Category: Successful Defence

Award recipient | Dr. Yueming Liu

Dr. Yueming Liu, awarded fall 2022 Associate Dean’s Graduate Student Thesis Award

Congratulations to Dr. Yueming Liu, one of two recipients of the fall 2022 Faculty of Education Associate Dean’s Graduate Student Thesis Award. The Faculty of Education Associate Dean’s Graduate Student Thesis Award was established in 2021 to recognize outstanding academic performance of thesis-based graduate students (Masters and PhD) in Education. This $2,000 award is granted to a student in a graduate program in the Faculty of Education who has exemplified academic excellence and research ability, demonstrated leadership ability and/or university/community involvement, and whose thesis/dissertation was deemed meritorious by the Examining Committee.

Dr. Liu successfully defended her dissertation, “Exploring Chinese Instructors’ Perceptions and Practices of Integrating Culture into Tertiary-Level English Education: A Case Study,” on July 15, 2022. Dr. Liu’s supervisors were Dr. Abu Bockarie and Dr. Dongyan Blachford (Dept. of International Languages). Her committee included Dr. Andrea Sterzuk, Dr. Douglas Brown, & Dr. Philip Charrier (Dept. of History). The External Reviewer was Dr. Rahat Zaidi (University of Calgary), and Dr. Chris Oriet (Dept. of Psychology) was chair.

Research story:

Yueming Liu first visited the University of Regina, Faculty of Education as a visiting scholar between 2011 and 2012, sponsored by the China Scholarship Council. The experience influenced her decision to return to the University of Regina for her PhD program in Education. Liu says, “I observed quite a few classes during that year, including Dr. Paul Hart’s methodology, three of Dr. Andrea Sterzuk’s classes related to second language acquisition, and Dr. Douglas Brown’s sociology class and some others. These classes brought me into the academic field and planted a seed in my heart. The emotional bond that I’ve developed with the faculty and the respectable professors brought me back here to do my PhD degree.”

Lui was born and raised in the capital city of a northeastern province in China where she did her undergraduate degree in a Top 20 university, majoring in British and American Literature. After graduating, Liu became an English instructor in the university where she had studied. Because the city is not an international metropolis, Liu says, “Learning about a different language and culture here, like in many other inland cities in China, means that one has limited access to native English speakers and real-life intercultural encounters. Textbooks and the Internet are the primary sites where English learners encounter the target language culture. Addressing the intercultural dynamic is a challenging pedagogical endeavor here when students do not enjoy exposure to real-life culture of English-speaking countries, requiring creativity on the instructors’ part.”

Liu’s interest in her research topic, “Exploring Chinese Instructors’ Perceptions and Practices of Integrating Culture into Tertiary-Level English Education: A Case Study,” was sparked by her own intercultural experiences. She says, “Five years of living and studying in Canada was a transformative journey for me. I was able to be truly involved in communications with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. These experiences caused me to rediscover the complexity of intercultural communication and cultural teaching. I found truth in what Sewell (1999) concluded: Intercultural communication is ‘shot through with willful actions, power relations, struggle, contradiction and change.’ By then, I had started to question the common practice of teaching the generalized culture as bounded by geographic borders. Although a generalized cultural sketch is usually the starting point of one’s journey towards intercultural understanding, it should by no means be the end point. Efforts need to be made to help learners to transcend it. A generalized sum-up of any culture can be incomplete, unfair, destructive, and condescending. A transpired generalized inclination tends to jeopardize, rather than facilitate, intercultural communication. These realizations made me want to see how today’s English instructors in Chinese higher educational institutions conceptualize and approach culture and what efforts they are making to prepare their students for complicated and unpredictable intercultural encounters. As a language instructor myself, I realize how essential it is for us to reflect on and have a clear understanding of our own pedagogical philosophy. Language instructors’ pedagogical conceptualization of culture influences how language learners construct intercultural knowledge, develop intercultural attitudes, adjust intercultural behaviors, and perform intercultural roles.”

Through her research, Liu found that “instructors’ pedagogical conceptualizations of culture significantly influence how language instructors identify cultural points, contextualize culture for pedagogical purposes, and scaffold student meaning-making. The participants conceived culture more as a noun, with its referential meaning ready to be transmitted to the learner in form of objective knowledge, than as a verb (Street, 1991), with its meaning to be explored and interpreted in dynamic social interactions. Further, they perceived culture more as social constraints, in the form of cultural norms that demanded conformity, than as public resources that could be drawn on strategically and creatively to serve purposes. In addition, they viewed culture more as value-free, something that could be grasped at the denotative level, than as value-laden with its barely known face hidden under the veil of cultural myth (Barthes, 1957). This way of conceptualizing culture has limiting effects on classroom meaning-making: the referential, normative (conventionalized), and generalized meaning of culture were highlighted and the personalized, symbolic, and ideological meaning of culture were largely underexplored.”

