Browsing by Author "Panayotidis, E. Lisa"
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- ItemOpen AccessHistorical Thinking, Ghosts and Hauntings: Imagination and the Poetics of On-Line Learning(University of Calgary, 2014-05) Panayotidis, E. Lisa; Bjartveit, Carolyn; Werklund School of EducationThis innovative collaborative research project and practice began with a critical pedagogical and curricular concern about how to incorporate “historical thinking” and knowledge into an on-line graduate course, Current Issues in Early Childhood Education. Drawing on the work of interpretive scholars who wrote about “living” ghosts, phantoms, and memory we strove to offer different insights into the context of teaching and learning in post-secondary programs of study. We invited Enlightenment philosopher and early childhood advocate Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) to class as a way to re-image critical historical and socio-cultural notions of childhood, and child care in Western curricular traditions and inheritances.
- ItemOpen AccessThe Space-In-Between: Ontology and the Place of Curriculum in the Culturally Diverse Post-Secondary Early Childhood Education Classroom(2015-04-22) Bjartveit, Carolyn Joy; Panayotidis, E. LisaThis doctoral dissertation explores the topic of teaching and learning and the intersections between the Self and the curriculum in the culturally diverse Early Childhood Education (ECE) post-secondary classroom. I seek to understand more fully the “zone of between” (Aoki, 2005) ―a metaphoric inner landscape―which serves to situate students and educators ontologically through the process of interpretation and meaning-making. In dialogue with a group of immigrant educators, I studied this pedagogical relationship within the context of a western ECE curriculum. The research is shaped by a set of critical questions around curriculum, social justice, the voices of power and the marginal in the culturally diverse adult classroom: How does culture and one’s life experiences impact immigrants’ knowing and understanding of a post-secondary ECE curriculum? How are cultural differences in child-rearing and early learning acknowledged in early childhood education and curriculum? How do educators interpret and teach the curriculum to adult immigrant students to ensure meaningful learning? How does learning ultimately translate into practice when immigrant educators teach and care for children in Canadian ECE settings? Utilizing an interpretive narrative approach that includes listening to, recording and layering the participants’ autobiographical accounts, I noted their responses to questions relevant to school, culture and the curriculum. Shaun Tan’s (2006) graphic novel, The Arrival, was the catalyst provoking our thinking and imaginations, and providing a visual lens through which to view and interpret ideas about identity and the immigrant experience. Listening to the participants’ stories, I heard their cultural perspectives about what exists in the space-in-between Self and Other, acknowledging the hermeneutic interlacing of their past and present experiences in forming “a unified flow of experience” (Gadamer, 2004a, p. 237). I examined how immigrants juxtapose what they know about child care and early learning from their culture(s) with relative pedagogical practices they observe in ECE settings. I explain how curriculum and culture are placed in terms of diversity and difference. This work raises awareness about the importance of relationality and issues of identity and offers different understandings about how immigrant educators and students can live and learn together in an always complex world.
- ItemOpen AccessVisual displays in elementary schools: more than just a pretty picture(2012-07-24) Martens, Sherry; Panayotidis, E. LisaThis dissertation is a hermeneutic inquiry into the meaning of visual displays in elementary schools. Specifically, I address the question of how visual displays have come to appear in our schools. I explore, through my conversations with three elementary teacher participants, the topic of visual displays. The inquiry explores historical, pedagogical, cultural and personal narratives through teacher identity that open up an understanding of the topic of visual displays in elementary schools. The inquiry also investigates the intersubjectivity of visual culture in education and how this relates to a tradition of images in schools. This dissertation draws upon the philosophical writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer and nineteenth-century social theorist John Ruskin to understand how the appearance of tradition, joy, beauty, and labor came to be associated with the existence of visual displays. I critically trace the historic threads of “object-study,” “nature study,” the school-decoration movement and picture-study as they speak to the current practices of visual displays in today’s schools. Understanding that “images speak” is an important notion for the twenty-first century educator yet is rarely discussed or taken up critically. Thus, my exploration into the meaning and significance of the topic of visual displays in elementary schools opens up the possibility for new understandings of visuality in education.