Abstracts

To disrupt the hegemonic discourse of mathematics class as creating arithmetic fluency, using commercial games holds promise for mathematics learning through playfulness. In particular, spatial reasoning (SR) and logical reasoning (LR) in abstract strategy games are processes critical for all mathematics learning. This project’s purpose asks: How does the reflexive design process impact students’ play with Gobblet Gobblers (GG) and create opportunities for SR and LR? We used design-based research as the mode of inquiry to investigate students’ accumulation of experiences. We focused on one cycle with a grade four teacher and 20 diverse students within a larger project. Four hour-long weekly sessions included playing GG to employ SR and LR, analyze strategies and board configurations as a class, and discuss moves through partner play and written reflections. Data included: student reflection sheets (RS), photos, videos, and field notes. Analyzing RS as primary data sources, we coded units for both students’ SR and LR.

We identified emerging types of questions enabling us to draw out students’ LR and SR (analyzing and interpreting: Pick one of the winning patterns from your game, how did you create that pattern? Why is it a winning pattern?). Our results indicated that RS prompted students to enact SR and LR simultaneously, allowing noticing of the creation of winning strategies through GG play. Key co-enactments included (exemplars to be part of the presentation): 1) Justify piece placements (choose that spot...can expand my players...they can’t cover me) through comparing locations and/or sizes (I choose that size [big] so they can’t cover me); 2) Generalizing strategies by naming (double-cross) while pathfinding (draw with lines that depicts two ways of winning). We recognized that each week our RS formed a response to the students’ developing SR and LR, acknowledging the natural trajectory of their learning. This emerging understanding formed the core of our discussion as researchers and led to the employment of a responsive and reflexive approach to the creation of learning activities, and the design and form of data collection which allowed us to access students’ SR and LR through play.

Lucas and Katz (2011) describe Hurricane Katrina is described as a Category 5 storm with winds of one hundred sixty miles-per hour and a 30-foot wall of water that came across the shore. Additionally, 400 000 residents of the coast of Mississippi were displaced. The COVID-19 pandemic was declared March 11, 2020 by WHO. From the World Health Organization website we are currently in the fifth wave and almost 6 million people have died as a result of COVID 19. Osofsky and Osofsky (2018) define a disaster as: tragic events that frequently cause catastrophic physical damage to homes, buildings, trailers, trees, power lines, and other physical structures. Often even more important is the tragic physical and psychological disruption to individuals, families, and communities that are affected by the physical damage and the psychological fallout caused by the destruction of community infrastructure, resources, and other types of supports. (p. 115)

Using this definition, I draw parallels between the changes to the New Orleans area schools following Hurricane Katrina, which are well documented in academic scholarship, and compare these with the changes being proposed by the Alberta legislature, 2019–2022, led by the United Conservative Party (UCP). Referencing historical academic papers for the background on Hurricane Katrina and either current or proposed Alberta government policies for the future direction of Alberta Education, through the lens of Disaster Theory () I argue that the UCP’s changes to Alberta Education’s policy could lead to a fallout as devastating at those felt in Louisiana after Katrina. The UCP changes include private and charter schools as well as schools currently classed a public. The future possibilities for Alberta schools will be considered based on the results found in New Orleans.

References

Kim, Y.-k., & Sohn, H.-G. (2018). Disaster Theory. In Disaster Risk Reduction: Disaster Risk

Management in the Republic of Korea (pp. 23-76). Singapore: Springer Singapore.

Lucas, F., & Katz, B. (2011). Gone with the wind? Integrity and Hurricane Katrina. In R. B.

