Learning from the Experiences of Mothers of School-Aged Children on Tenure Track during the COVID-19 Global Pandemic

How are mothers of school-aged children navigating the tenure track in the global pandemic of COVID-19? In this article, I weave my reflections with the voices of other early career academic mothers of school-aged children to tell our varied stories traversing tenure. To access these stories, I conducted synchronous and asynchronous (email) dialogic interviews with six early career academic mothers of school-aged children from a variety of disciplines, departments, and universities in North America. Although COVID-19 will likely have much longer lasting implications, this article focuses on how participants felt in March 2020 when COVID-19 physical distancing plans were widely implemented. As the interviewees suggest, time was negotiated, reorganized, and felt in different ways among academic mothers of school-aged children. There were innumerable factors shaping the various responses to COVID-19 lifeworld reconfigurations while pursuing tenure, and my hope for this article is twofold—that others are able to feel seen and heard and that universities might begin truly listening to the voices and experiences of nondominant faculty to consider reorienting their tenure cultures to be more inclusive of the diverse lifeworlds their faculty inhabit. Importantly, in their commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion, universities ought to be reflecting on the cultures and temporalities of tenure to better attend to the decline in numbers of women through the professorial ranks. Particularly in heightened times of uncertainty and intensification of historical gender inequities compelled by the global pandemic of COVID-19, this article introduces some considerations for differently approaching and reconfiguring individualist and competitive tenure processes

On What Autoethnography Did in a Study on Student Voice Pedagogies: A Mapping of Returns

In this paper, I invite you into some considerations of what autoethnography might do in research, what it might teach us as researchers. In doing so, I return to an autoethnographic study I engaged in a few years ago which was contoured through the question: How do teachers experience student voice pedagogies? In that study, I experienced autoethnography as a creative methodology that allowed me to go back to two experiences I had with youth, or student voice projects. The paper embodies a return to the autoethnographic study of my doctoral research, which itself was a return to the previously experienced student voice projects; a return that is being propelled by my new position as a professor, supervising students in the mappings of their research landscapes. Returning, thus, becomes a central motif that invites dwelling in the simultaneity of pastpresentfuture – wherein the present is the folding in of the past and the future through attuning to embodied ways of knowing, sensing, being, and doing -- disrupting colonial epistemological legacies of progress and linearity found in conventional and taken-for-granted research practices. I ask, what does it mean to go back, in efforts oriented towards a future (such as social justice)? What might it mean to conceptualize time differently within our research, teaching, and learning? I argue that autoethnography, when engaged through an active nomadism, opens space for learning about our research practices, ourselves as researchers and pedagogues, as well as deeper understandings of our research topics

Art as Meditation: A Mindful Inquiry into Educator Well-Being

Being prepared for the intensity and complexities that educators face in their work means building strategies for managing well-being. This qualitative study explored educators’ conceptualizations about their well-being using an arts-based, community-based participatory research (AB-CBPR) methodology. After a brief mindfulness meditation and contemplation of prompting questions, educators were invited to participate in drawing and writing reflections. The artifacts were coded to determine themes. Themes suggested the importance of human connectedness and interconnection, self care and nurturance, the healing qualities of the natural word, and the recognition that institutions need to provide space and resources to support educator well-being. The mindfulness-based art-as-meditation process was itself a salutogenic process and provided a means for developing a deeper understanding of educator well-being through a community-based participatory research approach

The impact of immediate breast reconstruction on the time to delivery of adjuvant therapy: the iBRA-2 study

Background: Immediate breast reconstruction (IBR) is routinely offered to improve quality-of-life for women requiring mastectomy, but there are concerns that more complex surgery may delay adjuvant oncological treatments and compromise long-term outcomes. High-quality evidence is lacking. The iBRA-2 study aimed to investigate the impact of IBR on time to adjuvant therapy. Methods: Consecutive women undergoing mastectomy ± IBR for breast cancer July–December, 2016 were included. Patient demographics, operative, oncological and complication data were collected. Time from last definitive cancer surgery to first adjuvant treatment for patients undergoing mastectomy ± IBR were compared and risk factors associated with delays explored. Results: A total of 2540 patients were recruited from 76 centres; 1008 (39.7%) underwent IBR (implant-only [n = 675, 26.6%]; pedicled flaps [n = 105,4.1%] and free-flaps [n = 228, 8.9%]). Complications requiring re-admission or re-operation were significantly more common in patients undergoing IBR than those receiving mastectomy. Adjuvant chemotherapy or radiotherapy was required by 1235 (48.6%) patients. No clinically significant differences were seen in time to adjuvant therapy between patient groups but major complications irrespective of surgery received were significantly associated with treatment delays. Conclusions: IBR does not result in clinically significant delays to adjuvant therapy, but post-operative complications are associated with treatment delays. Strategies to minimise complications, including careful patient selection, are required to improve outcomes for patients

