Browsing by Author "Scott, David M."

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Investigating Educational Responses to Diversity in Brazil during a Time of Curriculum Change
    (University of Chicago Press, 2019-08) Scott, David M.; Kawalilak, Colleen; Dressler, Roswita; de Paiva, Wilson Alves
    This article offers findings from a qualitative case-based research study examining the ways educators in central Brazil made sense of diversity, and the extent to which they believed recent policies in Brazil promoting greater recognition of ethno-cultural diversity are being realized in K-12 contexts. The multinational research team also examined the degree to which these educators felt that responses to diversity drawn from the Canadian context could inform Brazilian educational policy. Of note, the research participants articulated productive possibilities for promoting the inclusion of cultural diversity in varied classroom contexts. However, confirming findings from prior research, they saw recent policy shifts in Brazil related to intercultural understanding as unsupported by institutions, and thus almost completely reliant on teacher’s personal efforts and convictions. Overall, educators in this study had difficulty seeing Canadian responses to diversity as workable in Brazil, and there were a general absence of discussions concerning the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous culture and history. Informed by insights from both sociocultural theorizing (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Wertsch, 1998) and transformative learning theory (Freire, 1970; Mezirow, 1991), findings are analyzed by working to uncover the historically derived interpretive frameworks that both enabled and constrained the various beliefs of these educators.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Tuning into General Education: Understanding Student Experience in Undergraduate Education
    (2020-12-10) Ulmer-Krol, Simon Francis; Scott, David M.; Lund, Darren E.; Burwell, Catherine; Lucas, Jack
    General Education is a program that is generally defined as “the home for a well-rounded education that nurtures skills in communication, numeracy, and critical thinking” (Furman, 2013, p. 130) in post-secondary education. The purpose of this research was to investigate how students experience learning and living within a university in Western Canada that has structured all of its degree programs around General Education. Following case study methodology (Merriam, 2009), data was collected through multiple avenues, including: the review of four institutional and curricular documents, four semi-structured interviews with university faculty, and an online survey and three focus group interviews with current and graduated students. Interpretation of the data was guided by a hermeneutic lens (Smith, 2006), revealing that the student experience of General Education at this university is fundamentally experimental in nature, resulting in great divergences of experiences and understandings of the program. Students experience General Education as both transformative and hermeneutic, challenging and overcoming previously held assumptions and prejudices. Other participants, however, report their experiences as frustrating, irrelevant to their education, and interfering with their core studies. This study’s findings are significant in several respects, including providing the first investigation of a General Education program situated in a Canadian institutional context. These findings can further provide deeper insights into the tensions and incongruities that exist between the philosophical aims of General Education programs and how they are experienced by the students they are meant to serve.