What impressed Liu most about her findings is that “most participants contextualized culture in self-sanctioned ‘purified’ ways to block off cultural dissonances and there was a general resistance towards problematizing cultural meaning and engaging learners in ‘struggles over meaning.’ I pondered on the possible consequences of portraying smooth cultural landscape and papering over the complexity and ambiguity of culture and how this practice will influence which meanings get inactivated in the classrooms. As I see it, the inadequacy is obvious and profound and this issue deserves more attention from language instructors.”

The research project was memorable for Liu because, she says, it “gave me opportunities to talk to my fellow colleagues, listening to their experiences of teaching culture and observing their practices in the classrooms. This was an exciting and discovering process, during which I reflected on the insights provided by the participants and developed an in-depth understanding of the complexities and challenges involved in culture teaching.”

As recommendations for future research, Liu says, “The meaning-making potentials of the current culture instruction could be expanded through exploring poststructuralist perspectives on culture and reorienting culture pedagogies towards individual-level culture, problematized cultural meanings, and more agentive cultural competence.”

Liu says, “I hope that more practicing language instructors could interrogate their pedagogical philosophy before making attempts to address culture within language classroom. I hope that the inadequacy of tourist-like culture teaching could be widely recognized and dealt with. The increasingly complicated nature of transnational communications poses new challenges for intercultural language education and I hope practicing instructors could take the initiative and seek ways to expand the meaning-making potentials of classroom activities.

Following the completion of her Phd, Liu returned to her university in China to teach undergraduate students English as a foreign Language.  “I feel thrilled at the thought of being able to continue working in the field of intercultural language education. I’m looking forward to working with both teachers and students to conduct action research to practice some of my pedagogical ideas concerning culture teaching. Creating opportunities for students to carry out ethnographical project on culture and applying discourse analysis in culture learning, these are but a few possibilities that are waiting for me to try my hands on,” says Liu.

Liu feels grateful for her experiences at the University of Regina, which she says, “helped me to transform from an instructor to a researcher. The classes I observed during 2011 and 2012 led me into the academic world. For the first time, I got to study educational research methodology in a systematic way. I learned how to design and carry out a sound research project. My supervisors, Dr. Abu Bockarie and Dr. Dongyan Blachford guided me in the field of my research area and supported me all the way when I felt overwhelmed by the complexity of culture and culture teaching. I am filled with gratitude for the professors I met here in Regina.”

Successful defense | Dr. Donna Swapp

Congratulations to Dr. Donna Swapp, who successfully defended her dissertation “School Principals’ Work in Grenada” on Monday, March 21, 2022 from Western University.

Supervisor: Dr. Katina Pollock, Western University
External: Dr. Kirk Anderson, Memorial University
Internal Examiners (Western University): Dr. Gus Riveros (Faculty of Education); Dr. Suzanne Majhanovich (Faculty of Education); Dr. Yasaman Rafat (Modern Languages & Cultures)
Chair of the defense (Western University): Dr. Betty Anne Younker (Faculty of Music)

Donna’s thesis has been nominated for the Cecile DePass Award for best doctoral thesis by a student from the Caribbean and for the the Canadian Association for the Studies of Educational Administration (CASEA) Thomas B. Greenfield Dissertation Award, presented to the author of the best doctoral dissertation in educational administration and leadership completed in a Canadian university during the previous year.

Successful defence | Dr. Brittany Tomin

Congratulations to Dr. Brittany Tomin who successfully defended “Science Fiction, Radical Democracy, and World Building: A Pedagogy of Unknowable Futures” through York University on October 22, 2021.

Committee:

Dr. Jennifer Jenson (co-supervisor, UBC)
Dr. Aparna Mishra Tarc (co-supervisor, York University),
Dr. Kurt Thumlert (committee member/chair, York University)
Dr. Suzanne de Castell (committee member, UBC)
Dr. Kymberley Bird (internal, York University)
Dr. Elizabeth Marshall (external, Simon Fraser University)

Dr. Tomin is a Lecturer – Secondary English Education (High School) with the Faculty of Education since August 2021.