Young (Ed.), Advancing the integrity of professional practice (pp. 89–96). John Wiley &

Sons, Ltd. http://doi.org/10.1002/ss.407

Osofsky, J. D., & Osofsky, H. J. (2018). Challenges in building child and family resilience after

disasters. Journal of Family Social Work, 21(2), 115–128.

http://doi.org/10.1080/10522158.2018.1427644

World Health Organization. 2022. https://covid19.who.int/

This four-year study of Statistical Literacy will examine how school principals interpret, act upon, and explain statistics – specifically the concepts of probability and likelihood (year 1), effect size and causality (year 2), sampling error and representative sample (year 3)– looking for common misconceptions (year 4). Statistical Literacy is defined in three components: having a basic understanding of statistical terminology; applying statistical understandings when embedded in social contexts; and being able to have a questioning attitude about statistical claims (Watson, 1997, cited in Gal & Murray, 2011). Probability has two basic meanings and types. First, stochastic models based on frequency-type understandings of chance and randomness; and, non-stochastic models based on belief-type understanding of degrees and reasonableness of outcomes (Liu & Thompson, 2007). This study is being conducted with both Anglophone and Francophone school leaders to learn more about bilingualism’s impact on evidence-informed decision-making in K-12 schools.

This is not a testing project. Rather, we are studying school leaders’ concepts about the use of statistics when interpreting numerical data from classroom assessment, survey results, provincial or international assessments, or student enrollment. A major deliverable in this project is professional development material in the form of video anthologies of principals reading and interpreting data. School leaders will participate anonymously and their readings would be featured in our four-year national study. We are wanting to highlight the crucial role of principals in schools and their skills when reading data.

Significance of the project is to test the assumptions that: language as well as mathematics is important when interpreting numbers; representation of numbers through graphs, charts and a variety of displays is connected to understanding; and that school Principals are leaders who model numeracy to school staff, parents, and communities. Developing an understanding of school leaders', specifically principals' statistical competency, is one step toward a broader and more significant goal -- building the statistical skills of all adults in Canada. Initial data and findings to be presented at the SEGSA/ EEGSA Graduate Research Showcase will include data sources provided, interview questions and a summary of interview questions including differences between responses from Anglophone and Francophone school leaders. Responses to early findings from two presentations to system and school leaders during the spring of 2022 will also be summarized.

References:

Gal, I., & Murray, S. T. (2011). Responding to diversity in users’ statistical literacy and information needs: Institutional and educational implications. Statistical Journal of the IAOS

27, 27(3/4), 185–195. https://doi.org/10.3233/SJI20110730

Liu, Y., & Thompson, P. (2007). Teachers’ understandings of probability. Cognition and Instruction, 25(2–3), 113– 160. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370000701301117

Teaching about difficult histories in social studies education is both commonplace and challenging. Research in the field has emphasized that part of what characterizes difficult histories as “difficult” is how learners are affected by encounters with historical narratives and accounts that incorporate experiences of pain, violence, trauma, tragedy, suffering, injustice, and/or oppression (Epstein & Peck, 2018; Gross & Terra, 2019; McArthur Harris, et al., 2022). A number of approaches to understanding difficult histories currently exist (Epstein & Peck, 2018; Garrett, 2011), and each are concerned with important aspects of learners’ encounters, including the ways in which students’ identities are connected to these histories (Peck, 2018). However, current approaches tend to take the humanist and interpretive ontological position that identities are definable, knowable, and stable. A critical post-structural approach to understanding difficult histories asks that we might take seriously the suggestion that learners’ identities are always, already in the process of becoming and are, therefore, indefinite and unknowable. In other words, while most research asks, what do difficult histories do to learners’ identities?, this presentation asks, what becomes possible when we consider what difficult histories undo to learners’ identities? Returning to Britzman’s (1998; Pitt & Britzman, 2003) post-structural concept of difficult knowledge alongside Michel Foucault’s (1977) understandings of discourse and power, this presentation theorizes the pedagogical possibilities that live in the moments of rupture, where learner’s identities unravel and become unsettled.

References

Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic theory of education. SUNY Press.

Epstein, T., & Peck, C. L. (2018). Teaching and learning difficult histories in international contexts: A critical sociocultural approach. Routledge.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Allen Lane.

Garrett, H. J. (2011). The routing and re-routing of difficult knowledge: Social studies teachers encounter When the Levees Broke. Theory & Research in Social Education, 39(3), 320-347. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2011.10473458

Gross, M. H., & Terra, L. (2019). Introduction: What makes difficult history difficult? In M. H. Gross & L. Terra (Eds.), Teaching and learning the difficult past: Comparative perspectives (pp. 1-8). Routledge.

