Emergent Student Engagement in Ontario School Reform

• In Event: 30.053 - The Emerging Age of Engagement, Identity, and Well-Being: New Research Findings From Ontario

Abstract

A newly emerging movement for global educational change seeks to promote student engagement rather than focusing exclusively on student achievement results (Lawson & Lawson, 2013). The origins of the term “engagement” first appeared as involvement with an enemy in battle, then as a promise to marry, then as an upcoming commitment or appointment. Engagement is about serious commitment of a sustained rather than fleeting nature. Sustained engagement in learning enhances the opportunities for and likelihood of later achievement and success.

Using the interview-based methodology with educators from 10 Ontario school districts described above, this paper examines the ways that educators strove to increase student engagement through emergent educational practices supported by “Leading from the Middle.” The research also documents the ways in which student disengagement persisted when educators were compelled to administer residual practices from the preceding era of the GERM.

The practices of student engagement in this study were evident in what Bernstein (1975) originally labeled the 3 “message systems” of schooling: curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Student engagement increased when educators were able to adapt their schools’ message to their pupils. For example, educators reported that when Old Order Mennonite students were enabled to choose texts that responded to their own traditional cultural norms, such as Anne of Green Gables, their engagement increased noticeably. Other students who struggled with cursive writing were offered new pedagogies that enabled them to select from a menu of digital technologies to enhance writing performance. Students with fetal alcohol symptoms, who found it difficult to sustain attention, had access to in-class climbing walls to alternate physical activity with academic tasks. First Nations, Metís, and Inuit students had opportunities to express their cultural heritages by participating in innovative school designs with accompanying assessments that invited extensive community participation.

Innovations such as these expressed the emergence of a new narrative of educational change that promotes engagement, identity, and well-being. Promising as they were, the innovations often co-existed uneasily with student and teacher disengagement that was perpetuated through the required residual practices of the provincial standardized tests and the preparation for them in Grades 3 and 6. These residual practices led to student distraction and doodling when re-doing practice writing assessments in assignments that were not culturally responsive. They also posed dispiriting ethical dilemmas for teachers when deliberating upon whether to include new refugee students in the tests when non-participation would yield scores of zero and bring down the performance scores of their classes and schools.

This paper points to the growth of greater attention to student engagement in Ontario as a way to motivate all learners and to strengthen their identities through curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. It also reveals the difficulties that arise when the emergence of differentiated curriculum, pedagogy and assessment is undermined by the persistence of residual undifferentiated and unresponsive standardized testing practices.

Authors

• Dennis Lynn Shirley, Boston College

• Andy Hargreaves, Boston College