This open access book brings together the disciplines of childhood studies, literary studies, and the environmental humanities to focus on the figure of the child as it appears in popular culture and theory. Drawing on theoretical works by Clare Colebrook, Elizabeth Povinelli, Kathryn Yusoff, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour the book offers creative readings of sci-fi novels, short stories and films including Frankenstein, Handmaid’s Tale, The Girl with All the Gifts, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and The Broken Earth trilogy. Emily Ashton raises important questions about the theorization of child development, the ontology of children, racialization and parenting and care, and how those intersect with questions of colonialism, climate, and indigeneity. The book contributes to the growing scholarship within childhood studies that is reconceptualizing the child within the Anthropocene era and argues for child-climate futures that renounce white supremacy and support Black and Indigenous futurities.
Congratulations to Dr. Donna Swapp and team who have been awarded $75,000 (USD) from the Spencer Foundation’s Racial Equity Special Grants Program for their research project: “Decolonizing School Leadership across Transnational Spaces: Exposing, Disrupting, and Transforming Inequitable Colonial Regimes in the Work and Wellbeing of Black School Principals in Canada, Grenada, and Jamaica.” Dr. Swapp is the Lead Principal Investigator. Co-Principal Investigators are Dr. Katina Pollock (Western University), Dr. Fei Wang (University of British Columbia), and Dr. Annette Walker (Health and Wellness Coach and Educational Leadership Consultant).
The $75,000 represents the maximum amount dispersed under this highly competitive grant. Projects selected for this funding must reach beyond documenting conditions and paradigms of persistent racial inequalities to disrupting the reproduction and deepening of inequality in education. Dr. Swapp and her team will apply a decolonizing, transnational lens to expose and interrogate racial disparities in the lived experiences of Black school principals across the different sites and co-construct with research participants anti-racist and equity-focused understandings, strategies, and recommendations for fostering more equitable arrangements of work and ameliorating wellbeing for racialized school leaders.
This project aligns well with the Faculty of Education’s 2021-2026 Strategic Plan, Transformative Education Transformed, which documents our strategic commitment to “work collectively to identify and change the causes of inequitable systems of power and privilege” and our commitment to “develop and engage in a diversity of research and scholarly output that has local, national, and global impact” as well as the broader University of Regina’s Strategic Plan, All our Relations, and the attendant five areas of focus.
Save the date for the next Whisperings of the Land Indigenous Speaker Series, Thursday November 17, 2022 @ 10:00 a.m. via Zoom. The presenter, Dr. Kim TallBear, will speak on Science v. the Sacred, a Dead-End Settler Ontology.
Dr. Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) (she/her) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the weekly podcast, Media Indigena.
Settler-colonial society works to separate so-called spirituality from the material. This worldview inhibits understanding Indigenous knowledges as knowledge based on centuries of observations and lived relations with other-than-humans. Instead, Indigenous peoples are viewed as “spiritual,” and the disciplines tend to implicitly denigrate Indigenous understandings of the world as beliefs rather than knowledges. The knowledge/belief divide stems from a hierarchy of life that the sciences share with major religious traditions. With this understanding of sentience and agency, some humans rank above others according to race or gender, for example, and humans rank above other life forms. More recently, “new materialists” and multi-species ethnographers have analyzed other-than-humans in less hierarchical and more “vibrant” or agential, if still secular terms. I bring such ideas into conversation with Indigenous ideas of being in good relation in ways that disrupt longstanding racial hierarchies of thought.
Congratulations to Heather Carter, who has been chosen as one of the University of Regina’s candidates for Vanier’s Canada Graduate Scholarships-Doctoral Awards 2022-23 competition.
Heather (B.Ed.’08 SUNTEP-PA, M.Ed.’19 UofR) is a Métis woman from Prince Albert, SK, and is now living and working on Treaty 4 territory, the territories of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, and the homeland of the Métis/Michif Nation. Before moving to Regina, Heather worked as a middle years teacher for 8 years and then in adult education at Dumont Technical Institute for 2 years. She also earned her M.Ed. (C&I with a focus on Indigenous Leadership and Pedagogy) in our community-based master’s of education program offered in partnership with Gabriel Dumont Institute in Prince Albert.