McArthur Harris, L., Sheppard, M., & Levy, S. (2022). Framing difficult histories. In L. McArthur Harris, M. Sheppard, & S. Levy (Eds.), Teaching difficult histories in difficult times: Stories of practice (pp. 1-12). Teachers College Press. https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049993

Peck, C. L. (2018). Intersections of students ethnic identifications and understandings of history. In T. Epstein & C. L. Peck (Eds.), Teaching and learning difficult histories in international contexts: A critical sociocultural approach (pp. 231-246). Routledge.

Pitt, A. J., & Britzmanm D. P. (2003). Speculations on qualities of difficult knowledge in teaching and learning: An experiment in psychoanalytic research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(6), 755-776. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390310001632135

Songs that were once considered standard repertoire in elementary music programs across Canada are now being identified as including derogatory, misogynistic, and/or harmful texts. While there has been research and findings compiled on the text of songs (Bailey, 2020; Ellingsen, 2019; Kelly-McHale, 2018; McDougle, 2021), this is still a relatively new field, particularly regarding how information about texts of songs is disseminated to teachers. How can existing music education programs provide learning opportunities around repertoire selection for both in-service and preservice teachers? The Orff Level Certificate Program of Carl Orff Canada works with both preservice and in-service music teachers. The Orff program occurs on a yearly basis, with approximately 25 teacher educators and 250 teachers enrolled across the country.

With the majority of elementary educators being “white, middle class, female, heterosexual teachers” (Holden & Kitchen, 2019, p. 27), there is a need to acknowledge the social hierarchy present in the classroom, that is, the power and privilege held by music educators. By working with music teachers to think critically about what musics to include, Orff Level Teacher Educators can provide the tools for music educators to “shape a curriculum and a pedagogy that purposefully places classroom musics alongside students’ own musics, experiences and interests (Hess, 2017, p. 71).

In March 2021, an online survey, including a combination of multiple-choice and open-ended questions was sent to 25 Orff Level Teacher Educators in Canada. Responses were received from 17 teacher educators. The following questions guided the investigation: (a) How are songs selected for inclusion in the program? (b) Have there been changes to the repertoire list over the last five years? If so, what is driving these changes? (c) How do teacher educators see their selection process of repertoire impacting teachers’ choices of repertoire? Using thematic analysis, I analyzed the responses looking for common themes. These findings have served as a foundation for dialogue with Orff Teacher Educators. The next phase of the study will begin in spring 2022 where I will be interviewing three to five participants to further clarify findings from the survey portion of the research.

References

Bailey, P. (2020, April 27). Reclaiming kumbaya!

https://www.decolonizingthemusicroom.com/reclaiming-kumbaya

Ellingsen, A. (2019, October 30). Jump Jim Joe.

https://www.decolonizingthemusicroom.com/jump-jim-joe

Hess, J. (2017). Equity in Music Education: Why equity and social justice in music education?

Music Educators Journal, 104(1), 71–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/0027432117714737

Holden, M., & Kitchen, J. (2019). Equitable admissions in Canadian teacher education: Where

we are now, and where we might go. In J. Mueller, & J. Nickel, (Eds.) Globalization and

diversity in education: What does it mean for Canadian teacher education? (23-60).

Canadian Association for Teacher Education.

Kelly-McHale, J. (2018). Equity in music education: Exclusionary practices in music

education. Music Educators Journal, 104(3), 60–62.

https://doi.org/10.1177/0027432117744755

McDougle, L. (2021, October 25). Songs with a questionable past.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q1jVGqOgKxfiUZ8N3oz0warXefGIJill2Xha-3X5nUY/edit

