Education WithOut Borders _EWOB_ 8th Annual Faculty-Wide

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                                                                                  Presentation Abstracts
                             Education With/Out Borders (EWOB)
                             8th Annual Faculty-Wide Symposium
                                    October 23 - 25, 2009

                                      Presentation Abstracts
                                          (By Session)



Friday:
Session A-1 (Fireside) 18:30 – 20:30

Title: Philosopher’s Café

Abstract: Presenters and participants are invited to come together during this first evening of EWOB to
discuss their research and graduate experiences in an informal, friendly atmosphere. Topics that
engage symposium participants, both conceptually and through embodied activity, are welcome.
Complimentary refreshments will be provided.



Saturday:
Session B-1 (Helm Lodge) 10:45 – 12:15

TITLE: Exploring Teachers’ Experiences of an Educational Change: “Bridging A Learning Gap”

PRESENTER: Jas Uppal

ABSTRACT:
This research study reports the experiences of teachers attempting to understand a complex
educational change such as assessment for learning. Little documentation is available specifically
focusing on teacher experiences of transformation and improvement in schools in this context, it is
hoped the study will provide some insight into the process and influence future school improvement
programs. The teachers chose to develop their understanding of assessment for learning through the
professional learning communities (PLCs) offered at the inner city school in British Columbia’s Surrey
School District. Through teacher interviews, the enquiry explores the teachers’ experiences of the
process against Fullan’s (1993) identified core capacities to teacher change.
   The research identifies the complex nature of school improvement; how leadership, climate,
relationships, emotions and systems all influence the impact on teacher learning. The study examines
teachers making sense of assessment for learning and what processes and structures can support or
hinder teachers’ understanding of the educational change.



TITLE: “Sokha” – A glimpse into Cambodia

PRESENTERS: Allan MacKinnon and Jillian Chisolm

ABSTRACT:
In 2008, 24 students from South East Asia graduated from Simon Fraser University with a Masters
Degree in Education. Through a CIDA funded project for economic development, members of the
Faculty of Education and the Office of International Development at SFU have spent the last five years
working in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. This summer, three Canadian SFU education graduate
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students were chosen to visit SE Asian to observe the project activities and then return to share their
experience. This film tells the story of Heng Sokha, a Cambodian woman who with courage and
determination shares her journey of hope.



Session B-2 (Wallace Room) 10:45 – 12:15

TITLE: language, um, like totally, eh?

PRESENTERS: Jodi MacQuarrie, Harri Dewijze, Gord Sturrock, Naoko, Takei, Veronica Hotton, Jin
Thindal, and Charles Bingham

ABSTRACT:
In this presentation, we will offer a dynamic rendition of various unexpected aspects of language. As
we will show, language is central to teaching and learning, but language is not exactly what most of us
think it is. For this presentation, we will draw on the following thinkers who write on language: Michel
Foucault, Ferdinand de Saussure, John Dewey, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bahktin, and more. Our
presentation format will be a extemporaneous play, and we will encourage audience participation.



TITLE: Walking Sasamat Trails: Education on Foot

PRESENTERS: Veronica Hotton

ABSTRACT:
Recently I have begun to wonder and write about walking and what educative value there could be in
walking with a teacher—where the teacher could be yourself, another person, and the more-than-
human world. What are the dialogues that take place on foot (Anderson 2004) rather than sitting,
standing or lying down and how can being on foot facilitate education? Could the place of walking
influence the dialogue between a teacher and student (i.e. city versus forest, known versus unknown
landscapes)? This presentation will be on foot using the trails of Sasamat. Selected quotes will act as
waypoints along the trail.



Session B-3 (Cedar Room) 10:45 – 12:15

TITLE: Re-membering the Body: An Affective Consideration of White Pre-service Teacher Resistance

PRESENTER: Sadie Donovan

ABSTRACT:
Research on the programming that prepares pre-service teachers to work with youth in critical and
culturally appropriate ways reveals that curricula is often met with resistance on the part of students
(Schick and St. Denis, 2003; Marx, 2004). This resistance often occurs on a deep emotional and
visceral level and can greatly impede one’s receptivity to critical discourse. Despite the important role
that emotions and affects play in pre-service teacher resistance, they are broached with trepidation by
education theorists who either (1) seek to move beyond emotions to consider prevailing sociocultural
assumptions or (2) attempt to avoid emotions by developing pedagogical strategies that are sure not
to disrupt students.


