Theresa Rogers

It is well established that comprehensive sexual health education (SHE) in Canada is inconsistent and reflects a range of content, learning outcomes, and adherences to pedagogical best practices. To better understand why, in this dissertation I examined how SHE is known, lived, and produced through sexual health educators’ bodies, as well as the corresponding implications for pedagogy and practice. Inquiry of this nature has a heightened importance because sex educators remain curiously understudied in Canada, with no other known studies addressing their embodied experiences. I first situated myself in the research project by distilling the theoretical, methodological, and contextual gaps in relevant scholarship. I then created a custom ‘felt-sense’ theoretical lens for interpreting sexual health educators’ phenomenological experiences via arts-based processes. I next employed principles of sensory ethnography as I took part in a community-based sexual health educator training program alongside fellow novice sex educators in Vancouver, Canada. Working with five focal novice educators, I employed a range of qualitative and arts-based methods to contribute a nuanced account of each educator’s embodied experiences of learning to teach SHE, including my own. As part of this, I interrogated the social conditions interconnecting with educators’ embodied conditions to consider ways that the collective (re)production of meanings may counter the varied anti-oppressive aims of SHE. The findings of this study are organized around three primary felt-sense experiences: Interchange, Intensification, and Interruption. Through all three experiences, I found that the educators learn and teach in a context of ever-shifting knowledge, realities, and priorities. Multiple intersubjectivities and ways of being exist alongside each other, coming to the forefront of pedagogical practice as needed and desired. Educators’ selves were in ongoing, sometimes paradoxical, dialogue with situational demands and logistics, as well as with intersubjectivities and memories. Considering the influences of trauma, misogyny and racial hegemony on SHE, educators’ reflexivity and ongoing growth are crucial. Mirroring the educators’ dedication to being multifaceted and inclusive professionals in face of the demanding nature of SHE, I conclude by carving out a space and offering suggestions for how embodied experiences may be helpfully conceptualized and operationalized within future pedagogical practices.

View record

Language and Literacy Practices (LLPs) in the Botswana bi/multilingual Hairdressing and Beauty Therapy (HBT) workplaces are an important resource for curriculum design and development in Botswana Technical Education Programmes (BTEPs). The hairdressing and beauty therapy salon are sites where BTEP acquired theoretical knowledge, practical skills, and attitudes are applied. A salon should therefore link seamlessly with the vocational training environment of the HBT students to facilitate students’ attainment of the core repertoire of linguistic skills of the trade and acceptance into the professional hairdressing community of practice. Prior to this study, the relationship of site-based LLPs to the BTEP Comm & PIPS curriculum design and implementation in the bi/multilingual training context of Botswana has not been researched. Using ethnographic qualitative methods and framed with the Situated literacies (Barton, Hamilton & Ivanic, 2000) and Communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) models, this case study drew on observations, interviews and focus groups with curriculum developers, trainers, students and hairdressers to generate and collect data on LLPs in the hairdressing training and workplace environments. Data were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-phase content thematic approach reinforced by Gee’s (2003) Concepts of D/discourse and building tasks to inductively analyse textualized data to decipher the LLPs of the hairdressers. Results show that, despite policy and assumption based on a colonial history that English, the official language, is the workplace and vocational education language, the English and Setswana competent students and hairdressers were hybrid-speaking professionals who code-switch and translanguage in their LLPs to assert professional identity and expertise, attend to hairdressing salon operations, exhibit salon etiquette and comfort, and portray elements of social culture in a hairdressing environment. These findings have implications for workplace language and literacy curriculum and development in vocational training in Botswana and other similar contexts.

View record

This dissertation presents a novel posthuman digital visual methodology for studying digital self-imaging practices on social media. The method considers digital images, the images they produce, and the audiences to whom the images are shared not as distinct entities but rather as entangles assemblages of material, discursive, and affective forces that intra-act together to create digital imaging phenomena. Reading the Cuts draws on the work of Karen Barad, Don Ihde, and Gayle Salamon as the foundation of the methodology. The dissertation provides an overview of literature written about selfies or digital self-images shared on social media. It then provides a posthuman narrative of the becoming of the paradigms that have come to shape how we think about the relationship between digital images and digital subjectivities. The dissertation then narrates how the Reading the Cuts came to be, theoretically, and positions itself as contributing to both classic qualitative visual methods and post qualitative methodologies. Reading the Cuts as a methodology aims to provide a posthuman approach to visual methods that challenges typical representational modes of analyzing images in social media spaces by studying the becoming of digital self-images.