Currently, Heather works as an Indigenous Student Success Facilitator and runs the nitôncipâmin omâ Student Success Program at the University of Regina. About her work, Heather says, “Through this first-year program, I support a cohort of Indigenous undergraduate students as they transition to university and provide mentorship as they move into the second year of their degree. By working in partnership with my colleagues in the ta-tawâw Student Centre, I am proud to lead a program that provides a culturally focused, community-centered approach to post-secondary education.”
While Heather is working toward a Ph.D. in Educational Administration and Leadership, she says, “My research focus is anti-oppressive leadership in higher education, and understanding the impact that ubiquitous racism and oppression has on the identity of Indigenous and racialized learners in post-secondary institutions.”
Elder May Desnomie, a Woodland Cree from Peter Ballantyne First Nation, was born and raised in the northern Saskatchewan hamlet of Sandy Bay. Her family on both of her mom’s and dad’s sides and grandparents going back generations lived off the land, hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering. Before she was taken to the Catholic-run Guy Hill Indian Residential School in The Pas, Manitoba at the young age of 6, May also lived off the land: “I was 100% immersed in my language and culture until I was taken away to residential school in 1956.”
If being far away from home at such a young age wasn’t enough hardship, residential school was made harder because of the parental visitation policies: “Parents weren’t allowed to visit in residential school. They had a room they called a parlor next to the principal’s office. The parents would come to visit there, and they were only allowed one hour,” says May.
Though attending residential school didn’t destroy May’s Catholic faith, it did affect the faith of some members of her family. “There are four of us that went to residential schools and two will not have anything to do with the church. I personally didn’t suffer any physical or sexual abuse.”
Still, May recognizes the damage done by the policies of residential schools, She says, “I have nothing good to say about residential schools. They destroyed our cultures, our languages, our families. For myself, I met many good people along my journey. Although I am not going to say anything nice about residential schools, I will say there were nice people. However, the policies were destructive: the residential school was trying to destroy our way of life. That is still their goal: They still want to assimilate us, to fit us into the Canadian multicultural dream, but they can’t forget that we were the first people on this land.”
May moved to Wilcox to attend high school at Athol Murray College of Notre Dame boarding school after 9 years as a student at Guy Hill. She says, “I was sent there as part of the integration policy. My aunt was a teacher/nun at the elementary school there, and I could see her because she was a supervisor.” The change in landscape from her northern roots was a big change for May, “It was a culture shock for me, being from northern Saskatchewan with the rocks and the forest. Honestly, Wilcox has the flattest land in Saskatchewan, I swear. And we didn’t have the water that we had up north. When I was a child, you could drink water right from the lakes up north. We drank the water from the dugout at Wilcox and it was bad.”
After being in an institution for 11 years of her life, May decided to move to Saskatoon to take her Grade 12 from E. D. Feehan Catholic High School. “I had to find some freedom. I don’t know why, but I ended up in Saskatoon. Indian Affairs put us in boarding homes.”
May decided to become a teacher after graduating high school because she wanted to help change the narrative of Indigenous people in Canadian society. She says, “When I was in residential school, I did not learn my Indigenous history, like the history of Indian people. We were told we were savages and pagans and I didn’t think that was right. I was hoping I could change that narrative in the classroom to some degree.” After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan with a Bachelor of Education, May and her husband Gerry Desnomie returned to the North, moving to Red Earth First Nation where she taught Grade 1 students.
Changing the narrative has been the work of May’s entire career in education: “It’s coming along slowly, but now they teach treaties in the classroom, and now they have native studies in high school, but they still need to change the curriculum to have more of the Indigenous perspective in there.” To help with curriculum change, May is sitting with an elder’s group that is advising the provincial government on curriculum.