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        In this presentation, I argue that within education scholarship, we need to bridge the gap
between discourses of emotions and affect (the body) and to consider both in conjunction with one
another, specifically within the context of pre-service teacher education. I provide a brief overview of
how emotions and affects have been theorized in educational scholarship, noting the limitations of
each when applied separately to pre-service teacher resistance. Extending the works of critical
education scholars like Zembylas (2006) and O’Loughlin (1998), the objective of this presentation is to
reaffirm the need for scholarship which explores the meaning of emotions and affects as interrelated,
albeit distinct, components of pre-service teacher resistance.



TITLE: Hissing into Literacy

PRESENTERS: Kathryn Ricketts with Paul Shaker and Angela Flumerfelt

ABSTRACT:
If literacy is about ‘reading the world’, how can disenfranchised youth ‘open the book’? Kathryn
Ricketts, PhD candidate in Arts Education, answers “Through the body of course!”

Embodied explorations through a creative, dynamic process are at the core of the training methods
with Friends of Simon, a tutoring program run through Simon Fraser University. Friends of Simon. is
comprised of tutors from the undergraduate and post-baccalaureate levels currently enrolled in Simon
Fraser University who work with immigrant and refugee children after school in sites throughout
Lower Mainland, Vancouver, B.C.

This workshop will demonstrate some of the theories and methods behind the training with an
interactive example of how reading leads to creative and expressive physical playfulness and how this
is cyclical in moving students to turn back to the written word both creatively and critically.

From a simple movement exploration based on a poem of S’s interwoven with sound we will explore
the literary device, alliteration.



Session C-1 (Helm Lodge) 14:00-15:30

TITLE: Bang the drum, move me! Music as the teacher, body as the student; what we learn from each
other?

PRESENTER: Jin Thindal

ABSTRACT:
This mixed fun session will explore ethnomusicology and allow participants to experience the
embodiment of non-western music. The presentation will include a brief history of Bhangara music that
originated in Northern India to how it is used today by mainstream artists such as Nelly Furtado and
Jay Z. We will also explore what role this music plays in the lives of so many of our students and why
it is so popular among certain sections of our community. This will be followed by the implementation
of several Bhangara dance moves to music that turns into a joyous celebration of practical dance. This
will be a opportunity to see how the music affects the body, what joy it can bring and how our bodies
can respond to unknown and unfamiliar sounds, beats and rhythms. Given that music is always
experienced by the body and not just the mind, here is an ideal opening to engage in the full
embodiment experience of both emotional and physical, feeling it in the body as well as the mind.
Plus, have some fun!

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TITLE: Narrative Voices of Embodied Pedagogy in Stillness, Silence, and Sound

PRESENTER: Lorna Ramsay

ABSTRACT:
As an educator, I invite my class of future teachers to places of deep listening in still silence and
sound of shared landscapes of daily living. I encourage a sharing of autobiographical narratives, my
students’ reflections approaching definitions of collaborative learning and worthy teaching.
        As a musician, my shared narratives about teaching special needs students demonstrate my
places of detached and vulnerable awareness, spaces without tempo and time, places to let go, where
I seek to be present with my voice that reflects, reveals, and (re) searches my body’s prolonged focus
to sensation in empowering moments of reflective places and spaces before aesthetic expression,
before performance in art and teaching. I seek to demonstrate my taking on of details of the world
around me as flutist, poet, and photographer with an invitation for intense conversation of theory and
practice framed in pedagogical spaces of stillness and silent imagery through photography, sounds of
landscapes in poetry, and lyrical descriptions of flute playing.
        I assume all students are aesthetic expressers who provoke and blend corporeal history of
pulse and rhythm disclosed with sound-full stillness in landscapes of experiences. In constant re-
visioning of narrative autobiographical of many text forms, we question interpretive frameworks of
teaching practices in a re-view of blurred borders between self-made definitions of the
learner/educator relationship, phenomenological nuances of re-lived experiences.