View record

Advances in technology have influenced the ways in which students read, write, and communicate. The advent of the Internet and other digital technologies in the classroom has encouraged educators to supplement traditional pedagogies with those that integrate digital technologies in order to cater to students’ academic and professional needs—needs that include the ability to navigate large repositories of multimodal information on the Internet to locate, evaluate, organize, and use relevant information. Further, the emergence of new technologies demands that educators explore their potential for new ways of reading and writing as well as for fostering participatory and collaborative learning in classroom instruction.This case study aimed to investigate University of Botswana first-year students’ use of digital technologies to enhance learning in the Communication and Academic Literacy Skills (COM) course. A qualitative approach—using a questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, observations, and document reviews—was taken to determine the technologies that were available for student use at the university, how the digital technologies were used to enhance student learning, whether the use of digital technologies contributed to the development of students’ academic literacies, and lecturer perceptions of students’ use of digital technologies to enhance their learning. Data from 63 students and two lecturers, purposely sampled, were analyzed for emergent themes, revealing generally that (a), although students were exposed to a variety of digital technologies the university provided, they did not use them to enhance their learning due to a lack of digital literacy skills and (b), although participants acknowledged the potential of using digital technologies for effective learning and teaching, resource challenges—such as a lack of working computers, unreliable Internet connections, and a lack of digital skills—impacted the integration of technology into the COM course. With new and emerging technologies rapidly increasing, this study highlights (a) the need for exploration into the use of these new digital technologies for teaching and learning, (b) professional development for lecturers on the effective integration of these technologies into instruction, and (c) policy formation and implementation regarding the use of these technologies for the promotion of 21st-century skills.

View record

This dissertation explores discourses of difference used by students throughout one year in a Francophone minority language school. This ethnography was conducted in the students’ social studies classes, where drama was used as a (post)critical pedagogy to teach and explore differences embedded in the curriculum. Drawing on critical, Indigenous, and poststructural theories this project explores how the students used discourses of difference in their interactions in and out of the classroom and during dramatic work. This study reveals that the participating youth used categories of difference, like race, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, and youth, in ways marked by ambiguity, humour, irony, and dissatisfaction, as well as attempts to govern and discipline the boundaries of these constructed categories. Discourses of race consistently emerged in informal educational spaces, such as school hallways; however, the students avoided them in the formal classroom space, a practice linked to the dominance of whiteness in the Canadian educational context. Drama activities created liminal spaces that disrupted the discursive distinction between informal and formal educational spaces, allowing limited access to the students’ informal discourses of race during instructional time. Overarching schooling structures made seizing such moments difficult, in order to disrupt and unpack categories of difference. Furthermore, the students’ problematic racial humour and representational practices surfaced during and immediately following classroom drama activities in ways that reinforced colonial ideas about belonging and unbelonging in Canadian schools. This study fills gaps in existing research on Francophone minority language schooling by exploring how race, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, and gender intersected in the identifications and discourses of participating youth. These findings trouble the myth of seamless integration in minority language Francophone schools and suggest that linguistic affiliation is an insufficient basis for inclusion and that schools must work to address the significant impact that differences of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, and gender have on youth’s lives. Furthermore, this study complicates literature in drama-in-education by examining the possibilities and limitations applied theatre affords for unpacking categories of difference in the classroom. It proposes that pedagogical approaches that are explicitly anti-racist and decolonizing are needed in order to achieve such results.

View record

In this qualitative case study, I explored the process of identity construction of plurilingual students attending a Francophone minority school in British Columbia. Using a theoretical framework informed by a sociocultural perspective on literacies (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Street, 1984), positioning theories of identity (Davies & Harré, 1990; Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2001), plurilingualism and pluricultural competence (Marshall & Moore, 2013; Moore, 2006), and multimodality (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Kress, 2000a, 2000b), I investigated how focal students negotiated multiple subject positions as plurilingual and pluricultural in the context of literacy events in a classroom. My analysis focused on their use of linguistic and cultural resources in their oral interactions, and on their use of modes of representation in their digital multimodal texts. I gathered data through ethnographic methods, and I also collected multimodal digital texts. My analysis of literacy events allowed for identification of “moments of positioning” as plurilingual and pluricultural, in which students activated some of their linguistic and cultural resources, and/or modes of representation to negotiate multiple subject positions. This study of moments of positioning provides a close analysis of factors inhibiting the expression and recognition of some subject positions as legitimate in the classroom. For instance, the monolingual school Discourse – with an upper case D, as conceptualized by Gee (1996, 2001, 2005) – may limit the negotiation of plurilingual and pluricultural subject positions. This study makes significant contributions to research on identity in the fields of literacy and language learning, and in the research on identity in Francophone minority schools. It shows how a Discourse might lead students to express some of their subject positions in their classroom setting, and not others. My analysis of moments of positioning supports current poststructuralist views of identity as dynamic, fluid, and performed in interactions and adds to research demonstrating that subject positions are not stable entities negotiated once and acquired forever (Blackledge & Pavlenko, 2001). In the field of research on multimodality, my research adds to the literature arguing that multimodality can be a powerful tool that children can use when they create texts in which they negotiate subject positions.

