Could targeted inclusion initiatives press Canada's professional theatre community to tap the vast reserve of disabled people disenfranchised by its current practices? In 2015/2016, several long-standing professional institutions dedicated to fostering Canadian theatre joined with Canadian disability theatre artists in order to mark and understand…

In this paper we conduct a deductive analysis, using Sutton-Smith's "rhetorics of play," of the published kindergarten programs that have guided Ontario kindergarten teaching since 1944. Our analysis is used to gain an understanding of how we in Ontario have arrived at a point where play-based learning has been taken up by developers of…

Fundraising and collecting fees are ubiquitous in Ontario, Canada's public schools. Critics assert that these practices perpetuate and exacerbate inequities between schools and communities. In this article we present findings from a critical policy analysis of an advocacy group's efforts to change Ontario's fees and fundraising policies over the…

Background: PISA results appear to have a large impact upon government policy. The phenomenon is growing, with more countries taking part in PISA testing and politicians pointing to PISA results as reasons for their reforms. Purpose: The aims of this research were to depict the policy reactions to PISA across a number of jurisdictions, to see…

Rhetorical analysis, an approach to critical discourse analysis, is presented as a useful method for critical policy analysis and its effort to understand the role policies play in perpetuating inequality. A rhetorical analysis of Character "Matters!", the character education policy of a school board in Ontario, Canada, provides an…

This article investigates an emerging practice in palliative care: dignity therapy. Dignity therapy is a psychotherapeutic intervention that its proponents assert has clinically significant positive impacts on dying patients. Dignity therapy consists of a physician asking a patient a set of questions about his or her life and returning to the…

This article offers a way of using the theory of audience design--how speakers position different audience groups as main addressees, overhearers, or bystanders--for written discourse. It focuses on main addressees, that is, those audience members who are expected to participate in and respond to a speaker's utterances. The text samples are…

Claims that the rhetoric of Quebec sovereignty is based on an appeal to a particular motivated subject, the "Quebecois." Discusses certain consequences for the theory and practice of rhetoric that are suggested by Kenneth Burke's treatment of the term "identification" and an understanding of rhetoric's constitutive and…

In order to examine the value of explicating genre and rhetorical rules for teaching, this study explores the level of consistency between the linear, deductive discourse pattern recommended for school writing and the actual structure of reading materials selected from seventh- and eighth-grade English language arts textbooks. We focus on 25…

A study examined the written English proficiency of Windsor, Ontario francophone eighth-graders being educated entirely in French and compared it to norms for English-speaking eighth-grade children educated in English or French. Results suggest that these francophone students compare favorably with anglophone groups in syntactic maturity and…