Session C-2 (Wallace Room) 14:00-15:30

TITLE: Shock and awe: Biophilia through bibliophilia

PRESENTER: Peter Kovacs

ABSTRACT:
My presentation would examine the potential role that reading can play in environmental education.
The most obvious way to make children fall in love with things natural is by raising them in bucolic
settings. But since most children now grow up within city limits, this tried and true “method” is not
readily available for parents. I would argue that with a combination of “shock and awe” – that is, with
literature that paints a horrifying picture of our devastated environment (or the devastation that may
come should we not alter our behavior) and literature that presents an awe-inspiring inside look at
creatures around us that we tend not to notice – it might be just possible to expand our fairly limited
circle of care to include many more (if not all) living things. This, in turn, could lead to a drastic change
in our behavior and, ultimately, in a healthier and richer environment.



TITLE: Making up Lost Ground: Past Descartes to Gendlin

PRESENTER: Larry Green

ABSTRACT:
If philosophy is understood as the identification of eternal truths than the postmodern era, with its
situated truths, can be seen as the end of philosophy. Postmodernism suggests that because there

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are no justifiable, eternal truths, then "anything goes". Or, as one of Dostoevsky's characters claimed,
if God is dead, then everything is permitted. While using different vocabularies, both claims point to a
similar crisis. The consequence of these negations is a kind of confusing, back and forthness between
our “default settings” and something emergent but unarticulated. At times we act and speak as if
Cartesian dualism continues to be the assumed framework. Yet whenever we stop to reflect upon the
assumptions underlying our claims, we notice that there is no ground. We’re left with the feeling that
something is fundamentally wrong about our way of being in the world. Eugene Gendlin's response
to this crisis was to develop a method that utilized, rather than regretted, our situatedness. By directing
our attention to our felt sense of any circumstance, he showed us a method for developing concepts
that “made sense” out of our situation -- not eternal truths but provisional ones. He developed an
approach that called for a connection between our minds and bodies; between our bodies and our
situation. This connection shows that not “anything goes” but rather that only certain, existential
understandings carry the situation forward. Finally, this presentation will suggest that Robert Kegan’s
developmental framework, has a lot to offer in terms of understanding our culture in transition.



Session C-3 (Cedar Room) 14:00-15:30

TITLE: The multiple literacies of multilingual undergraduate students in higher education: implications
for ‘Standard Academic English’

PRESENTERS: Steve Marshall, Hisako Hayashi, Paul Yeung

ABSTRACT:
A growing body of literature focuses on “academic literacies” in higher education reading and writing.
According to this approach, students’ writing practices at university are understood as social practice,
related to and impacted upon by social context and other literacy practices. In our study, we analyze
the inter-relationship between six students’ formal academic literacies and the less formal literacies
that they use in other contexts.
        In the interactive presentation, we present data from an ongoing study of the academic literacy
practices of six multilingual first year undergraduate students at SFU. We highlight the important inter-
relationship between the formal academic literacies that students are expected to produce on
undergraduate courses and the multiple social and digital literacies that students use in less formal
contexts such as social networking. We present the following data from the study: a brief a review of
the most recent literature in the field; data from interviews with six multilingual students, which focused
on their linguistic background, identities, and literacy practices; and samples of the formal and less
formal written texts of the interviewees, including samples of writing in which different languages are
used together.
        The presentation raises the following questions for discussion: [i] do changing student
demographics and changing literacy practices require a rethinking of what should constitute “standard
academic English” at university? [ii] how should university instructors respond to students who
produce written texts in their classes that seem informal and inaccurate?