May also has a heart for reparation work. She belongs to three groups dedicated to this work: the Intercultural Grandmothers Uniting (IGU), which is made up of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women working toward building bridges of understanding, respect, trust and friendship; the Aboriginal Non Aboriginal Relations Community (ANARC); and a TRC committee, with the Catholic Church. “They are hoping to repair the wrongs done by the church to Indigenous people, so that is why I joined that group.”
In her role as Elder-in-Residence with the Faculty of Education, May hopes to continue her work of changing the narrative about Indigenous people. She says, “I hope I can tell the wider society about Indigenous people, that we are part of society and we feel the way they do: We have our joys and our sorrows, our hopes and our dreams. I want them to know about our history, our Indigenous history. Many of them wonder about and have so many stereotypes about Indigenous people, that ‘they’re lazy, they don’t want to work, or they are alcoholics,’ and those are the ones you see. The majority of us are okay, we are successful. This is what I want to tell the general public. The government has made us invisible in the past, through residential schools and restricting us from leaving our reserves, and they told the wrong story about us.”
Being made invisible damages Indigenous people; May says, “They don’t know the damage they are doing to our person; it makes it so you’re not proud of yourself as an Indigenous person. I always tell my students to be proud of who you are; I know you can’t be successful until you are proud of who you are. Otherwise you are always trying to hide who you are.”
“I want to tell the right story. But not just me, I will have a hard time trying to educate society. Canadians will have to go out and educate themselves, read books, and find about our history and they will know who we are and can be our allies, and help us move forward and walk with us.”
Elder May Desnomie replaces the former Elder-in-Residence, Elder Alma Poitras, who retired recently.
The Bachelor of Education After Degree (BEAD) Convocation Prize was established by the Faculty of Education to encourage and recognize BEAD students. The BEAD Convocation prize is awarded to the most distinguished graduate, with an overall internship rating of “Outstanding” and the highest grade point average in the program.
Congratulations to Jillian Marie Durham, Bachelor of Education with Great Distinction
Jillian Durham completed her degree through the Yukon Native Teach Education Program with a grade point average of 94.76%. Jillian was also a recipient of the Academic Silver Scholarship in fall 2021. She has lived in Whitehorse, Yukon from the age of 8, spending much of her time at the piano. During high school, she maintained a private music studio, teaching beginner students. Durham has a Bachelor of Music degree from Mount Allison University. Upon completion of her degree, she continued private teaching in Whitehorse where she realized that she had a deep desire to be a school teacher. Durham has also been the musical director of two major productions involving youth, and has been a leading lady for the Frantic Follies as well as the House Manager. She was accompanist and vocal coach for the Cafe de Voix, a showcase for local vocalists, as well.
One memorable accomplishment in her final term of her after degree was the opportunity to present an aesthetic response to learning. Durham was able to use her musical literacy in a meaningful way, which not only allowed for her own deeper learning, but also gave opportunity for her classmates to learn more about her passions and background. This empowering experience is one that she will keep at the forefront as she enters the K- 12 teaching field. Jillian started a temporary position in Whitehorse, Yukon and is pleased to put into practice the lessons she has learned.
As a final faculty spotlight for the term, we are shining light on Dr. Marc Spooner, a full professor with the Faculty of Education, who has recently taken on the role of interim director of CERCD (www.cercd.ca), the Faculty of Education’s research unit. He works with both the educational psychology and education curriculum and instruction areas, specializing in qualitative and participatory action research. A multiple winner of the Prairie Dog’s Best of Regina Poll for Best U of R Professor, Spooner says that, “teaching, and hopefully modelling, critical and creative thinking in the service of democratic consciousness, participation, and engagement” are what he is passionate about in his work.
Spooner is well-known in the community for his advocacy for those who suffer from homelessness and poverty. He takes an active interest in participatory democracy and activism. More recent interests include academic freedom, audit culture, social justice and the effects of neoliberalization and corporatization on higher education. He, with Dr. James McNinch, recently co-edited the award-winning book, Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education, as part of an ongoing discussion regarding the purpose of higher education in a climate of neoliberalism.
