Email: jenalee.kluttz@alumni.ubc.ca
Jenalee is a Liu Scholar and PhD student in the Department of Educational Studies. She researches adult learning in social action focusing on environmental and social justice movements in North America. Her current projects explore the individual and collective learning that occurs in solidarity work between climate change, environmental justice, and Indigenous Rights movements in opposition to fossil fuel projects. Some of her other research interests include anticolonial/decolonial learning, climate justice, social movement learning, community engaged learning, climate change education and sustainability education more broadly. In addition to her research, she works as a Climate Change Education Coordinator for the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning where she researches and develops climate change curriculum for secondary education. Outside of her work at the university, she spends her time as an activist and organizer working with a grass-roots coalition on issues of social and environmental justice.
Supervisor: Dr. Pierre Walter (Educational Studies)
Committee members: Dr. Rob VanWynsberghe (Educational Studies) and Dr. Rima Wilkes (Sociology)
A Decolonial Approach to Denaturalizing Norwegian Exceptionalism in Education
Seminar with Kristin Gregers Eriksen, Ph.D. Research Fellow, University of South-Eastern Norway
Monday, May 13, 2019
1:00 – 3:00
PCOH 2012
The Norwegian national imaginary represents the country as a global do-gooder and champion of sustainability, aid, and democracy. This imaginary has served well to market the image of Norway as exceptional both nationally and internationally (Eriksen, 2018). This exceptionalist imaginary is also deeply embedded within the Norwegian educational system, and manifests in the production of knowledge and social identities. Norwegian education is currently going through a large national curriculum reform, where democracy and citizenship, sustainable development, and life skills are set out to be the three core concerns permeating all education. However, in spite of bold policy ambitions, Norwegian educational institutions continue to construct structures of inequality that reproduce racism, colonialism, and epistemic violence as well as unsustainable capitalist economic structures. In this presentation, I apply post- and decolonial perspectives to shed light on the knowledge production and educational narratives that dominate the Norwegian primary school context. Through examples derived from three different papers, I show how the tenacious ideological construction of Nordic Exceptionalism (Loftsdottir & Jensen, 2012) as it appears in social studies education may obstruct the critical literacies the educational system allegedly is aiming to foster. Exceptionalist narratives may effectively absolve educational institutions of their ethical and pedagogical responsibilities to disrupt unjust and unsustainable social relations (Stein, 2018), and stand in the way of possibilities for imagining or doing education otherwise.
Bio: Kristin Gregers Eriksen is a PhD Research Fellow and lecturer in Social Studies teacher education at the University of South-Eastern Norway in Drammen. Her current research is focused on narratives about Norwegian exceptionalism and citizenship in primary school education. Her research and teaching interests include post- and decolonial perspectives on education, Indigenous philosophies, affect theory and education for sustainable development
“From Alternative Schools to School Choice in the Vancouver School District, 1960s to the Neoliberal Present” written by EDST Assistant Professor Jason Ellis and EDST graduate Ee-Seul Yoon has been published in the Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy.
Read it here: https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/cjeap/article/view/43357
Abstract
This article examines the transformation over time of alternative secondary school programs in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC). It approaches school choice from a historical standpoint, to make the point that today’s choice policies are neither entirely recent nor entirely neoliberal in origin. Instead, they are built on past precedent and policy flowing from the right and left of the spectrum. The article traces the alternative schools that first emerged in the 1960s, and the Vancouver school board’s subsequent absorption of them to offer new, alternative programs beyond its regular secondary school curriculum. Vancouver’s alternative secondary programs were soon organized into two distinctive types: (1) remedial rehabilitative alternatives, and (2) selective district specified alternatives. New policy, institutional changes, and philosophical changes in the education sector allowed both types of alternatives to exist, but over time encouraged district specified alternatives to thrive. The provincial School Amendment Act of 2002 represented a watershed for choice as we know it today. It opened attendance boundaries across BC and gave districts the tools to generate their own revenues. Freezing the per-pupil funding it provided to districts at the same time, the provincial government induced districts to compete with one another to recruit students domestically and internationally in order to secure revenue. District specified programs in Vancouver became a key to the district’s competitive ability. By elucidating some of this history of different alternative and choice programs, at the secondary level in Vancouver, this article adds considerable perspective to the current theoretical discussion about how neoliberal philosophy is changing choice in Canadian schools.
Jason Ellis and Ee-Seul Yoon, “From Alternative Schools to School Choice in the Vancouver School District, 1960s to the Neoliberal Present,” Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy 188 (2019): 86-103.
Dr. Sam Rocha has been selected as a recipient of a 2018-2019 UBC Killam Teaching Prize.
Dr. Rocha’s award will be announced at the Faculty of Education meeting in May. He will receive the award at the Spring congregation this May.
Congratulations to Catherine Macala who has recently been awarded the Masters Thesis/Project Award from the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education (CSSHE).
Her thesis is entitled “Bridging the Rural Divide: An Exploratory Study of a Medical School’s Rural Applicants.” Well done, Catherine!
The pleasure of your company is requested at the
Public Presentation of Graduate Research on Leadership Practices
Saturday, April 13, 2019
Education Centre at Ponderosa Commons
6445 University Boulevard
Vancouver
Draft Event Program
PhDs Go Public 2019, 1st Talk: PEOPLE, POLICY, PRACTICE
https://www.grad.ubc.ca/about-us/events/17442-phds-go-public-2019-1st-talk-people-policy-practice
The event will take place on Friday, 29 March 2019, at 17:30, at the Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch, Alma VanDusen Room.
As part of this event, EDST PhD student, Keith Dormond, will be presenting his work entitled “Understanding honour related violence and oppression in ways that are helpful for victims, their communities, and Canadian society”. His work “examines how service providers such as the police, educators, settlement workers, social workers, counsellors and mental health professionals among others, understand and respond to incidents of violence against women that are motivated by notions of honour and shame.”
<https://www.grad.ubc.ca/campus-community/meet-our-students/dormond-keith>
EDST’s Dr. André Mazawi will be delivering the event’s opening speech, entitled “Thoughts in/action, scholarship, and engaging the public good”.
Congratulations to Dr. Bathseba Opini who has accepted a tenure track position as Instructor in EDST.