This presentation outlines a proposed research-creation project of composing with kisiskâciwan-sîpî - the North Saskatchewan River. Within the context of the Anthropocene, I join a long tradition of musicians that disrupt the colonial influence of noise-music dichotomies on sonic lifeworlds and attend to my own settler identities as a white music teacher. I explore listening not only as a way to unseat occularcentrism and instrumentality within music education, but as an ethical act towards hearing-as-witnessing the continued pedagogical complicity in the Anthropogenic trauma (Truman, 2020). Through a “critical listening positionality” (Robinson, 2020) I contemplate research-creation as a model for a responsive and place-based music pedagogy–wherein experience and creativity are situated ecologically, and where students and teachers come to hear the potentialities of their tense in|human entanglement. In Becoming-kisiskâciwan-sîpî, we hear how the river is “always, already threaded through” (Barad, 2003) our relationship with Edmonton. We hear ways in which human, epochal, and cosmic time scales flow through place. Finally, we hear a whisper of the immense world-making power of music and sound (Attali, 1985) and the resonant role of listening, affect and sonic imagining in bringing about ecological, social and personal change.

Max van Manen (1989) posits that the difficulty of writing derives from the fact that the writing process is inherently paradoxical. The phenomenological writer must grapple with the tension of these paradoxes. My belief is that this tensionality is also experienced by secondary students when engaging in classroom writing tasks. In this presentation, I will consider how phenomenological conceptualizations of writing can inform writing instruction in secondary classrooms so as to unearth the challenges students face when writing. Particularly, I am thinking about how the tensions inherent to writing may cause writer’s block, which hinders participation in the writing process. I will explore how this phenomenon occurs and offer some insights as to how teachers might respond to it with pedagogical tact.

Beginning with a theoretical overview of the various tensions van Manen (1989) explores in the writing process, I will present how writing paradoxically separates yet unites, distances yet brings closer, abstracts yet concretizes, and objectifies yet subjectifies our understanding of experiences. I will then discuss how these tensions can contribute to secondary students’ feelings of ‘stuckness’ or writer’s block. Further, I will demonstrate how different modalities of writing (handwriting vs. typing) influence this phenomenon. Finally, I will offer insights on how thinking with phenomenology can inform writing instruction in secondary classrooms. When teachers think about writing phenomenologically, it allows them to recognize the inextricable link between writing and identity; to assist students in navigating between their private and public self (van Manen, 2010) when writing; and to consider how the mimetic process of writing-with can inspire students to enter the writing process.

References

van Manen, M. (1989). Pedagogical text as method: Phenomenological research as writing.

Saybrook Review, 7(2), 23–45.

van Manen, M. (2010). The pedagogy of momus technologies: Facebook, privacy, and

online intimacy. Qualitative Health Research, 20(8), 1023–1032.

The benefits of long-term physical activity (PA) lead to a sense of well-being that may be developed and nurtured over the formative years, developing strong, healthy individuals who are positive contributors to society. However, youth participation in PA declines in the adolescent years (ParticipACTION, 2020). Due to lower PA rates among female adolescents (ParticipACTION, 2020), research has focused on female participation. As such, less is known on what influences participation rates among male adolescents. To fill this gap, the purpose of this study was to understand what multi-level factors influence the PA experiences of adolescent males. Using interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) (Alase, 2017) twelve Grade 9 male students from one junior high school participated in semi-structured interviews. Following a socio-ecological framework, the following five levels were used to support the development of the interview guide, frame the data for interpretation, and suggest interventions across the multi-layers: (a) Intrapersonal, (b) Interpersonal, (c) Institutional, (d) Community, and (e) Policy (Sallis & Owen, 2015). Using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six phases of thematic analysis, themes were determined within each of the socio-ecological levels. The findings suggest that adolescent males are influenced by their early experiences that will either hinder further participation, or provide the confidence to continue engaging in PA. Adolescent males’ identified influential factors such as choosing the activity they enjoy with their friends in a space that allows for competition and growth at their skill level. The multi-level factors that participants’ identified as influencing their engagement in PA are important to broaden the understanding for those who work with adolescent males and to better align programs to enhance their experiences.

