Category: Musings

Final Blog Post

Following the Textual Sources writing prompt (Liese et al., 2017) shared by my Advisor, Jordanne Christie:

I feel that the most relevant piece of writing to my project – one that I return to over and over again – is Masinda, Jacquet and Moore’s 2014 article: An Integrated Framework for Immigrant Children and Youth’s School Integration: A Focus on African Francophone Students in British Columbia – Canada. The authors describe their previous research, outcomes of their interviews, and set out an integrated guiding framework for teachers and administrators to implement in the integration process of immigrant children and youth.

The article explores the experience of immigrant African Francophone students in particular, but looks at the social, cultural, psycho-social, and academic factors of the larger immigrant experience demonstrating how those critical pieces contribute to or detract from a successful school integration. The African Francophone experience is an interesting example as this group represents a “minority within a minority context” (Masinda et al., 2014, p. 92): a cultural/racial minority within the French language speaking minority here in BC. The authors composed a diverse research team who were all English and French speaking, along with various African languages. In broad strokes the research consisted of individual and group interviews in iterative phases, community observation, and literature review, followed by opportunity for voice – specifically youth voice – to form the corpus of data.

Masinda et al.’s (2014) article was the first place that fully clarified for me that it is the immigrant/refugee student that continues to be the focus of acculturation, rather than all students be the focus of cultural integration. That the voice of the new student is drowned out in the call to make them sound more like the domestic students. While I already knew that I wanted to develop something that was more inclusive, this is the article that gave me the vocabulary to do it. This paper also gave me a working definition of what a positive integration can look like: “the healthy social, cultural, psychological and academic transitions that help immigrant children and youth to realize their full potential in the school” (p. 99).

The components identified by Masinda et al. (2014) that comprise the Integrated Framework are social, cultural, psychological, and academic. The article looks at each in detail, and ways of recognizing success in each area from immediate to long-term results. The paper concludes with a list of 9 recommendations that can be generalized to support any immigrant groups in most school settings.

The social and cultural aspects of the framework in particular were something I intend to approach with my project, particularly the immediate results shown in the framework diagram: that “newcomer students and peers understand each other, positive connectedness [sic]”, and that “newcomer students have a better understanding of school and Canadian Culture” (p. 100). My hope is that, through the use of games, that the initial cultural distance can be decreased and that students will understand rather than ‘other’ each other.

For me, this paper was a goldmine. Reading it last fall confirmed some of the thinking I was developing, and opened up my mind to new understandings of stressors and difficulties that children and youth say are barriers to their positive integration. Although this paper concentrates specifically on Francophone African children and youth in the Lower Mainland of BC, many of the things that the authors revealed in the paper can be seen here in other immigrant groups (in the Interior). The concluding recommendations could be implemented in most schools to promote student’s connection to their new school, peers, educators, and culture.

I enjoyed that the final recommendations included ones that support educators with practical direction. Helping teachers identify their own needs and assets as well as looking at the domestic student and teacher inter-cultural competence when welcoming new students would support everyone in the equation.

Finally, the reference list from this paper was a treasure trove of well researched, relevant and recent resources that I’m still working my way through.

The initial writing prompt was to talk about a meaningful text as though I were at a dinner party (Liese et al., 2017) – this isn’t entirely that, and this past year has been devoid of dinner parties. My partner has heard about facets of this article many times, though, over dinner and otherwise. It has acted as an anchor document for me throughout the research process, and a place I have come back to when stuck or needing to reorient. I count myself lucky to have found it early on in my process, and have shared it widely.

References:

Liese, J., West, A., & Cornell du Houx, E. (2017). Grad Written Thesis-Writing Prompts.
Masinda, M. T., Jacquet, M., & Moore, D. (2014). An Integrated Framework for Immigrant Children and Youth’s School Integration: A Focus on African Francophone Students in British Columbia – Canada. International Journal of Education, 6(1), 18.

Change Management in Educational Contexts

Change is everywhere in education right now, especially as relates to technology use, online course development and availability. Each individual change case is unique with different stakeholders and contexts. Both Al-Haddad & Kotnour (2015) and Weiner (2009) make a case for ensuring that organizations undergoing change have alignment with the change process that they undertake, and stakeholder engagement in order to ensure higher levels of success. Al-Haddad & Kotnour share a startling statistic, that <30% of change processes are unsuccessful. Al-Haddad & Kotnour discuss the idea that superimposition of change from above is less effective than the engagement of stakeholders, who then become the drivers of change. Weiner refers to this engagement as the change valence, with the individuals seeing that the change is needed, important and worthwhile and themselves then becoming the drivers of change.

