Title: Connectedness with Nature: Designing Curriculum for Climate Justice Using Design-Based Research

Leila Refahi is a visual artist, educator, and researcher. She is currently working on her master’s thesis in socially engaged art, public pedagogy, environment, and transformative learning. In her thesis, she is studying Art Based Environmental Education and the potential of art in transforming ecological knowledge.  Throughout her professional career, she ran various educational and artistic projects in Canada, Iran, Finland, and Germany, focused on environmental issues. Her Artworks presented in 6 solo exhibitions and more than 60 national and international group exhibitions and festivals.

Title: Making Art at Home during the Covid19 Pandemic: Young Visitors, Instagram, and Museum Collections

Emma June Huebner is a bilingual multidisciplinary artist and high school teacher from Montreal. She finds ways to make art no matter what medium but primarily expresses herself through her music, dance, and videography. In studying Art History at McGill University and Education at the University of Ottawa, she discovered how museums can be catalysts for placing creativity and cultural objects at the center of learning. She currently does museum education research as part of her master’s in Art Education at Concordia University.

Topic: Exploring the roles and involvement of knowledge users in education research: A scoping review

Bernadine Sengalrayan is a Master’s student at the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. Her research focuses on knowledge mobilisation (bridging of research to practice and policy) in education. In particular, the relationship between knowledge producers and knowledge users, and whether those that do research and produce knowledge adequately work with or seek the insights of those who utilise that knowledge to inform classroom practice and policy decisions.
The benefit of getting the inputs of the knowledge users allows for research to be more publicly credible and applicable, and findings to be more readily translated into practice. Through a scoping review, Bernadine takes an exploratory look at the engagement of knowledge users of K-12 teaching and education policy research in Canada. It is hoped that the results from the scoping review will aid in uncovering the types of strong-reiterative-research-producer-user-connections best practices that can be adapted to future research.

Bernadine Sengalrayan

Title: SparkNotes study guides, reading behavior, and the literary canon in contemporary ELA education​

It is an open secret that high school and post-secondary students do not always read the books they are assigned in their English Language Arts (ELA) or literature classes—novels like Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984. Numerous editorials, blog posts, and articles in teaching trade publications have bemoaned the scourge of online study guides, which they claim students use to avoid the readings and cheat their way through English class. Of these, the most frequently cited offender is SparkNotes, a subsidiary of multibillion-dollar American bookselling giant Barnes and Noble and the dominant digital successor to printed study guides like Cole’s Notes and Cliffs Notes. The SparkNotes website attracts half a million visitors each month, and high school students report that its use is endemic among their peers; however, except for a passing mention in one qualitative study of reading behavior (Keller, 2013), no formal research has yet addressed the SparkNotes phenomenon.
This paper presents early research from a thesis project exploring SparkNotes’ impact on the ever-evolving theory and practice of ELA education. Preliminary findings from a large-scale survey of students’ SparkNotes use will be situated within a theoretical framework from New Literacy Studies (Hayles, 2012; Keller, 2013). In addition to describing aspects of contemporary students’ reading behavior in quantitative terms, this research raises questions about the role of primary texts in ELA education, particularly texts from the English literary canon.

Presenter

Amanda Light Dunbar is a Master’s student and incoming PhD student in the Department of Education at Concordia University, where she researches the role of SparkNotes study guides in English Language Arts (ELA) education. She holds a BA (Hon) in English Literature and a BEd from the University of British Columbia. In the past, Amanda has worked as an ELA and ESL teacher, and as a learning coach and program coordinator with the Learning Associates of Montreal, Trevor Williams Kids Foundation, and the Montreal Fluency Centre, specializing in literacy and executive function-based interventions for students with learning disabilities. These varied experiences have given Amanda a unique and nuanced perspective on education, which drives her to explore the points of disconnection between research, curriculum, and pedagogy. To connect, email amanda.light.dunbar@gmail.com.

Title: It’s all Relative: Sibling and Parent Teaching in Early Childhood

Family teaching is a topic which has received limited attention, and within the teaching literature, parent- and sibling-directed teaching have widely been examined separately. However, both relationships are valuable for providing insight about the development of teaching and learning in early childhood. Investigating families’ use of conceptual (i.e., concepts, labels, general knowledge) and procedural knowledge (i.e., step-by-step processes, procedures) can deepen our understanding about how families co-construct meaning and scaffold learning within the home. This presentation will highlight the main findings of Julia’s Master’s thesis, which compared parents’ and siblings’ use of conceptual and procedural knowledge during naturalistic home observations. Particular attention will be paid to implications of family teaching practices in the home.

Julia Fuoco recently obtained her Master’s degree in Child Studies at Concordia University, where she pursued her research interests in sibling and parent teaching. Prior to her graduate studies, Julia completed her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at McGill University, with a double minor in Education and Behavioral Sciences. Her presentation for the Graduate Symposium centres around her Masters’ thesis, which explored family teaching during naturalistic home observations.