The concept of resilience has become increasingly influential in contemporary western society and specifically in the context of formal education. In the face of challenges, adversities, and hardships, a crucial question has been how individuals or communities bounce back or persevere. Educators, administrators, and educational professionals have turned to resiliency for resources to equip their students or stand in solidarity with them. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group II (IPCC WGII) report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (2022) sets out the current scientific research on how best to respond to the planetary changes due to climate change. Disasters and impacts are already documented in the previous report (IPCC WGI) and are further described here. The global and existential question is what individuals can do in the face of these hazards and threats, with the changes that have already begun and are coming. Resilience is a key concept in the IPCC WGII report, most notably in section D, which describes a ‘climate resilient development’. What does this concept of resilience mean in comparison with the use of the term in psychological or justice contexts? How does the difference between these two uses inform how we as educators reconsider the nature of resiliency? How does this difference provide a radical shift for the student’s horizon when resilience is reframed from a social-ecological perspective?

I explore my experiences as a settler teacher and emerging scholar by unpacking time and place in the short children’s story The Little Hummingbird by Michael Nicoll Yahgaulanaas. I demonstrate my understanding with a hyperlapse video of traditional beading, a skill taught to me by local Indigenous Elders. I begin to unpack myself and others by centering myself as the hummingbird, the protagonist of the short story who continues to put drops of water on a raging forest fire, even though it will not put out the flames. In this retelling, I problematically view myself as a settler hero who is doing “good”, ignoring the ongoing nature of colonialism and the benefits I gain from the hierarchy of relations in Canada. In the second retelling, I become the fire destroying the forest. I recount the shattering of my settler-as-hero self-proclaimed identity, and begin to accept how I am complicit in colonial violence towards Indigenous peoples. By watching my hands work the pattern and beads, I physically depict the slow work necessary for arriving at the actualization of bigger possibilities for settler teachers and emerging scholars, like a hummingbird with a drop of water to douse fire.

Metacognition is referred to knowledge, control, and awareness of one’s own learning. Many educational organizations and experts suggest that teachers should create their classroom learning environments to support development of students’ metacognition. Therefore, students could control their own learning, and could be developed to be a lifelong learner. This research aims to explore Thai science teachers’ metacognition and their perceptions of the extent to which their classrooms are or could be metacognitively oriented, and the relation between those aspects. The research is established based on Social Constructivism which could be explained that students could be more metacognitive when they interact with people who are more metacognitive in metacognitively oriented learning environments (MOLEs). A convergent mixed methods research design is adopted. More than 200 science teachers gave response to questionnaires, and more than 20 teachers were interviewed. Preliminary results show interesting trends not only on teachers’ metacognition and their perceptions of metacognitively oriented learning environments but also some trends of teaching and learning in science classrooms in Thailand. The findings could be used as essential information to support developing MOLEs in science classrooms in Thailand and in international contexts.

Keywords: Metacognition, Metacognitively oriented learning environment, teachers’

metacognition, science education

Contemporary childhood exists in a rapidly changing literacy context in the digital age, where digital devices and technology are progressively used at home (OECD, 2019). In the global context, digital technology is greatly emerging in children’s lives, including the way of their play, learning, communicating and entertainment (Marsh et al, 2016). In the field of early childhood education, a growing number of studies explore practices that children are engaging with digital devices at home (Laidlaw & Wong, 2016; Rizk & Hillier, 2021) as well as in the school context (Neumann & Merchant, 2021).

As children’s fiction is infused with ideology, the text instills values and beliefs to young readers, which, further, will shape children’s sociocultural development (Stephens, 1992). For this reason, it is critical to examine the ideological message and cultural discourse in relation to digital literacy practices in children’s fiction work. Because the gaps and differences between the ideologies of digital usage in children’s literature and children’s digital literacy practices reality could cause confusion to our young readers.

In this presentation, I use autobiographic narrative inquiry to explore my reading experiences on contemporary fiction picture books, regarding the silence of digital literacy. Because I notice that the digital literacy practices is generally missing in recently published picture books. For this reason, I will discuss the silence of digital usage in contemporary picture books in both text and illustrations. I will share my perception of the possible reasons of the lack of digital literacy practices in picture books.

This research explores autoethnographic life writing and poetic inquiry as methods to engage in practices of witnessing that attends to relations between human and non-human others. Witnessing points to some shift in equity between agents and is quite different from an idea of building back better, which is more a resilience effort to re-consolidate individual agency. As such, witnessing focuses on relations, working against our anthropocentric tendencies to assimilate non-human/ more-than-human otherness into the self. Open-ended methodology is necessary as looking for and setting up the expectation for verifiable truth compromises the attention necessary for witnessing.