Video: Brittany presents her research:

Soutenance bien réussie | Érika Baldó

Félicitations à Érika Baldó qui a soutenu avec succès son mémoire de maîtrise en éducation française intitulé: “Les défis auxquels les mères-enseignantes de l’immersion française en milieu langagier minoritaire canadien font face” le 8 décembre 2021. Son mémoire était dirigé par Dre Heather Phipps. Le jury de soutenance était composé des membres du comité Dre Sara Schroeter et Prof Nadine Bouchardon (LaCité) et l’éxaminatrice externe Dre Karla Culligan (Faculté d’éducation, University of New Brunswick). Un grand merci à Dre Sheila Petty (MAP) d’avoir présidé la soutenance.
Congratulations to Erika Baldo, who successfully defended her master’s thesis in French titled: “Les défis auxquels les mères-enseignantes de l’immersion française en milieu langagier minoritaire canadien font face” on December 8, 2021. Erika was supervised by Dr. Heather Phipps. Committee members were Dr. Sara Schroeter and Nadine Bouchardon (La Cité). The external examiner was Dr. Karla Culligan, Faculty of Education, University of New Brunswick. Thanks to Dr. Sheila Petty (MAP) for chairing the defense.

Teacher-Researcher Profile

An interview with Dr. Brandon Needham, Principal of Melville Comprehensive School (MCS) and 2020 CBC Future 40 Winner, who successfully defended his dissertation, “Critical Action Research: How One School Community Lives out the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action,” on February 16, 2021. Co-supervisors were Dr. Twyla Salm and Dr. Jennifer Tupper. Committee members were Dr. Michael Cappello, Dr. Anna-Leah King, and Dr. Amber Fletcher. External examiner was Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook (University of Ottawa).

Why did you choose to do your graduate degree at the Faculty of Education, University of Regina?

I completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, Bachelor of Education – major in physical education and minor in history, and a Master’s degree in curriculum studies from the University of Saskatchewan (U of S). I chose the University of Regina (U of R) for my doctoral work based on the reputation of the school, specifically, the notable research being conducted in the area of treaty and Indigenous education. My supervisor, and former U of R Dean of Education, Dr. Jennifer Tupper’s seminal work in treaty education became the basis to explore areas of reconciliation education.

The University of Regina was also one of the only doctoral programs not requiring a one-year residency for doctoral students, which allowed me to study and continue my job as an in-school administrator. This was very important for me, as I was not able to take an education leave from my school division to pursue a doctorate. The flexibility in the graduate programs at the U of R makes academia more accessible to those educators who still want to remain connected to a K-12 context and for that I was grateful.

What were the circumstances that led you to your research topic for your dissertation?

Having enrolled in the winter term of 2015, just as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report and the subsequent release of the Calls to Action occurred, this topic seemed timely. Prior to choosing this topic, I had conducted a research project with Dr. Michael Cottrell from the U of S on the implementation of treaty education through treaty catalyst teachers. My doctoral work was an evolution of this earlier work, which sought to investigate the challenges and opportunities in teaching students about the Indian Residential School (IRS) project.

What need were you identifying?

In my time as a classroom teacher and an in-school administrator, I have identified hesitancy from students and staff to engage fully in the teaching and learning of treaty education, and other Indigenous topics found in the curriculum. This was initially the case for me, too, as I began my teaching career. Having grown up in a town void of experiences with Indigenous peoples, I had to (un)learn many of the things I had come to know about Indigenous peoples. Through my various educational experiences, I gained a more nuanced understanding of myself as a White settler and the privilege that accompanies that position. Wanting to create meaningful change in my school community towards the goals of the TRC, this project offered the opportunity to invite others to consider their privileged positions. Much of the research conducted to this point had been with teacher-candidates; I felt that conducting the research project in my school may serve to help clarify the complexities of reconciliatory work in K-12 contexts.

Briefly outline your research question and findings.

The study was informed by the following research question: “What actions can a school community take to engage in the TRC Calls to Action to become a site where truth and reconciliation become possible?”

The findings of the study have been encapsulated in the following way: By living out the Calls to Action in our school community we learned to:

Begin with ourselves

  • Locate oneself in the context of settler-colonialism by confronting the various ways we have and continue to be shaped by it.
  • Understand the context of where the work is happening, seeking to understand the community we wish to transform.
  • Build capacity in ourselves so as to engage respectfully in difficult conversations we encountered on our journey of reconciliation.
  • Practice critical reflection and understand that the journey toward reconciliation is on-going and evolves with time.

