The Power and Limitations of Critical Research as Praxis: Youth, Race, and Schooling in Western Canada

Session Submission Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium presents four studies that examine young people’s struggles with racialization and racism in the public education systems in Western Canada, and consider what their experiences of racialized schooling mean for their present and future selves. Each study presents their innovative and ‘experimental’ methodological and epistemological approaches while assessing their respective rigor and shortfalls. The aims of this session are to first explore the complex ways public education has functioned as a reproductive and regulative institution for racializing youth in the historical and present Canadian context. Next, it aims to create a critical space to engage with the audience on the question of how critical researchers can expand methodological as well as political capacities and tools to strengthen the links between research and action.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Section 2: Education in Multicultural Contexts Within and Across Subject Areas

Chair

• Verna L. St Denis, University of Saskatchewan

Papers

• “We’re Here Because We’re Black”: A Critical Theater-Based Pedagogy and Methodology for Understanding Student Experiences of Schooling in Western Canada - Sara Schroeter, The University of British Columbia

• Expressions of Policy Effects: Aboriginal Students’ Memories of Public School - Lyn Denise Daniels, The University of British Columbia

• Educational Experiences of First- and Second-Generation Turkish Immigrant Youth in Canada - Dilek Kayaalp, The University of British Columbia

• Researcher’s Consciousness: Young People’s Struggles With Racialization in the Context of Racially Sorting School Choice in Vancouver - Ee-Seul Yoon, The University of British Columbia

Discussant

• Verna L. St Denis, University of Saskatchewan