This new edition explores the myriad ways that education, broadly defined, molds each of us in profound and enduring ways. Laid against the supporting scaffolding of modern critical theory, the chapters offer cutting edge perspectives of going to school in British Columbia. How has education been tailored by race, class, gender? How do representations of schools and schooling change over time and whose interests are served? What echoes of current tensions can we hear in the past? The book offers a glimpse of the deep contradictions inherent in an experience that we all share.
British Columbia is regularly described in superlatives both positive and negative - most spectacular scenery, strangest politics, greatest environmental sensitivity, richest Aboriginal cultures, most aggressive resource exploitation, closest ties to Asia. Jean Barman's The West beyond the West presents the history of the province in all its diversity and apparent contradictions. This critically acclaimed work is the premiere book on British Columbian history, with a narrative beginning at the point of contact between Native peoples and Europeans and continuing into the twenty-first century. Barman tells the story by focusing not only on the history made by leaders in government but also on the roles of women, immigrants, and Aboriginal peoples in the development of the province. She incorporates new perspectives and expands discussions on important topics such as the province's relationship to Canada as a nation, its involvement in the two world wars, the perspectives of non-mainstream British Columbians, and its participation in recreation and sports including Olympics. First published in 1991 and revised in 1996, this third edition of The West beyond the West has been supplemented by statistical tables incorporating the 2001 census, two more extensive illustration sections portraying British Columbia's history in images, and other new material bringing the book up to date. Barman's deft scholarship is readily apparent and the book demands to be on the shelf of anyone with an interest in British Columbian or Canadian history.
Political progressives in Canada and the United States are deeply concerned by the manner in which their countries treat their poor. They are dismayed at the dismantling of the social welfare state, the weakening of public education systems and the grotesque and ever-growing inequality of wealth. To remedy this problem, citizens need to be more aware of how political ideology influences attitudes and actions, and they need to better comprehend the effects of hegemonic discourses in the corporate media and school curriculum. This book informs educators how to develop context-specific pedagogy that will help achieve a more enlightened citizenry and, as a result, a stronger democracy. Teaching about Hegemony: Race, Class and Democracy in the 21st Century promotes a progressive agenda for teaching that is rooted in critical pedagogy, it explains why ideological critique is necessary in raising political consciousness, it deconstructs white, middle-class hegemony in the formal school curriculum, and it examines corporate media and school curriculum as hegemonic devices. It also covers recent theory and research about race, class and democracy and how best to teach about these topics. Combining theory and sociological research with pedagogical approaches and classroom narratives, this book is fundamental for progressive educators interested in developing a politically conscious, progressive and active citizenry hungry for a stronger civil society.
What is mathematics, and what aspects of it should be taught in schools? How and to whom should it be taught, and how should its understanding be assessed? These questions continue to drive curriculum development, school organization, teaching methods, and research agendas. No one today doubts that mathematics should be taught in our schools, but this was not always so. Mathematics Education Across Time and Place aims to help mathematics teachers, teacher educators, and anyone else interested in mathematics education appreciate the path this discipline has taken through the ages. To understand the historical and social context for schools and the place of mathematics within them, we meet a variety of mathematics educators from different times and places. Though fictional, their lives and social circumstances are based on historical documents and professional sources. They range from ancient Greece to modern Zimbabwe; from Persia to British Columbia; from Islamic Baghdad to revolutionary Paris; from Elizabethan England to twentieth-century New York; and from the rural one-room schools of North America to the modern comprehensive secondary school. By sharing the teachers’ lives, we come to understand how they developed their love for teaching mathematics, and how their work fit into the larger social context of their time.
This major work brings together some of the most significant and influential writing on the history of education during the past thirty years. It illustrates key themes and their relevance for our understanding of the development of schooling.
Between the 1880s and the 1940s, children in English Canada encountered schools and school systems profoundly different from today's. In How Schools Worked, R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar map the contours of that world, retrieving it from the obscurity created not only by the passage of time but by fundamental shifts in organization, pedagogical values, and beliefs about the role of public education. Moving beyond the rhetoric on school reform that marked the period, How Schools Worked focuses squarely on schooling itself. How many children went to elementary or secondary school, how often, and for how long? What was the range of their educational attainments? How were their patterns of attendance influenced by social class, gender, and where they lived? What and how were they taught? How were they assessed and promoted from grade to grade? What were their teachers' qualifications and experience? What were their school buildings like? Who paid the bills and how much did they pay? How well or badly were children and young people served by their schools? And how did answers to these questions change over time? A sympathetic yet critical analysis, How Schools Worked is a portrait of a complex enterprise at work. Gidney and Millar offer a rich understanding of the period, a reappraisal of some major debates, and insights into educational issues that perplex us still.
Changing Women, Changing History is a bibliographic guide to the scholarship, both English and French, on Canadian's women's history. Organized under broad subject headings, and accompanied by author and subject indices it is accessible and comprehensive.
In 1922-23, Chinese students in Victoria, British Columbia, went on strike to protest a school board’s attempt to impose segregation. Their resistance was unexpected at the time and runs against the grain of mainstream accounts of Asian exclusion, which tend to ignore the agency of the excluded. Contesting White Supremacy offers an alternative reading of racism in British Columbia. Drawing on Chinese sources and perspectives and an innovative theory of racism and anti-racism to explain the strike, Timothy Stanley demonstrates that by the 1920s migrants from China and their BC-born children actively resisted policy makers’ efforts to organize white supremacy into the very texture of life. The education system served as an arena where white supremacy confronted Chinese nationalist schooling and where parents and students rejected the idea of being either Chinese or Canadian and instead invented a new category – Chinese Canadian – to define their identity.
In British Columbia by the Road, Ben Bradley takes readers on an unprecedented journey through the history of roads, highways, and motoring in British Columbia’s Interior, a remote landscape composed of plateaus and interlocking valleys, soaring mountains and treacherous passes. Challenging the idea that the automobile offered travellers the freedom of the road and a view of unadulterated nature, Bradley shows that an array of interested parties – boosters, businessmen, conservationists, and public servants – manipulated what drivers and passengers could and should view from the road. When it came to roads and highways, planners and builders had two concerns: grading or paving a way through “the wilderness” and opening pathways to new parks and historic sites. They understood that the development of a modern road network would lead to new ways of perceiving BC and its environment. Although cars and roads promised freedom, they offered drivers a curated view of the landscape that shaped the province’s image in the eyes of residents and visitors alike.
Between 1849 and 1930, government-assisted schooling in what is now British Columbia supported the development of a capitalist settler society. Lessons in Legitimacy examines state schooling for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples – public schools, Indian Day Schools, and Indian Residential Schools – in one analytical frame. Schooling for Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and youth functioned in distinct yet complementary ways, teaching students lessons in legitimacy that normalized settler capitalism and the making of British Columbia. Church and state officials administered different school systems that trained Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to take up and accept unequal roles in the emerging social order. Combining insights from history, Indigenous studies, historical materialism, and political economy, this important study reveals how an understanding of the historical uses of schooling can inform contemporary discussions about the role of education in reconciliation and improving Indigenous–settler relations.
