Mindfulness practices have been increasingly adopted in schools across Canada and beyond. While previous literature has explored a range of purposes for mindfulness, little is known about the ways in which it is broadly understood by communities. News media serves as a key source of public discourse on topics like mindfulness in education and can…

One understudied area of adult education and lifelong learning is the role of media as educator and policy player. This article describes how the authors used "critical discourse analysis" to examine how asylum seekers, migrant workers and their advocates have challenged long-standing discursive framings of them as benefactors of…

Media play an important role in young people's lives as an agent of socialization, both generally and with regard to mathematics. To understand the mathematics-related messages disseminated to young people via popular media, we analyzed portrayals of mathematics and mathematicians in over 40 media examples (television shows, movies, websites,…

The author examines discourses of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and World Englishes (WEs) in the commercials for 2 standardized English tests: the International English Language Testing System for study abroad in English-dominant countries and the Canadian English Language Proficiency Index Program for Canadian permanent residency and…

Jeffery Baldwin died in 2002 in the care of his maternal grandparents. The case received intense media attention at various times over an almost eight-year period. Along with other public documents, the media coverage permits an analysis of the practice errors by Child Protection Services that are related to the failure to protect Jeffrey. Nine…

This study examines how international education programs in British Columbia have been discursively framed by government and media sources. Over the past two decades, international education programs have expanded in number and scale in the province, a phenomenon that has been interpreted by some education researchers and media sources as…

In this paper, we undertake a particular policy critique and analysis of the gender achievement gap discourse in Ontario and Canada, and situate it within the context of what has been termed "the governance turn" in educational policy with its focus on policy as numbers and its multi-scalar manifestations. We show how this "gap…

Using a qualitative lens, this study investigated the role of digital media in the life of a five-year-old girl. The study focused on determining what this five-year-old knew about technology, what digital tools was she currently using and how important were these tools in her everyday life. Data collection included semi-structured interviews…

This paper explores the role of media in shaping adult literacy discourse and policy in Canada. The authors show how journalists, newspapers and other media personalities have directly and indirectly influenced (1) government and public perception of adult literacy and (2) the creation of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's…

The media's response to the release of "Math Instruction that Makes Sense" (2011), a research report by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP), helped spark a public controversy and spur the Saskatchewan government to reexamine the Ministry of Education's math curriculum. The purpose of this article is to examine the CBC's…

Social media allows for a wealth of social interactions. More recently, there is a growing use of social media for the purposes of health education. Using an adaptation of the Networked student model by Drexler (2010) as a conceptual model, this article conducts a literature review focusing on the use of social media for health education purposes.…

Over the past several decades indigenous people in Canada have mounted hundreds of collective action events such as marches, demonstrations, road blockades, and land occupations. What the general public knows about these events and their causes overwhelmingly comes from the mainstream mass media. For this reason, media coverage of these events…

There is an absence of research on the commercial advertising of gambling as it relates to casinos. This study examines print, radio, television and point of sale casino ads that aired in Canada. Using quantitative and qualitative methods we analyze a convenience sample of 367 ads that aired or were printed in 2005 and 2006. Our findings indicate…

The current study examined 1316 South Asian youth socialized in progressively Westernized contexts: "traditional" Indian homeland single-sex schools, "transitional" Indian homeland co-educational schools, and the immigrant "diaspora" in Canadian schools. Results showed youth in the three contexts were similar on…

Ontario's new Character Development Initiative is analyzed to determine whether it can be characterized as political spectacle. Examination of official policy texts, media reports, speeches, web pages, webcasts, and events at the Character Development Symposium suggests that the Initiative contains many elements of political spectacle; however,…