Change is less successful when it is imposed from the top down. Currently, we in BC are watching Ontario’s recently announced mandatory online course requirements for secondary school students. This is a top-down change imposed without talking to the stakeholders (teachers, students, administrators) about what will work for them, leaving the people who are going to be responsible for the change disenfranchised and angry. At this time, the provincial government of Ontario has mandated that each student will complete at least 2 online courses during their high school career, starting in grade 9. This change was announced before public engagement (CBC News, 2019) and before a framework was created for how the change will be implemented, without consultation of e-learning specialists, or a plan for how vulnerable learners will be included. I’m finding it hard to imagine how this can be a successful change (and how that will be measured) when the main change enablers (Weiner, 2009) are not aligned in support of the change: the content, the people and process.

I work in a post-secondary context in which our staff is experiencing change at many levels (managerial, faculty, and individual). As a college we are currently transitioning from old, siloed digital systems for tracking student records, finance, staff recruitment, and various other systems to a fully integrated, unified application portal that will allow us to do all previous tasks through a single sign-in. The leadership in our school has shown from the outset that this has been a thoughtful and systematic change that began with participatory action research (French, 1969; Helmich and Brown, 1972; Schein, 1969, Tichy, 1974 as cited in Al-Haddad and Kotnour, 2015), moved to ongoing development, and continues in semi-incremental cycles (Miller, 1982, as cited in Al-Haddad and Kotnour, 2015) as each new piece is rolled out. The leadership in this case appears to be aligned with a reflective model of leadership (Castelli, 2015) in that the environment is a safe one, promoting trust and confidence, there is ample opportunity for two-way communication, that the changes connect to the strategic plan commitments, and that there is training available to ensure the growth of individual staff members and the building of individual capacity with the new system. The change valence in our organization is high.

Leadership at our college has several roles within the change, not all of which can be captured here. They are responsible for building the framework of what change looks like in our context, and having the larger vision to see where we are going and why. Our leadership is in place to manage the process, look to the constituents to understand how well the change is progressing,  and to take and incorporate feedback. In our school in particular there is an emphasis within the culture on Dweck’s (2007) concept of growth mindset. The leadership is responsible for building and finding ways to maintain and direct the culture and identity of the school, and creating an environment in which innovation, growth mindset and risk tolerance are part of the culture, creating a context that is more receptive to change (Weiner, 2009).

I recognize that they are not the same scale or category of change, but can’t help but compare the two change scenarios somewhat. I wonder at the Ontario government’s seeming lack of planning and engagement, what I see as a lack of leadership around mandatory 2 online course requirement. I am pleased when I look at our little community college, at the way our leadership is striving for best practices, doing what they can to keep the staff involved and motivated for this change that most of us believe will be in our best interest. It’s obvious to me that our college has a plan, whereas it appears that the situation in Ontario will plunge forward regardless of plan.

References:

(please note: I’ve tried to reformat the references but they keep showing up without spaces between them on publishing. My apologies.)

Al-Haddad, S., & Kotnour, T. (2015). Integrating the organizational change literature: A model for successful change. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 28(2), 234–262. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-11-2013-0215
CBC News, November 21, 2019 2:55 PM ET | Last Updated:, & 2019. (2019, November 21). Ontario high school students must take 2 mandatory online courses before graduation | CBC News. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/high-school-students-mandatory-online-courses-graduation-1.5368305
Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2nd ed.). Ballantine Books.
Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science, 4(1), 67. https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-4-67

The Participation Quandary

*Please note – this is not an assigned activity. This is intended to be an informal exploration of how to capture student participation in my classroom context*

I’m in a unique situation currently, as both a student and an instructor. I’ve been struggling with an issue (as an instructor), one that was identified by another cohort member recently as being an issue in this space as a student, too:

How is student participation captured in a way that reflects actual participation?

I’m teaching a planning class this term, one that includes a large-scale assignment in which the class works in teams to put on a big event that the community is invited to, one that is themed around re-framing disability and celebrating diversity. A good part of the mark is based on participation.

