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Michael LeBlanc – Successful Oral Defence (EdD Dissertation)
Please join us in congratulating Michael LeBlanc who successfully defended his EdD Dissertation on November 18 of 2025.
Title:
By the Bootstraps: Teachers, Grassroots Computing, and Educational Culture in British Columbia, 1966 to 1986
Abstract:
This dissertation is a history of computer culture in British Columbia’s (BC) education system from 1966 to 1986, a period of teacher-led, grassroots computer adoption, integration, and interpretation. As cultural artifacts, computers were more than instruments—they were symbols that held meaning for people. I first discuss what they meant in the context of the 1960s computer counterculture, where computers were interpreted as a transformative force leading to personal empowerment. This ethos sparked various computer-based cultural initiatives in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the People’s Computer Company and Community Memory, an early social network. Beliefs in accessible and convivial technologies transferred to Vancouver, BC, where activists formed a computing organization called INFACT and their own Community Memory system. By the late 1970s, INFACT members were involved in the early computer hobbyist movement, promoting microcomputers as devices for everyone to access, understand, and control.
Some BC teachers were also hobbyists, and computers held a similar significance for them. Just like members of the countercultural computing movement, teachers were immersed in the social, political, and cultural currents of the Sixties. As teachers increasingly adopted a social justice orientation and progressive pedagogy, they viewed computers as a means to achieve both social and professional change. Computers would support their transformation into facilitators and curricular leaders, and lay the foundation for greater social equity. Rather than opposing computers in the classroom, as other scholars suggest in an American context, teachers led computer adoption and innovation in BC. Computers represented an opportunity to reshape the philosophy, practice, and business of education.
This progressive, teacher-led culture of computing began with William Goddard in 1966, who encouraged “computers for the whole school,” and continued through the Instructional Uses of Microcomputers Pilot Project in 1980; it concluded with the Provincial Advisory Committee on Computers in 1986. This cultural history of educational computing in BC draws on a variety of primary sources, including archival documents and reports, contemporary newsletters and magazines, newspaper articles, conference recordings, and oral interviews. It is a history rooted in teacher agency and local reinterpretations of global ideas about education, technology, and power.
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Jason Ellis
Dr. Alison Taylor
Dr. Robert Brain
We are thankful for the Examining Committee’s contribution and expertise.
Dr. Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo, External Examiner
Dr. Arthur (Skip) Ray, History, University Examiner
Dr. Leslie Paris, History, University Examiner
Dr. Marina Milner-Bolotin, Chair of Examination Committee
Congratulations Michael!
Arushi Goswami – Successful Defence (M.A. Thesis)
Congratulations to Arushi Goswami on successfully defending her M.A. Thesis on November 27, 2025.
Thesis title:
Deconstructing the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) Framework and The Happiness Curriculum in the Context of Educational Neoliberalism and Emotional Governance
Examining Committee:
Dr. Lindsay Gibson (EDCP), External Examiner
Dr. Taylor Webb (EDST), Committee Member
Dr. Mona Gleason (EDST), Research Supervisor
Abstract:
This thesis examines Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) through a comparative analysis of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL, 2020) framework and Delhi’s Happiness Curriculum (HC, 2019). It addresses two research questions: What implicit values and assumptions about emotions are embedded within the CASEL and Happiness Curriculum frameworks, and how does the Happiness Curriculum in India adapt, resist, or reproduce CASEL’s approach to social emotional learning? and How does SEL function as a tool of emotional governance by using governmentality to shape students into self-regulating individuals in ways that align with broader socio-economic systems? Using Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis together with a Foucauldian lens of governmentality, the study begins with an within-document description and keyword analysis for each framework, moves to cross-document comparison to identify convergences and adaptations, and then explains the findings. The findings indicate that by centering competencies like self-awareness, self-management, and “learning outcomes,” both frameworks organize emotions as skills to be optimized, individualize responsibility for improvement, and translate well-being into measurable performance targets. Read through governmentality, these patterns normalize self-monitoring and position well-being alongside achievement and readiness, shaping students as self-regulating individuals. Across both frameworks, the discourse privileges “positive” feelings such as calmness, happiness, and gratitude, with limited recognition of discomfort, anger, or grief as part of learning and social life. The thesis concludes by outlining implications for practice and design: broaden the emotional repertoire recognized in SEL frameworks, reduce the reliance on learning outcomes as proxies for emotional growth, and support participatory, context-grounded approaches that attend to well-being and collective flourishing within and beyond school.
Well done, Arushi!
Crochet Butterfly Making Workshop
Registration link: https://edst.educ.ubc.ca/events/event/crochet-butterfly-making-workshop/
Congratulations to Lisa Winsome White on a Successful Oral Defence (PhD Dissertation)
Please join us in congratulating Lisa Winsome White, who successfully defended the PhD Dissertation on November 14 of 2025.
Title:
ETHICAL SPACE OF ENGAGEMENT: EXPLORING PERSPECTIVES AND PRACTICES OF INDIGENIZATION IN POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION AS SITUATED IN PLACE
Abstract:
The notion of “Indigenization” within the academy has been taken up by Indigenous scholars and activists for more than two decades, and more recently, it has become a priority in the tertiary sector in Canada with federal and provincial endorsement. Still, Indigenization remains a relatively ambiguous concept within higher education. This doctoral dissertation offers a portrait of Indigenization, providing insight into this process within the academy in Canada. It explores the history of this land we now call Canada and the forces that have gotten us to where we are now, having to re-Indigenize, decolonize, and work towards reconciliation. It considers the contemporary landscape of Indigenization, how it is characterized, envisioned, and practiced in higher education. Using an Indigenous Métissage methodology and theories of Ethical Space and Ethical Relationality, this study looked at two unidentified public post-secondary institutions as positioned on Indigenous territories in British Columbia, Canada, to catch a glimpse of Indigenization in situ within a snapshot in time. Multiple methods were employed to gather knowledge at each case site including physical and virtual space observations, policy reviews, semi-structured interviews with senior administrators, and a questionnaire offered to other institutional personnel.
Findings revealed the practical, everyday challenges of Indigenization within institutions such as organizational silos, gaps in communication and perspectives, and a lack of Indigenous peoples to guide, support, and direct Indigenization initiatives. Results also showed deeper and more ideological barriers to consequential Indigenization such as an unhealthy institutional culture, the absence of a cohesive, holistic, and living vision for Indigenization as well as a sincere and robust accountability structure to measure goal progress and success. These outcomes indicate that transformational change is required. At the crux, institutions need to focus on the decolonization of attitudes and perceptions, policies and practices and, simultaneously, the adoption or equal inclusion of an Indigenous governance approach. An ethical space of engagement (Ermine, 2007) is suggested to promote transformational change and bring together disparate perspectives within distinct and complex institutions of higher education to realize meaningful Indigenization. Honouring the spirit, intent, and principles of a treaty partnership is recommended to achieve consequential Indigenization.
Supervisory Committee:
Dr. Jan Hare
Dr. Margaret Kovach
Dr. Judith Walker
Dr. J.D Lopez
We are thankful for the Examining Committee’s contribution and expertise.
Dr. Jean-Paul Restoule, University of Victoria, External Examiner
Dr. Kimberley Huyser, Sociology, University Examiner
Dr. Dustin Louie, Educational Studies, University Examiner
Dr. Charles Menzies, Chair of Examination Committee
Congratulations Lisa!