With the “aspirational hope of nudging the arc of history towards justice,” Spooner is busy planning the second symposium, which will facilitate the continued exploration of roles, challenges, conflicting tensions, and promising re-imaginings to address the question of the university’s purpose in an age of performance-based funding and audit culture. The symposium boasts an impressive line-up of speakers: Have a look and plan to attend: https://www.whatareuniversitiesfor.ca/speakers/
As advice to students, when choosing their academic program and courses, Spooner says, “Students should follow their interests, passions and curiosity.” Further, Spooner says, “Learn from one another, support each other, play, study, practice, and keep asking questions.”
Kelsey Mooney, MEd’22, recipient of Associate Dean’s Graduate Student Thesis Award
Congratulations to Kelsey Mooney (M.Ed.’22), one of two recipients of the fall 2022 Faculty of Education Associate Dean’s Graduate Student Thesis Award and also the Faculty of Education’s nominee for the President’s Distinguished Graduate Student award at the fall 2022 convocation.
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 (Master’s 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.
Mooney successfully defended her thesis titled, “A Community-Based and Mixed-Methods Approach to Exploring the Dove Confident Me Five Session Body Image Intervention in a Holistic School Classroom on July 19, 2022. Her Supervisor was Dr. JoLee Sasakamoose and Committee Members were Dr. Twyla Salm and Dr. Mamata Pandey (Sask Health Authority). The External Reviewer was Dr. Caroline Pukall (Queens University) and Chair was Dr. Amber Fletcher (Dept. of Sociology & Social Studies).
Research Story:
From a young age, Kelsey Mooney has dreamed of becoming a psychologist. To this end, after graduating from high school in her home town of Watrous, she completed her undergraduate degree, an Honours Bachelor of Science (with a Psychology Specialist, Criminology Major and a Sociology Minor), at the University of Toronto.
With a desire to return home to be closer to family and friends, Mooney moved back to Saskatchewan to continue her educational journey. However, Mooney felt some uncertainty about which route she should take to further her education: “I was uncertain on whether clinical or educational psychology was the right route for me, so I applied to both clinical and educational psychology programs and was admitted to the Educational Psychology program at the University of Regina in 2020. I chose the thesis route specifically because I wanted the option to potentially pursue a doctorate degree in the future and knew that completing a master’s thesis would prepare me well for doctoral research,” says Mooney.
The idea for the topic for her thesis took root in the first year of Mooney’s M.Ed. program. Growing up heavily involved in the world of dance as a competitive dancer and dance teacher, Mooney says, “I have witnessed many ways that an individual’s feelings about their body and self-esteem can influence their mental well-being. Because of these experiences, I have had a longstanding interest in promoting body confidence and self-esteem.”
In a Counselling Girls and Women course taught by Dr. Bree Fiissell, Mooney says, “We often discussed topics such as self-esteem, body confidence, body image, and the impact of the current societal emphasis on appearance on how women and girls feel about themselves. Through these discussions, I became further interested in how body confidence could be promoted to prevent the development of mental illnesses such as eating disorders, depression, or anxiety. Because of my longstanding interest in body image and confidence, I began to look into how I could transition these interests into my own research and that is how I landed on my own thesis project where I explored the effects of the Dove Confident Me program aimed at improving body confidence in adolescents.”
Through her research on the effects of the Dove Confident Me program, Mooney discovered “a gap in gender inclusivity, which may limit the ability for the program to improve self-esteem and body confidence. These findings were unexpected, but they identified an important gap in body-based education programs that needs to be addressed to ensure these programs are actually meeting the needs of adolescents struggling with body confidence today.”