View record

The purpose of this study was to explore how identity texts and narrative writing could strengthen adolescents’ writing and support adolescents’ identity explorations. The study took place in an English 10 First Peoples class in a small, remote community in northern British Columbia. The context was highly unique; therefore, the study also includes findings regarding the students’ and community’s response to a compulsory course with Indigenous content, the struggles for educators teaching the course, and the perceived strengths of the course. This qualitative case study (Stake, 1995) was guided by the metaphor of the Haida dogfish mother. It drew upon Indigenous storywork principles (Archibald, 2008) to create an ethical framework that extended beyond institutional standards for ethical conduct in research. This merging of methodologies invited improvisation, dialogue, and inner reflection to explore the role of stories, ancestry, history, and lived experiences in this research. Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, teachers, administrators, community members, and a parent were interviewed and observations were conducted in the English 10 First Peoples classroom, and the data were analyzed using the iterations of the k’aad ‘aww dance. The findings from this study indicated that adolescents generally engage more with writing that is based on topics of their choice and personal experiences. The adolescents shared ways that writing transformed their lives and strengthened their relationships. They also appreciated the inclusion of non-writing activities in their English language arts class. In this study, the resistance to English 10 First Peoples as a required course resulted in racially discriminatory conversations. These suggest the need to further explore ways to ensure all students and educators have access to accurate and respectful Indigenous content and history and to ensure that educators are not engaging in a racism of low expectations (Auditor General of British Columbia, 2015). The educators offered suggestions for improved support for courses that are rich in Indigenous content and pedagogical practices; overall they expressed that the strengths of the course far outweighed the struggles. All of the participants in this study emphasized the importance of building strong relationships between students and educators.

View record

This critical ethnography investigates the pedagogical spaces constituted within a youth-led, participatory theatre production, Surviving in the Cracks (Wager et al., 2009). The popular theatre production documented the lived experiences of eight street-youth, including their struggles to survive in the face of cuts to public health resources in Vancouver. As an applied theatre study, this theatre project is defined as a messy and rich site of pedagogical inquiry that is examined through multiple theoretical and methodological frameworks. It draws on critical feminist pedagogy, critical youth studies and theatre and literacy research with the purpose of revealing how drama and theatre spaces provide “anomalous” (Ellsworth, 2005) learning places, or out-of-the-ordinary learning spaces, that youth and researchers collectively embodied during the applied drama and theatre process and production. Analysis of ethnographic data generated before, during, and after the theatrical production of Surviving in the Cracks suggests how drama and theatre with street youth opens up embodied pedagogical spaces. Two different methods of analysis bring multiple perspectives to this work through exploring how meaning was collectively constructed, how multimodal literacy practices were used in critical ways, how power was negotiated, how desire was manifested through imaginaries, and how safe spaces were generated by this community of youth within selected pedagogical moments of resistance during the theatre process. Specifically, the script is analyzed with a youth participant, followed by the analysis of particular moments of resistance during performance creation and production. This research advances knowledge of how informal learning spaces and youth resistances within education become crucial parts of pedagogy and should be considered as future foundations and expansions of education. Implications include using multiple methodological lenses in order to work alongside, for and with youth, as well as being able to reach larger audiences of youth, communities, educators, and scholars through different analytical perspectives. By examining how theatre provides a space for marginalized youth to engage in dialogues about complex social issues, this research contributes to the fields of critical and feminist pedagogy, language and literacy education, drama in education, critical youth studies, and collaborative methodological studies in qualitative research.

