, political and legal processes stemming from the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism…

This paper examines the meanings educators produce about their experiences working with trans and gender-nonconforming students, and the effects of this discursive process. In this paper, I draw on 62 interviews with school staff conducted in British Columbia to examine how educators understand their role in an institutional context (a school)…

Many post-secondary institutions in Canada over the past decade have made the transition from college to university status. The researchers on this team were hired in the midst of such a transition at one western Canadian institution. As new faculty we were navigating the normal tides of adjusting to a new faculty position, but our induction…

In this article, we use a narrative methodology to understand the work of three teachers who have constituted identities that have allowed them to challenge the contemporary discourse of science education. We describe how teachers' evolving identities have been constituted through their responses to the discourses and situations of their work and…

This qualitative study builds on earlier research on language and identity by focusing on how Canadian Generation 1.5 university students enact their identities through talk-in-interaction. Drawing on (applied) Conversational Analysis (CA) to analyze critically the production and management of social institutions in talk-in-interaction in tandem…

Effective and therapeutic relationships between health care providers and clients are important elements for positive health outcomes. Children with intellectual disabilities (IDs) and their parents face unique challenges in establishing relationships with health care providers due to social and institutional stigma and stereotypes associated with…

This paper describes how a locally developed school ranking system affected student enrolment patterns in British Columbia over time. In developing an annual school "report card" that was published in newspapers and online, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute created a marketplace for school choice by devising an accountability scheme…

Using a critical discourse analysis, informed by poststructuralist theory, we explore the research phenomenon of coerced partnership. This lens allows us to pay attention to the social relations of power operating in knowledge generation processes, especially as they affect feminist researchers in adult education. We propose an alternative vision…

This article provides a feminist poststructural analysis of the authors' academic labor during a State of the Field Literature Review of Gender and Adult Learning for a government-funded educational body. Drawing on Foucault and feminist theorists, the authors pay particular attention to how power seeps down through the system to our bodies in our…