This unexpected finding changed the course of her entire thesis. Mooney says, “I think this goes to show that even when research doesn’t go as planned, there is a lot of value in exploring where the research takes you to ensure meaningful results to this field of research.” Identifying this lack in the program ended up being the high point of the research process. Mooney says, “The highlight for me came at the end of my data analysis phase when I was able to recognize that even though the project did not go as planned, we were able to identify a really important issue and gap that is currently not being pursued in research in this area.”
As a recommendation from her findings, Mooney says, “If researchers or educators wish to improve body confidence in their classrooms and adolescents today, we have to pay close attention to the gender dynamics of these classrooms and ensure the material being taught is not promoting the exclusion of any individual’s gender identities.” Mooney hopes that her research will “prompt a larger discussion on how teachers, researchers, and intervention developers can promote inclusivity and create a positive environment for adolescents in their classrooms.”
As for future plans, Mooney recently began her first year at the University of Saskatchewan as a student in their 5-year Clinical Psychology MA/PhD Transfer program. She says, “My plan for the future is to obtain my doctorate degree and practice as a clinical psychologist.”
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.”
Aujourd’hui, nous mettons en vedette Stephen Davis, professeur adjoint et étudiant doctoral dans la Faculté d’éducation à l’Université de Regina. Stephen enseigne au Baccalauréat en éducation française (le Bac) et contribue à la formation des enseignant.e.s de l’immersion française et des programmes francophones en Saskatchewan. D’ailleurs, Stephen a accepté de servir comme coordinateur par intérim de la Maîtrise en éducation française.
Stephen est passionné de l’apprentissage des langues, de l’enseignement plurilingue et de l’éducation inclusive et équitable. Il souligne l’importance de l’enseignement du français en situation linguistique minoritaire à travers les prairies canadiennes, ainsi que la valeur du plurilinguisme et de toutes langues minoritaires en Saskatchewan. Aux yeux de Stephen, les moments les plus inspirants de l’enseignement sont quand les étudiant.e.s partagent leurs connaissances culturelles et leurs répertoires linguistiques diversifiées pour apprendre ensemble.
Quant à sa recherche, Stephen s’intéresse à plusieurs sujets en éducation, y compris l’immersion française, l’éducation équitable et inclusive, l’enseignement plurilingue, la politique linguistique et l’éducation des élèves nouveaux-arrivants au Canada. Stephen a reçu une bourse doctorale du Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines (CRSH) pour explorer les expériences des élèves réfugiés et les perspectives des enseignant.e.s en immersion française à travers les prairies canadiennes. Les élèves réfugiés sont souvent exclus de l’immersion, et Stephen s’intéresse à apprendre comment adapter ces programmes pour mieux inclure et soutenir tous les élèves nouveaux-arrivants. Stephen est également impliqué dans d’autres initiatives langagières en Saskatchewan, incluant un projet pilote avec Saskatoon Open Door Society pour enseigner l’anglais comme langue additionelle aux élèves réfugiés, ainsi qu’un camp d’immersion michif. Dans son enseignement, dans sa recherche et dans son service communautaire, Stephen cherche à promouvoir la pédagogie plurilingue et l’éducation équitable et inclusive au Canada.
Si Stephen avait des conseils à offrir aux étudiant.e.s du Bac, il les encouragerait à saisir l’occasion de collaborer avec des camarades de classe provenant des communautés culturelles et linguistiques diversifiées. Les étudiant.e.s du Bac viennent de plusieurs pays autour du monde et ont tellement d’expériences valables à contribuer à l’éducation en Saskatchewan. Stephen inviterait tous les étudiant.e.s à partager leurs cultures, leurs langues, leurs perspectives et leurs expériences vécues pour contribuer à une éducation interculturelle et transformative.
Dans son temps libre, Stephen aime faire du vélo, faire du ski de fond et jouer au basketball. Il joue également du saxophone dans un groupe de jazz à l’Université de Regina. Stephen adore surtout voyager, faire du camping et passer du temps avec sa femme et leur chien.
Dr. Emily Ashton has published a new open access book: Anthropocene Childhoods Speculative Fiction, Racialization, and Climate Crisis