View record

The focus of this work is on how visual cohesive resources construct coherent picturebook texts. In particular, I analyze how the cohesive resources of colour and repetition construct meaning across a visual sequential narrative in the picturebook format. While there has been deep scholarship on the picturebook format, especially on the meanings, how and what readers glean from them, and how they work and support literacy and literary development, there is little systematic study on the construction of meaning and even less that uses a social semiotic theory of multimodal meaning construction. The study is based on the close analysis of two acclaimed picturebooks, Where the Wild Things Are and How to Heal a Broken WingThe broader implications of my study stem from the use of the multimodal picturebook as the focus of analysis. The picturebook is a widely acknowledged literary format - a sequential narrative multimodal form that is brief, concise, and ideal for the delicate analysis of multisemiosis. This investigation is timely and relevant to the growing imperative to involve future educators and students in multimodal learning and literary response and assessment activities.My reflections discuss the three outcomes of this study that provide new resources for picturebook analysis and have the potential for application beyond children’s literature and picturebook creation as resources for multimodal learning and assessment. The first outcome is a framework of resource systems and the textual environments that they construct. The systems and environments are central to the analysis and creation of picturebooks and multimodal sequential narrative texts. The second outcome is a defined set of cohesive colour configurations that are resources for assessing and editing visual cohesion in sequential visual narratives and other multimodal forms. And third is a set of descriptions of the ways visual repetition constructs continuity and cohesion, with particular attention to ways that salience and framing provide additional fresh critical resources for multimodal analysis and creation.

View record

In this dissertation I analyse lesbian and gay picturebooks and the discourse of a censorship challenge to these books. I take a deconstructive approach to the material, using queer theory, children’s literature criticism and children’s culture theory to analyse the ways in which the knowledge/ignorance and adult/child binaries are reinscribed and undone in these discourses. I focus on absences of LGBT-specific language, physical bodies, difference and non-normative gender identities in the picturebooks, and analyse a wide range of media in a challenge in Lexington, Massachusetts which began in 2005. I argue that both the books and the discourse of the challenge have the effect of reinscribing a construction of the ideal child as ignorant and asexual. This conceptualisation of childhood dismisses actual children’s ability to absorb, challenge or disseminate knowledge, and refuses to offer them possibilities of non-normative genders and sexualities for their lives. I argue that, due to the focus on sexuality and the unavoidably pedagogical nature of children’s literature, the picturebooks inherently trouble the knowledge/ignorance binary. Due to this disruptive condition the normalising politics of the picturebooks are inadequate to prevent the books from becoming controversial. Queer picturebooks that resisted normalisation and represented real difference would better respect the intellectual and emotional needs of child readers.

View record

This study examined the selection and development of character focalization in four children’s novels. Character focalization was defined as the location of fictional world perception in the mind of a character. Novels by Meindert DeJong, Katherine Paterson, and Susan Patron were analyzed using systemic-functional resources (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004), narrative concepts, and a model of focalization described by Rimmon-Kenan (Narrative Fiction, 2002). The study showed that one character in each novel is selected and developed as the prominent fictional world sensory perceiver, emoter, and thinker. Moonta Riemersma in Far Out the Long Canal (DeJong, 1964), Jess Aarons in Bridge to Terabithia (Paterson, 1977), Gilly Hopkins in The Great Gilly Hopkins (Paterson, 1978), and Lucky Trimble in The Higher Power of Lucky (Patron, 2006) are selected and developed as focalizing characters in and beyond the first few chapters of their novels. Distinctive seeing-, hearing-, emoting-, and thinking-patterns obtain in the first few chapters and are subsequently developed according to the principles of continuation, augmentation, or reconfiguration. These distinctive patterns represent the focalized, the people and things perceived. All four characters selected as focalizers are cognitively-engaged individuals, and their thinking reveals their personal understandings about themselves, others, and their lived experiences. This study offers a rich description of four focalizations and a methodology for exploring character focalization in fiction for children, adolescents, and adults. The author suggests that students in fourth through sixth grade will benefit academically and personally by exploring questions centering on focalization in the novels they read, discuss, and reflect on at school.

View record

This thesis draws on Social Symbolic Mediation Theory, Social Semiotics, and DiscursivePositioning Theories to explore a theoretical model I call “Authorship as Assemblage.” Thismodel considers authorship broadly; it posits that authors are “declared, hidden, or withdrawn”contributors of multimodal meanings who orchestrate an array of semiotic resources, social(inter)actions, and discursive positions within and across a variety of social contexts (Barthes,1970, p. 110). A literature review and three case studies suggest some of the ways multimodalauthorship can be theorized and explored within and across social contexts, including a child’sout-of-school environments, during professional picturebook-making collaboration, and in asummer camp where youth explore playbuilding. By considering authorship broadly, itssignificance in the multiple fields of study can be seen. Findings of the thesis include thatauthorship can not be thought of as a isolated or stable phenomenon, for it is bound up withsemiotic, social, and critical meanings that interrelate with and interanimate each other.