Walsh and Bai’s (2015) practice of witnessing through writing evokes a way of being that responds to a world beyond one’s experience; accordingly, Walsh and Bai present different voices as distinct yet collaborative and coherent through their responsiveness to the words of the other. Witnessing through writing calls participants to observe thoughts as they occupy the space of another—“through writing and witnessing together we create generous spaces for the other to be-with-what-is” (p. 26). Participants, then, become responsive to the experience of another as well as aware of how they are becoming responsive; in this way they are not reducing the experience of the other within pre-existing categories of expectation but expanding subjectivity. As Walsh and Bai assert, the perception that emerges through contemplative practice and witnessing, opens space for an ethics that does not derive from reductive theories of self-interest or structurally rigid concepts of personhood. Through photographs, notebook entries, and poems, this research engages an ongoing relational process, giving attention to experience and looking not only at data collected but the process of collecting data to find resonances—not to form a story that would adhere to pre-determined narrative categories but a coherent offering of potential for witnessing.

Teachers and students in schools are affected, controlled, confined, and shaped by time as ahistorical cultural construction which requires investigation in order to reveal the assumptions made about Eurocentric time and the alternative interpretations of time from Indigenous perspectives. The way in which time is conceived, from a Western/Modern perspective, points toward an ontology that has human beings in conflict with the passage of time (Apfel-Marglin, 2011). This suggests that a study of Indigenous conceptions of time may reveal cultural assumptions that teachers and students hold. Opportunity to reflect on what time means, how it is constructed, and how Indigenous ideas about the nature of time and human beings may offer potentially new ways forward in education. These concerns drive the questions of this literature review: how does the Eurocentric cultural definition of time shape the way that learning occurs in the classroom? What are the implications for examining and exploring Indigenous conceptions of time? Once complete, an application of what is learned about time from Western and Indigenous perspectives could be analyzed and theorized for the educational context to imagine new depths and processes for teaching and learning as we approach an uncertain technological future.

References

Apffel-Marglin, F. (2011). Subversive spiritualities : how rituals enact the world. New York:

Oxford University Press.

In the Golden Age of television and at the peak of streaming services, there are endless options for viewing and studying, both in the classroom and in our personal lives. Some series provide unsettling moments and others offer a difficult viewing experience. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) is more disquieting, disturbing, disruptive, and difficult than any television series in history. This article and presentation intends to explore and theorize this unsettled viewing experience through the formlessness of ‘the Woodsmen’ as unsettling characters in Twin Peaks: The Return. Their lack of, or blurred, humanity and our misunderstanding of their origins, intentions, and boundaries is disruptive enough to our senses that there exists a desire to abject them. It is through this abjection that we, as viewers of Twin Peaks (1990 1991), experience a loss of self that permeates through the entirety of The Return. Yet, we return to watch the show, as the ‘spectator is constantly confronted with the dynamic of the abject which manifests in [...] people or beings [...] that may be labeled repulsive or provocative, because they compel the spectator to look upon that which is uncomfortable, abominable, repulsive, disgusting and even perverse’ (Nel, 2012, p. 549). The Woodsmen serve as a metaphor for The Return in that they aid in our inability to interpret the show in the traditional sense of what a narrative is, could be, or should be. Watching Twin Peaks: The Return is a disturbing experience, and the findings and connections drawn through this research serve as one - among many possible - explanations for this uncanniness, of our misunderstanding of a ‘society where boundaries have broken down’ (Hawkes, 2019, p. 156). Links will be drawn through David Lynch and Mark Frost (the co- creators of Twin Peaks) along with the theories and philosophies of Georges Bataille and the formless and Julia Kristeva’s abject theory, among others, with the intention of theorizing the overarching question of why. The Return was so difficult to watch. In an educational context, being exposed to uncomfortable viewing experiences and texts pushes our understanding and thinking outside of normative frameworks and creates spaces for different perspectives and ways of understanding.