A Teacher's Reflexive Story of Student Voice Pedagogies: An Autoethnography

This study is an autoethnography of my experiences with student voice reforms. Ultimately, I am concerned with better understanding the possibilities for student voice as a transformative teaching and learning practice within the context of neoliberal education. The discussion is anchored in two past student voice projects in which I was involved, one as a researcher and one as a facilitator. As method, I revisit these experiences through memory and various artifacts by way of field notes, personal journals, lesson plans, and email correspondences, to unpack embodied voices of difference that frame contemporary epistemological questions of how we come to know and understand our life worlds. More specifically, I am concerned with how teachers take up student voice in their pedagogies, how teachers come to understand themselves and their students in terms of student voice, and how social differences come to contour student voice pedagogies. I query: How do teachers understand student voice? What are the ways in which teachers experience student voice? How does the experience of student voice organize and inscribe teacher ←→ student relationships? And, how are student voice practices shaped, organized, and inscribed through social difference? Grounding this inquiry is poststructural feminist anti-racism as an interwoven discursive orientation and politics for troubling and transforming schooling and education. My analyses address how my presence as an individual and as a member of socio-historical groups in the student voice initiatives affected the projects' dynamics. My findings amplify the necessity of time and space for educators to critically reflect on their practices when implementing reforms, time and space that were provided by engaging autoethnography. The study contributes important strategic processes towards realizing the necessary goals of critical reflexive practices in teaching and learning, addressing the question of `how' to do critical reflection through autoethnography.Ph.D

Teaching Citation Politics through Literature Review Topographies: Towards Cultivating Relational Writing Practices

Feminism teaches how power works and circulates through our often-unquestioned everyday practices. Since becoming a professor, I have committed myself to this feminist teaching by demystifying--and reimagining--habituated practices, relations, and expectations in higher education that produce and are produced through cis-hetero-patriarchal capitalist White supremacy. Since literature reviews and citation practices are core materials scholars work with, I invite doctoral students to consider different ways these materials can be engaged in efforts to craft transgressive knowledges and worlds through our research. In this article, I describe an assignment designed to disrupt hegemonic patriarchal inheritances in the conventions of writing literature reviews and habituated citational practices. The assignment was prepared for a first-year doctoral methodology course, and I share how I came into a more capacious relation to the feminist potentialities within the genre of the literature review through living the assignment with the students

How can school systems weave together Indigenous ways of knowing and response-tointervention to reduce chronic absenteeism in Alberta?

It is well documented that students who demonstrate high levels of absenteeism are at an increased risk for a number of negative outcomes (e.g., see Fuhs et al., 2018). What is becoming increasingly evident, however, is that students who experience chronic stressors, such as socioeconomic disadvantage, mental health challenges, or cultural marginalization are at an increased risk for school absenteeism and represent specific populations who would greatly benefit from innovative proactive and reactive intervention techniques (Wimmer, 2013). Current Rocky View Schools (RVS) data suggests that of the nearly 800 students who identify as Indigenous within the district, 30% can be considered chronically absent. Data analyzed from September 2017 to April 2018 revealed that on-reserve students who attend an RVS school demonstrated the highest percentage of chronic absenteeism – an alarming 80%. Additionally, these on-reserve students have missed an average of 32 days of school to date this year (representing close to 23% of the school year). Based on the results of the internal data analysis, this study examines the experiences in a public school of First Nations students, who reside on reserve. Interviews were conducted with parents and students and surveys were responded to by staff and what was revealed as a barrier to attendance was a form of cross-cultural anxiety

Graduate students\u27 research-based learning experiences in an online Master of Education program

The purpose of this research was to better understand graduate students\u27 learning experiences in a research-intensive, online Master of Education (MEd) program. In alignment with the program goal for graduate scholars of the profession, this course-based program adopted an inquiry-based signature pedagogy grounded in the innovative practice of research-based learning. As part of this study, we explored broader program structures, including the cohort-based model, course sequencing and research ethics approval processes, which situate the research-based learning experiences. Several research questions framed our investigation into the experiences of online students who are engaged in a research-active MEd program. Analysis of survey and focus group information contributes to this mixed-methods case study and provides insights into implications for research-based learning in online course-based graduate programs

Politics of Anti-Racism Education: In Search of Strategies for Transformative Learning

VIII, 239 p.online resource