Urban Communities Cohort Framework

As I begin a new school year at the University of Ottawa, I am excited to think about the ways our new Urban Communities Cohort (UCC) students will engage with their teaching practices and community involvement around the city. This infographic outlines some of the core elements of the program and helps us to organize our thoughts about what it means to be a member of the UCC.

Questions and Conversations about Digital Citizenship

What does it mean to be a teacher who asks students to work through questions of identity in various classroom projects? How have our histories with education influenced the way we teach and the ways we ask students to represent themselves? A group of B.Ed students from the Urban Communities Cohort at uOttawa has a frank and candid discussion about these questions.

“If the stars are spotlights, I wanted the sun”: Hacking children’s literature in Raziel Reid’s When Everything Feels Like the Movies

I want to offer up some food for thought about risky texts and the concept of "hacking education." This chapter will be featured in a forthcoming book entitled Hacking Education in a Digital Age: Teacher Education, Curriculum, and Literacies.

Abstract

In addressing the title of this book, Hacking Education, we are asked to consider how hacking might be a necessary part of moving educational discourse forward through a type of “productive destruction” so that educators can “spurn obedience to common sense patterns of acting/teaching/being.”  This paper considers how Raziel Reid’s (2014) When Everything Feels Like the Movies challenges the idea that children’s literature is a place where one can safely escape to avoid confronting the hyper realism of our times through hacking the conventional melodramatic form of historical fiction. When Everything Feels Like the Movies represents how the digital negotiates the liminal spaces of belonging and what is at stake there. In the main character Jude’s world of augmented reality, Reid establishes the allegorical significance of the gay male body as a means to address the social reality of the endangered lives of gay youths, children who do not conform to the readily consumable trope of the unproblematic child. 

Learning about Digital Citzenship through film

In this paper, inspired by the challenge Atom Egoyan provides for educators in Adoration, I offer the film as a heuristic to digital citizenship to read two university driven digital initiatives. I argue that digital citizenship is always emerging, and can be understood as a form of currere, where the personal and historical underpin “digital acts” that rewrite the notion of subjectivities as being disembodied in the seemingly atemporal space of being online. As a teacher educator who is part of the Urban Communities Cohort (UCC) team, one of the five different streams incoming Bachelor of Education students choose upon entering the program at the University of Ottawa, I am interested in exploring the concept of currere as it applies to digital citizenship and asking why it matters to urban schools in Ottawa. My inquiry is part of a larger project entitled, Developing Mobile Media Spaces for Civic Engagement in Urban Priority Schools, located in Ottawa, Canada that is supported by Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant.

Disney Confessions!

What does Disney have to do with education? Disney is one of the most commonplace "educators" of the youngest of children, the movies are an instantaneously recognizable form of public pedagogy (Giroux, 2004). In this recent work with Tasha Ausman, we explore what it at stake in the viewing and learning that takes place in relation to Disney and how pedagogies of affect and questions of what is at stake in our subjectivities through our attachments to Disney can be reproduced in the confessional and anonymous space of the Tumblr world. The feed entitled waltdisneyconfessions@tumblr is a "digital space that enacts a confessional curriculum of desire helping to reproduce Disney ideologies" (Sandlin & Garlen, 2016).