Browsing by Author "Williamson, W. John"

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    The Case of the Disappearing/Appearing Slow Learner:An Interpretive Mystery
    (2015-04-29) Williamson, W. John; Field, James Colin
    This thesis explored the topic of the categorization of and programming for students named, through intellectual assessment and/or documented school failure, as “slow learners”. Written as a fictionalized hard-boiled detective story instead of adopting a more traditional thesis format, the thesis drew on the author’s experiential data, primary sources, and interviews with students, teachers, administrators, and curriculum leaders and the interpretive lenses of disability studies, including disability history, and hermeneutics. It explored assumptions contained in the slow learner label and the resourcing and accommodation practices, and their lack, that flow from this and other educational labels. Emergent themes included the harmful consequences of sorting individuals by measured intelligence scores, and the notion that the complexity of human learning for any student is greater than the slow learner label, or any educational label can contain. Paradoxically, even as these themes emerged, the actual teaching practices in many programs for slow learners, in their concreteness, in their freedom from constraints such as standardized testing, and in their use of inquiry methods, were reported as beneficial to these students and potentially to other students as well. When similar methods were used in non-segregated classrooms that included students named as slow learners, most students were reported to be engaged and successful. In this vein, broader educational reform measures that might be potentially helpful in helping make schools more inclusive for the students currently labelled slow learners were also examined. This thesis recommended the use of inclusive approaches in classrooms at the site-based level as well as continued scrutiny and reform of the institutional barriers at the school, district, and provincial levels that contribute to the production of slow learners.
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    Understanding work experience: a discourse analysis
    (2004) Williamson, W. John; Phelan, Anne
    The objective of this research is to examine the discursive construction of Work Experience Education. Work Experience Education is an increasingly popular approach to vocational education in Alberta, Canada. It provides high school students opportunities to develop vocational skills, explore careers and in some cases gain hours towards trades certification, by working off-campus for employers in the business community while still gaining high school course credits for their efforts. Often viewed as a common sense approach, helping students develop employability skills through working with employers, Work Experience Education has largely evaded critical research. Through the use of Critical Discourse Analysis, both as a theoretical framework and as a method of inquiry, this study traces the growth of Work Experience Education and then examines the talk and policy involved its promotion and administration. Particular attention is given to the discourses or patterns of meaning that have come to dominate communication about Work Experience Education. This thesis highlights discursive tensions between managerial and marketing discourses in Work Experience Education and educational discourses about its plausibility as a form of learning, the accountability of participating schools and employers and the rights of student workers. In this thesis I examine the discourses of work and learning at play in Work Experience Education. I also raise questions regarding the impact of Work Experience Education on how educators understand the purpose of education more broadly.