Walk alongside Indigenous peoples on this journey

  • Bear witness to truth-telling (survivor stories and other Indigenous counter-stories).
  • Build and foster respectful relationships with Indigenous community members.
  • Create a support network (Indigenous organizations, community groups, academic institutions) to assist in the journey.

Engage in disruptive work

  • Work collectively and collaboratively to transform the teaching and learning of the residential school project, treaty education, Indigenous sovereignty, and ongoing colonial violence.
  • Encourage and influence those around us to include and infuse Indigenous perspectives, values, and cultural understanding into daily practice.
  • Transform the spaces and places in the school to reflect the historical significance of Indigenous peoples.
    Recognize the potential of schools and individuals in schools to be vehicles for reconciliatory actions.

What was memorable, a highlight about doing this research?

A highlight of doing this research project was having been fortunate enough to share this journey with the colleagues who participated in the study. Our group met several times over the course of the school year in the hope to live out the TRC Calls to Action in our school, which led to many meaningful conversations about the influence we have as teachers to make reconciliation more than aspirational.

What kinds of feedback have you received from others?

I have received very positive feedback from others. I have had an opportunity to share my findings through virtual conferences, with only positive comments coming from those sessions.

Were there any unexpected moments of grace coming out of your studies during a pandemic?

I would say an unexpected moment of grace that came out of this pandemic was shown by my supervisor, Dr. Tupper. She was extremely supportive and understanding of the challenges I faced as a graduate student, principal, and father of four children.

What are your hopes for how your work is taken up by others?

My hope is that this work is taken up in ways that continue to invite others to consider their positionality in our settler-colonial system and how they might use their privilege to explore the shared history between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. More work is needed in how students take up and experience reconciliation education and it is my hope that this project can illuminate some of those possibilities.

While a student, Brandon Needham was named one of CBC’s 2020 Future Forty winners. Read the interview by clicking on the image

 

 

 

 

 

 

Successful defence

Dr. Emily Ashton has successfully completed her PhD from the University of Victoria. Dr. Ashton’s research explores how the cultural connections of childhood are being rewritten under conditions of ecological destruction and political uncertainty. Her research seeks to better understand how child figures of public and popular culture entangle with early childhood imaginaries to create particular worlds.

Successful Defence

On February 28, 2018, Dr. Ian Matheson successfully defended his dissertation Unpacking Reading Comprehension by Text Type: An Examination of Reading Strategy Use and Cognitive Functioning in Poor and Typically-Achieving Comprehenders at Queen’s University, Faculty of Education.

Dr. Derek Berg (Queen’s University) served as Ian’s Supervisor and the following were his committee members: Dr. Nancy Hutchinson (Queen’s University) and Dr. Don Klinger (Queen’s University). External to Faculty was Dr. Valerie Kuhlmeier (Queen’s University), Head/Delegate was Dr. Kristy Timmons (Queen’s University), External to University was Dr. Dawn Buzza (Wilfrid Laurier) and the Chair was Dr. Anthony Goerzen (Queen’s University).

In his study, Dr. Matheson  examined how students build comprehension with different types of text. Poor comprehenders and typically achieving comprehenders, as determined by a standardized measure for general reading comprehension, were compared in their reading comprehension and reading strategy use across narrative, expository, and graphic text. Ian also examined the influence of cognitive functioning on reading comprehension, and to what extent cognitive functions can explain the difference in reading comprehension between poor and typically achieving comprehenders. This research was partially exploratory, where he aimed to validate existing research on cognitive functions, reading strategies, and reading comprehension of text, as well as to contribute new research that distinguishes between text types. Past research has shown that cognitive functions predict reading comprehension and that poor comprehenders have poorer cognitive functioning and use fewer reading strategies than their peers. However, no research to date has made distinctions between different types of text, specifically graphic text, and how cognitive functioning and reading strategy use relate to comprehension.

Successful defence

On Tuesday, November 28, Dr. Alexandra Stoddart successfully defended her dissertation, “Physical Literacy: A Journey of Understanding and Development” at the University of Saskatchewan.

Dr. Louise Humbert served as Alex’s doctoral supervisor and the committee members were Dr. Adam Baxter-Jones, Dr. Kent Kowalski, and Dr. Sarah Oosman. Her external examiner was Dr. Lynn Randall from the University of New Brunswick.

Alex will be joining the faculty in the HOPE Subject area as of January 1, 2018.