TITLE: Searching for the Perfect English

PRESENTER: Glichelle Pereya

ABSTRACT:
As native speakers, we often assume that because we identify words as English that we can decode
their meaning. Nevertheless, sometimes they make no sense that we think that the speaker has a
linguistic, or even cognitive, deficiency. In many cases, ESL/EFL teachers are exposed to language

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“distorted” through filters like strong accents and unfamiliar phrases; if they hear only the distortion
and ignore the individual, they threaten their students’ success by classifying them as deficient.
Unfortunately, the single factor of English language competency assessed through standardized
English tests used by a multitude of authorities: governments, employers, university admission boards,
etc. can essentially control a student’s destiny. However, many scholars argue that such tests suffer
from bias towards certain peoples, cultures, and Englishes.

Strangely enough, the word Englishes is not in the dictionary. However, the contrasting truth is that
various Englishes have come to exist (or I suppose they must exist) in the world. They exist to serve
different purposes and cater to distinct audiences. Thus, teachers must realize that these test results
do not determine intelligence. Instead, the results are mere indications that inform language teachers
where they need to improve in order to safeguard their students’ futures. Essentially, teachers must
fight to prepare students to face people outside the classroom who may not offer the same
understanding provided by their family or their teachers. Students must be empowered with
substantial personal confidence to view their worth as separate from the judgments they receive from
these tests.



Session D-1 (Helm Lodge) 16:00 – 18:15

TITLE: Roots of Empathy: Art and Social Justice

PRESENTERS: Sylvia Richardson

ABSTRACT:
What is the effect of interactive pedagogy that allows students the ability to create knowledge and
meaning, reflective of the world they live in? What impact does this method have in their confidence,
and sense of efficacy?

This research will adopt the interactive, problem-based, teaching method of Paulo Freire, whose book
Pedagogy of the Oppressed seeks to transform education from a prescriptive, “banking” method, that
serves to perpetuate the status quo of people as objects of production into humanistic and libertarian
pedagogy.

My EWOB presentation seeks to connect learners to create community and communion among
humans and nature. Devoid of a universal language, I engage learners using movement to embody
issues of social justice. Using art to connect the learners to the information presented will allow the
students to explore issues from an intellectual and emotional perspective; which may lead to a greater
understanding of our individual and collective capacity for empathy and ability to create transformative
social change.

Dance Performance: A 4 minutes dance is performed in front of an installation depicting images of
war. The dance interprets the scenes being depicted on film through movement.

My passion for dance, poetry, music and creative writing, have greatly enriched my life. I am confident
the use of art, music and dance in the facilitation of course material will prove a powerful tool for
learning and developing our capacities for empathy and intrinsic valuing.




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TITLE: moving words

PRESENTERS: Daniela Elza and Su-Lin Tseng

ABSTRACT:
A collaboration between a poet and a dancer. We compose in space when moving our bodies, as we
compose on the page when placing our words on it.

We invite you to come to this creative space where you are listener and creator in an authentic
relationship embodying a moment of being. Participants will be invited in a workshop atmosphere to
translate movement to word and word to movement. How do we read a dance, and how do we dance
a poem.



TITLE: Stories from the Land Beyond Time: Using Freedom of Information Legislation to Explore how
Governments create curriculum for Public Servants

PRESENTERS: Marc Weiler

ABSTRACT:
With the passing of the Canada School of Public Service Act and the establishment of the federal
organization, the Canada School of Public Service, there is irrefutable evidence that the Canadian
governments create curriculum for public servants. However, the academic literature contains little that
recognizes that governments routinely create curriculum for the public servants who work in our public
institutions. Why should ignorance of such important curricula created in the public interest be the
status quo when Freedom of Information legislation makes accessing documents about public servant
curriculum easy? In this multi-media rich session, I share stories of how I have used freedom of
information to explore “Post-Entry Public Servant Curriculum.” Follow me into the opulent hallways,
offices, and instructional rooms at the National School of Government in the United Kingdom;
celebrate as the Bank of Canada, flanked by an investigator from the Information Commissioner of
Canada on one side and a global economic crisis on the other, finally agreed to release records about
employee learning, training, and development; witness the Privy Council Office retreat into the ancient
Roman tradition of arcana imperii – state secrecy – when summoned to release eight learning plans;
and gasp as one freedom of information request to Environment Canada returns a $23,000 whale of a
response! These stories will introduce you to the world of “Post-Entry Public Servant Curriculum” and
teach you how to use freedom of information to make researching it a snap.