Last year, at the end of the term, I was disappointed in the pieces that showed up as participation marks (mostly based on forum participation) – especially as I know that the students have such rich back-channels (Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, email etc.) and that they work together and support each other in those spaces without my knowledge, in ways that are beyond what shows up within the classroom.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want a window into the back-channels. It’s important for the students to have spaces in which they feel like they can really, honestly sandbox things without any perception that I might see it. Regardless of how democratized our classroom gets, there is still a power imbalance that means I can’t look at what students are doing in those spaces without changing what they will do.

How do I move from a formulaic place in which I inadvertently encourage them to do the minimum (I’m referring here to the ‘post to the forum, reply to two of your colleagues posts by X date and time’ type criteria)? I’ve not been teaching a long time, but find that type of metric to be a race to the bottom, one that does not capture the ACTUAL interactions between the students in all of the informal ways that they support each other – the interactions on the back-channels. My observation is that, as the students feel somewhat constrained by this forum-measurement piece, they aren’t really able to express their true participatory experiences.

Switching to my student role for a moment, I’m finding that the most rewarding and interesting conversations are happening in the back-channels with my own cohort. This is where the real interactive, co-constructive learning is happening, learning that is invisible to our own instructors. I can’t help but wonder if my own students are feeling the same way. I intend to ask them about it after reading break.

What I’m exploring right now is the idea of having them self-assess their participation for the big event assignment, both giving themselves a mark and writing a short explanation as to why they think that mark is appropriate. I’m curious to see whether the back-channel pieces figure more strongly for them than the forum-style interactions, and what students identify as being the places and ways in which they participated most fruitfully (both for themselves, and in service of other students and the assignment). My wondering is whether this will be a more realistic measure of their participation in their teams, in the class as a whole, and the building of the event.

I’d love to hear from others who have come up against this in their own classrooms, and to hear your challenges and how (and if!) you’ve approached a solution.

Film or Webcam? What makes sense?

(This post is outside of our expected academic posting, but I’m hoping that others will weigh in with their thoughts.)

I work in a lovely, diverse faculty – one that is very forward thinking about philosophy and methodology of teaching. They are always bringing in new points of view and tools to use in a variety of different ways for all kinds of applications. For the most part, we agree on things.

Keep the student at the centre? Check.

Keep the individuals that our students will eventually be in the service of in mind at all times? Check.

Find ways to keep our students engaged and motivated, while helping them to understand what might be a whole new paradigm (to them) about the world, and different philosophies around disability and understanding behaviour? Check.

*Whew*

This fall will see us introducing a new course developed and taught by a colleague. We’re hoping to make the initial face-to-face offering something that can be delivered online in subsequent semesters, one that can get across the visceral experience of having guest speakers – 1st voice – in the room. To this end, we’re planning on filming the guests each week.

The colleague who has written it is interested in high production film (two camera points-of-view, lapel mics for good sound quality, augmentative lighting, visually interesting editing), something that I’ve done before and will be happy to assist with.

I was having a conversation with another colleague about what her department does in such circumstances, and she said that they do their guest speaker filming with a webcam – that the sound is good enough, that the video is fine for their purposes, and that they change and iterate their courses often enough that investing the time and money into ‘capital F’ Film doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Hm.

This left me wondering…

both instructors are people I have a huge amount of respect for, who push boundaries all the time and innovate educational experiences for students, AND are approaching this idea from completely different points of view. It left me thinking that perhaps my high production value colleague is coming from another paradigm…one heavily influenced by print. After all, we used to put a lot of effort into educational artifacts – textbooks, films, and physical objects to convey information. Creating a film is an undertaking in this paradigm, one that takes a highly skilled staff.

I wonder then, if, in contrast, my webcam colleague is coming from a more contemporary paradigm – video is easy, ubiquitous, and iterative. Anyone with a smartphone can make a film, quality is not as important as accessibility. We’re often asking students to make short films of their own in response to our participation prompts through applications such as Flipgrid, and are less concerned about quality over content.

Or…is it about the need to have polished video that represents what the Institution is doing? Versus iterating until the right ‘note’ is hit?

I’m curious as to what others might think. Would webcam capture be good enough to convey the point to students? Would it make more sense to use higher quality film production? Where are the lines between not good enough, good enough and more effort than necessary?

Related reading:

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. MIT Press.