View record

This study enters the ongoing theoretical conversation about New Literacy Studies (NLS) and literacy practices. Recent critiques of NLS have highlighted shortcomings related to the difficulty in accounting for the way power plays a role in shaping literacy practices (e.g., Brandt & Clinton, 2002; Collins & Blot, 2003). In their article, “Limits of the Local” Brandt and Clinton (2002) call for literacy studies that include an analysis of both localizing and globalizing activity to find a means for exploring the role of power in local literacy practices. Their call prompted much discussion within the NLS (e.g., Barton & Hamilton, 2005; Reder & Davila, 2005; Street, 2003b) and several studies that followed took up this theoretical challenge (e.g., see Pahl & Rowsell, 2006)The purpose of this study is to instantiate the "literacy-in-action” model (Brandt and Clinton, 2002), based on the work of Latour (1993; 1996), to account for and further theorize the global in local literacy practices. To date, few published studies that take up this model in all of its depth are in evidence. In this study, the “literacy-in-action” model is explored and elaborated through a qualitative case study of one classroom in order to a) build a more detailed research framework for the model and b) provide a concrete basis for discussing its merits and limitations in sociocultural studies of literacy in classroom settings. In doing so, my goal is to situate the model and move the discussion of the local and global in literacy research beyond the kind of theoretical critique NLS scholars, such as Street (2003a; 2003b) and Street and Lefstein (2007) provide.

View record

This study investigates the forces and affects of contemporary devised theatre practices in education. Inquiries at two sites form the basis of research: an analysis of professional contemporary devising practice with regard to educational applications and implications within it; and an analysis of a devising process in a secondary school program to consider the benefits and limitations of this approach in the context of education. This work is situated within a poststructural perspective on embodied pedagogy (Davies, 2000; Ellsworth, 2005; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000), and within the theory of nomadic thought, as developed by Giles Deleuze (1990; 1994) and his collaborations with Felix Guattari (1983; 1987). Taking up pedagogy in this light, I consider the student as a body/mind/self in motion (Ellsworth, 2005) and focus on a non-representational perspective of analysis, understanding pedagogy to be lived and experienced by means of forces of affect, sensation and interrelation. Accordingly, this study challenges the dominant perspective on pedagogy, as occurring and evaluated according to representational logic, reliant on semiotic systems. This study asks: What can be gained from a new lens through which to understand the construction of theatre and drama in education? And, what are the connections and crevices between theatre practices today and theatre and drama in education?

View record

Research findings point to reading comprehension as an important mediator of academic achievement for French immersion students (Hogan, Caffs, & Little, 2005). This research investigated the best predictors of word reading and reading comprehension in French as a second language in 72 Grade 3 students of an early French immersion programme. The present research is based on Bemhardt’s (2005) model of second language reading, which views reading comprehension as an interactive-compensatory process. Four main questions guided this program of study: (1) What is the best predictor of word reading among phonological awareness, spelling, verbal working memory, vocabulary and morphological awareness in Grade 3 French immersion students? (2) What is the best predictor of reading comprehension amongphonological awareness, spelling, verbal working memory, vocabulary and morphological awareness in Grade 3 French immersion students? (3) What is the relative role of second language cultural knowledge compared to phonological awareness, spelling, verbal working memory, vocabulary and morphological awareness in Grade 3 French immersion students’ reading comprehension? and (4) What do French immersion Grade 3 students perceive as different in a culturally less and more familiar text that affected their reading comprehension and which cultural context do they prefer and why? Results from hierarchical regression analyses showed that phonological awareness and spelling predicted word reading, whereas morphological awareness predicted readingcomprehension of isolated sentences. Reading comprehension of a narrative text with morefamiliar cultural emphasis was predicted by receptive vocabulary (EVIP). Readingcomprehension of a narrative text with less familiar cultural emphasis was predicted by second language cultural knowledge, followed by morphological awareness. However, participantsperceived the culturally more familiar passage easier and perceived the culturally less familiarpassage as more engaging. Thus, results from the study appear to confirm that reading is an interactive compensatory process. Several theoretical, pedagogical and programme development implications are drawnfrom the present research.

View record