Session D-2 (Wallace Room) 16:00-18:15

TITLE: The effect of institutional merit-based aid on student aspirations, choice & participation

PRESENTER: Kate Ross

ABSRACT:
North American higher education financial aid research includes significant debate about the effect of
merit-based aid. In particular, questions arise as to whether the growth and use of merit-based aid has
decreased access and eroded needs-based aid (Access Denied, 2002; Heller & Schwartz, 2002;
Junor & Usher, 2007). While there are many North American studies focused on needs-based aid and
access, there is little research that has examined who receives institutional merit-based financial aid
and whether it is a factor in supporting participation in higher education (Longanecker, 2002).

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One view of institutional merit-based aid is as a competitive recruitment tool to attract students who
have demonstrated they are academically capable and have the greatest attributes for success as
defined by a given institution. This is desirable to institutions as it ensures that they are attracting the
best and the brightest and crafting a class with the greatest potential to succeed and bring prestige to
the university. Typically, in Canada, institutional merit-based aid that is provided as part of an
admission offer is broken into two categories: automatic entrance scholarships based on academic
performance only or academic performance plus additional attributes such as leadership capability
and community service. Evidence suggests that these attributes are correlated with higher socio-
economic status (Cabrena & La Nasa, 2000; Ehrenberg, Zhang, & Levin, 2006; Frenette, 2007). This
raises the questions of whether merit-based aid enables access to students of all backgrounds or
primarily supports the participation of the middle and upper income students who would participate
independent of aid.



TITLE: Archaeology and place-based education: possibilities for rural school districts

PRESENTER: George Kaufmann

ABSTRACT:
“Do not worry, we are not going to educate Indians to compete with White men for their jobs!”
Clifford Sifton, Superintendent, Department of Indian Affairs, circa 1900.

Recent Foundation Skills Assessments (FAS) show a recurring trend for the Stikine School District.
The largest school district in the province (#87) continues to underachieve as many Aboriginal
students perform poorly on the provincial assessments and do not graduate from secondary school.
This paper will discuss culturally-relevant curriculum options for those students who might otherwise
slip through the cracks of our education system in our remote communities. Many archaeological and
culturally important sites and locations are readily accessible to the district schools and have the
potential to yield important data on the prehistoric past of the vast wilderness area. Our
archaeological investigations during 2007 to 2009 of the traditional village at Tahltan and the adjoining
areas have unearthed a wide range of material culture that could enliven the social studies and
science curricula of the local classroom. This paper intends to discuss some of the educational issues
in the last century that have affected the outcomes of the Stikine students, and to show through visual
displays of the recorded artifacts and cultural features, that the local landscape holds promise for a
culturally relevant curriculum in the 21st Century. The growing interest in this region by speculative
multi-national corporations with whetted appetites for the massive deposits of copper and other base
metals in the traditional territories, is a call to encourage the young students of the Stikine to assume a
role of heritage stewardship and write their own cultural histories before they are buried forever
beneath the heavy equipment of “progress and development.” As this discussion will demonstrate,
archaeology has the potential to engage the intellect of local students in ways that the district schools
have failed to comprehend.



TITLE: Communitarian practices Seminar: An opportunity to think again of school and educational
practices in indigenous communities of Colombia

PRESENTER: Alexandra Henao-Castrillón

ABSTRACT:


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The communitarian education is a practice that is understood as a network of heterogeneous
processes and dynamics of cultural, and social interaction in which re-creation, and transmission of
culture are possible. These processes should be part of reflections by diverse societies to define what
knowledges and educational practices they need to produce and reproduce for their own future.
Human beings do not learn exclusively at school although this one has apparently achieved a central
role in human development since childhood at such a point than the educational process at school
seems to be considered by Western societies as a natural, and mandatory process in which every
single girl and boy must be involved, even those societies and communities where school just begin to
be part of them, like it is the case of indigenous communities in Colombia.
        From this point I would like to share the experience of the Seminar: "Communitarian practices"
[in Spanish: Proyección Comunitaria] as part of the lately created undergraduate Program offered to
indigenous people: Bachelor in Pedagogy of Mother Earth in Universidad de Antioquia, Medellin,
Colombia. The Seminar encourages its students to re-think school, the educational practices in their
communities, the roles that play different people, places, and moments involved in daily learning
processes; this is, we encourage them to strengthen the communitarian educational practices.



