Comparative curriculum mapping for social justice in Canadian education: Next steps

• In Event: Global knowledge for local equity: Comparative curriculum mapping for social justice in Canadian education

Proposal

To address the issue of curriculum injustice in Canadian schools, where the prior educational experiences of immigrant students are ignored and their funds of knowledge are marginalized, we propose critical curriculum interventions through a methodology of counter-mapping curricula for social justice. This approach aims to empower teachers, students, and parents to enact socially just pedagogies and advance the epistemic inclusion of immigrant communities, facilitating a truly socially just Canadian curriculum.


This proposed research program builds directly on two funded projects. A SSHRC project (2022-2025) investigating the educational experiences of post-Soviet adolescents in the Greater Toronto Area identified a significant mismatch between curriculum orientations of immigrants and those of their Canadian teachers. A Mitacs project (2020-2024) developed comparative maps of Ontario Science and Mathematics curricula (Grades 7-9) with those of 17 recent refugee-sending countries, creating tools to foster authentic communication and mutual understanding between immigrant parents and educators.


The new research intends to significantly expand this work by: 1) developing and applying a 5D analytical lens as a framework for categorizing and critical assessment of decolonial empirical and theoretical research centered around definition, depth, direction, domain, and danger of performativity; 2) participatory counter-mapping as a critical methodological approach for achieving epistemic justice in education - developed in response to the gaps identified through the critical assessment and analysis; 3) incorporating a wider range of immigrant-sending countries for counter-mapping, including understudied post-Soviet nations. The project is theoretically grounded at the intersection of critical social justice (Fraser, 2005), post-colonial comparative education (Takayama, 2017), funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992), and curricula counter-mapping (Duggan & Gutiérrez-Ujaque, 2025) to advance a novel methodology for curriculum design: participatory curricula counter-mapping.


The project will unfold in four phases: (1) developing counter-mapping as a methodological approach for curriculum design for social justice, informed by the results of critical review of decolonial research; (2) a critical comparative curriculum analysis of policy documents; (3) participatory action research with teachers, students, and community members; and (4) the development of counter-mapping curriculum design principles. Expected outcomes include an open-access repository of 50+ justice-oriented curriculum units, a co-designed pedagogical toolkit of counter-mapping lesson plans, and concrete policy recommendations for institutionalizing epistemic justice in provincial curricula.


This future project seeks to fundamentally shift the paradigm of inclusion from assimilation to epistemic sovereignty, positioning immigrant communities as empowered agents of equitable educational change. By critically revealing how dominant curricula can silence global knowledge and offering solutions to incorporate curricula from countries represented in the classroom, this work will provide Canadian educators and policymakers with the practical tools to build systems that honour plural ways of knowing and being.

Authors

• Emmanuelle Le Pichon, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education OISE, University of Toronto

• Marina Antony-Newman, University College London, Institute of Education