Key words: Twin Peaks, abject, formless, Bataille, television, David Lynch

Classified as populations less than 1000, 16.1% of Alberta’s population lives rurally (Alberta Government, 2016, p. 3). Rural education research addresses an underserved minority in educational structures, policy and practices. However, much of the research is approached in a way indicating the rural is somehow deficient. Well cited researchers in the field of rural education research, Howley and Howley (2014) state, “the most prevalent impulse in rural education research is to address the problem of rural schools, namely that they are deficient and need to be improved. Variations on this theme implicate the deficiencies of rural children, rural families, rural teachers, rural school facilities, rural culture, and so on” (p. 10). As someone who grew up rural and remains deeply tied to it, I have witnessed variations of these themes in theory and in practice. In order to see what possibilities lay ahead for rural education research, we ought to consider where we have been. Howley and Howley’s (2014) assessment is a call to do rural research differently. Being focussed on the problem can obscure or preclude what is important or valuable within rural communities regarding educational research. In part due to Howley & Howley’s assessment and in part because of a curiosity that drives my own present and future forms of research, I present a literature review of The Journal of Research in Rural Education. I examine the abstracts covering the years between and including 2012-2020, where I determine whether their pronouncement rings true over the past decade. Since Howley and Howley published their assessment, the continuing research in JRRE has remained fairly consistent with the prevalent impulse to problematize the rural in an educational capacity. In my findings I do the following, 1) assess the proportion of research problematizing some aspect of the rural in rural education research, 2) contextualize reasons for and against the impulse to address “the problem of rural schools,” and 3) optimistically look to studies that are not framed by assumptions of deficiency in rural communities. I look to the latter in order to envision new possibilities for doing rural educational research for rural communities rather than on rural communities.

References

Alberta Government. (2016). 2016 Census of Canada – Population and dwelling release.

https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/7d02c106-a55a-4f88-8253-4b4c81168e9f/resource/

e435dd59-2dbd-4bf2-b5b6-3173d9bd6c39/download/2016-census-population-and-

dwelling-counts.pdf

Howley, C. & Howley, A. (2014). Making sense of rural education research: Art, transgression,

and other acts of terroir. In S. White & M. Corbett (Eds.), Doing educational research in

rural settings: Methodological issues, international perspectives and practical solutions

(pp. 7–25). Routledge.

Over the last decade, Canadian students have exhibited variable performance in standardized assessments focusing on mathematics achievement. This variability adds to concerns when their mathematics scores reflect insubstantial improvements compared to other countries as indicated by large-scale educational assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) that examines profiles of secondary school students. Albertan students have also exhibited a similar pattern with the national average as more than half of Albertan students did not meet the threshold for everyday life mathematical skills. In relation to students’ mathematical performance, math anxiety - the feeling of fear or nervousness when performing math-related tasks - is an associated factor with math performance (Barroso et al., 2021). However, no previous study has explored math performance and math anxiety specifically among Albertan students. To address this issue, we present a work-in-progress that aims to identify significant predictors of math performance and math anxiety among Canadian and Albertan students, using the PISA 2018 and TIMSS 2019 datasets to formulate actionable recommendations for the optimization of mathematics instruction through mixed methods research.

This study has three phases: first, a list of predictors will be selected from the data set based on existing theories regarding students’ math performance and math anxiety. The initial list of predictors will be presented to domain experts (i.e., math teachers) for refinement based on their practical experience. The second phase involves the development of a predictive model for math performance and math anxiety from the list with Educational Data Mining techniques. For the third phase, results from the model will be presented to the domain experts for their inputs as the qualitative component, and variable importance metrics of the model will be consulted for data-driven results as the quantitative component. Findings from both components will be integrated into a greater whole and consulted with the domain experts to derive actionable recommendations that would inform various stakeholders (e.g., educators, school districts, and Alberta Education) of ways to improve math performance in Alberta students.

References

Barroso, C., Ganley, C. M., McGraw, A. L., Geer, E. A., Hart, S. A., & Daucourt, M. C. (2021).

A meta-analysis of the relation between math anxiety and math achievement.

Psychological Bulletin, 147(2), 134.