Session D-3 (Cedar Room) 16:00-18:15

TITLE: Development in Teaching Practice: Pilot Study Methods and Findings

PRESENTER: Annique Boelryk

ABSTRACT:
This presentation will involve sharing and discussing methods and themes from a small, exploratory
pilot study on the experience of college faculty in the development of their teaching practice. The main
intention of the study was to gather insight into the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting
qualitative data grounded in a hermeneutic phenomenological method (Van Manen, 1997). The coding
of the interview data was done based on a recursive process described by Weston et. al. (2001) The
presentation will begin by sharing the methodological elements of the study.
         Although this was a small study and very preliminary, several interesting themes emerged from
the data related to development in teaching practice. These themes, related to the catalysts and
process of development in teaching practice, will be shared with the group and discussed in light of
other literature on professional growth and development.



TITLE: Teacher Inquiry & Teacher Identity: connections and questions

PRESENTERS: Marlowe Irvine, Barb Kolbus, Kathy Neilson

ABSTRACT:
Drawing on the vast literature concerning teacher inquiry and what it offers to teachers and to
education, we wish to discuss the potential identity shift from teacher to teacher-inquirer, and how
those two identities differ. We are interested in the impact of this shift on both the individual teacher
and the discourse of teaching. In Field Programs, we work to create communities of teacher inquiry
that support this shift in identity. In this work we find both successes and tensions. Using the model of
a community of inquiry, we would like to facilitate discussion around some key questions that come
out of our struggle to reconcile the demands of an academic institution and the principles of practice-
based discourse-embedded learning. These would include:
• What is the difference between a teacher and a teacher-inquirer?


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• How much ownership should the teacher inquirer have over the inquiry agenda? How much
influence should the teacher educator have?
• How does teacher inquiry contribute to knowledge about what it means to teach and to learn? (Can
teachers be legitimate knowledge producers?)
• What is the difference between “inquiry as an assignment” and “inquiry as a disposition”?
• What role does external assessment play in teacher identity?



TITLE: Becoming: Being Reflective on our Learning Experiences

PRESENTERS: Carol (Myungdock) Suhr, Angel (Hsiao-Chuan) Hsu, Nipaporn Tangtorrith, Aven
(Ruo-Han) Wang, and Sookja Kim

ABSTRACT:
“Without the past, there is no present, nor the future.”

  This is the reason why it is important to be able to be reflective on our learning experiences.
Reflection is learning through our everyday experiences, a self-inquiry, and a transformation process
of being and becoming the practitioner one desires to be. It brings us closer to Praxis -- “reflection
and action upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1970, p. 36), and we believe that by
becoming reflective, we would constantly be reminded that being a teacher means to constantly think,
learn, and change.

  Five international graduate students, all of whom are from different Asian countries and with different
learning/work experiences, will be sharing their reflections about their experiences as international
graduate students attending a North American graduate school. The presenters would also share how
their ideas and thoughts have been transformed, or have been influenced, while being in a different
context and with people from various backgrounds. Each reflective piece would include a brief
summary of personal history, learning experiences from coursework, personal thoughts on the
program, and future goals.

 After the panel presentation, discussion (i.e., question and answers) session with the audience
would follow.



Sunday:
Session E-1 (Helm Lodge) 9:30-10:30

TITLE: Leading With/Out Borders: A Panel Discussion

PRESENTERS: TBD

ABSTRACT:
This morning panel is intended to bring together presenters and participants in an engaging
conversation around notions of ‘leading’ in education. What does leading mean in contexts within and
beyond the borders of educational institutions, within and beyond educational contexts? This panel is
dialogic, intended to be a conversation between panelists and sessional attendees and invites both
parties to think of what ‘leading’ might be in these and other contexts left unmentioned.




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