Diverse Approaches to Research in Education (DARE) is a seminar series co-hosted by Faculty of Education’s Research Hub and the Research Advisory Working Group (RAWG). The series provides a forum for faculty and students to share their research approaches and methods in connection to theories, creates a pedagogical space for intergenerational learning, and makes our scholarship more visible.

What does Meaningful Consent Look Like? New Thinking and Challenges in Online and Community Research

This panel will explore diverse experiences of education research that include meaningful, ongoing consent. We explore the ways in which dynamics of consent and ethical research relations have presented in our projects and informed us as teacher-scholars. Our panelists include: Amir Michalovich, UBC PhD Candidate; Amber Moore, Banting postdoctoral fellow with the Faculty of Education, SFU, Suzanne Smythe, SFU Associate Professor of Adult Literacy and Education Suzanne Smythe; together, we share stories about the challenges and ethics of meaningful consent in online fanfiction community spaces with primarily adolescent authors; with emergent bi/multilingual newcomer adolescent students from refugee backgrounds; in community technology centres. Drawing from our experiences, we tackle a number of issues that cut across our work, including trust and consent, differences between institutional consent procedures and local cultures and experiences of consent, consent in communities that are often already over-researched, and the complexities and clashing opinions and practices of using freely available Internet data. We consider the consequent critical decisions we make to attend meaningful consent in generative and generous ways.

Panelist bios:

Amir Michalovich is a PhD Candidate in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. His doctoral research explores digital multimodal composing with newcomer youth from refugee and socio-economically marginalized backgrounds in a secondary school in Metro Vancouver. His research and teaching also explore critical media literacy, computer-assisted and multimodal qualitative data analysis, arts-based research, classroom interaction, and linguistic landscape. He recently published in Journal of Adolescent and Adult LiteracyJournal of Language, Identity, and EducationTESOL Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry.

Dr. Amber Moore is a Banting Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her interests include: adolescent literacies; arts-based research; English education; feminist pedagogies; teacher and teacher librarian education; rape culture; and representations of youth in popular culture and YA literature, particularly sexual assault narratives. Her work can be found in publications such as English Journal, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship.

Dr. Suzanne Smythe is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her focus is on Adult Literacy and Adult Education, where she works at the intersections of adult literacy, digital equity and community-based learning. Her current research program explores new technologies, literacies and digital justice in community-based adult learning settings.

Panelists
Amir Michalovich
Dr. Amber Moore
Dr. Suzanne Smythe

Date/Time
Tuesday, June 6
4:30–6:00 p.m. PST

Place
HC 7000
SFU Vancouver Campus
(Online with Zoom is optional)   

PAST EVENTS

Transdisciplinary Pathways in Educational Research: Learning, ecology, media and beyond

The potential of transdisciplinary research and education has been lauded and discussed for decades. Despite often lofty promises, many have remarked on the lack of meaningful transdisciplinary research and teaching—ironically in universities, where it is most expected. Very little research presents or explores conceptual-philosophical frameworks (or pathways) for how to study and engage in transdisciplinary inquiry and questioning. Our workshop aims to address this theory gap, building from our team’s research expertise in educational semiotics and uniting theoretical perspectives from bio-semiotics, multimodality, and new socio-materiality studies.

Participants and presenters will collaboratively articulate transdisciplinary problems by distinguishing transdisciplinary methodologies and theoretical frameworks from related inter- and cross-disciplinary approaches. We specifically address transdisciplinary challenges associated with climate crisis (the Anthropocene) and the rapid proliferation of digital-media technologies, focusing on the continuity of environmental and embodied learning and digital media-learning.

Presenter' Bios

Dr. Natasa Lackovic

Senior Lecturer, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University (UK).
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/educational-research/people/natasa-lackovic

Natasa’s research broadly tackles educational futures as linked to challenges and complexities of material, digital and social futures, via inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches and theories. These incorporate concerns for social justice; visual and arts-based research and pedagogy (photographs, sketching and graphic narratives), socio-materiality; (digital) semiotics and a semiotic theory of learning; multimodality, critical thinking and critical media literacy; student/staff wellbeing and mental health. Her scholarship also includes critical approaches to graduate employability and identity, the postdigital, posthuman, and post-truth.

Dr. Alin Olteanu

Post-doctoral Researcher, Käte Hamburger Kolleg Aachen: Cultures of Research, University of Aachen, Germany.
https://khk.rwth-aachen.de/dr-alin-olteanu/

Alin’s main research interests fall at the intersection of embodiment and mediality, which he explores from a semiotic perspective. He holds a PhD from Roehampton University (London) in philosophy of education and has held postdoctoral grants at Kaunas University of Technology and the University of Tartu, besides other academic positions. At the moment, he is pursuing research on the social and cultural consequences of digitalization. Specifically, he is interested in understanding how digitalization can foster opportunities for rethinking education and scientific practices that support sustainable development.

Dr. Cary Campbell

Term Lecturer, SFU, Faculty of Education.
https://www.sfu.ca/education/faculty-research/faculty-directory/faculty-members/ccampbell.html

Cary is a term lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University as well as a music educator. His research interests include philosophy of education, place/Land-based pedagogy, multimodal curriculum development and music and arts education. Broadly, he employs biosemiotics, post-humanist, and decolonial theory to articulate the educational challenges and opportunities jointly posed by digitalization and climate-change. Through his ongoing work as Director of Research for the registered BC society The Group (multimodal research), Cary collaborates with teachers, artists, and community members, to create curriculum resources and digital tools that connect people and students with their own localities, communities, and public spaces.

Presenters
Dr. Natasa Lackovic
Dr. Alin Olteanu
Dr. Cary Campbell

Date/Time
Tuesday, April 25
12:00–1:30 p.m. PST

Place
Virtual via Zoom

Behind the Scenes of the Katzie Slough Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Project

DARE Research Seminar

What happens when research begins with a vision rather than a question? When it is guided as much by affect and intuition as reflection and intentionality? When it is understood as an agential living thing capable of charting its own path? And when the “behind the scenes” of the project becomes “the scene” of knowledge creation? During this presentation, Cher Hill shares her wayfaring as a researcher as she and her friends Elder Rick Bailey, environmentalist Meghan Rooney, and artist Carman McKay endeavour to facilitate community learning about the history of the q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie) Slough and the environmental challenges in this area as they simultaneously care for the Land. Utilizing arts-based methods, they invite the past to “haunt” the present, disrupting colonial spaces. This research seeks to inform understandings of how we might educate for post-colonial futures, as well as how creating interference within colonized spaces can invite different ways of engaging with Land, place, and one another.

Presenter
Dr. Cher Hill

Date/Time
Wednesday, April 5
3:00–5:00 p.m. PST

Place
Research Hub
SFU Burnaby Campus

Embodiment in Teacher Education: The Critical-Collaborative (Be)coming Together

This presentation draws on data collected in a year-long classroom study of an undergraduate teacher education course: “Language and Culture in Classrooms.” The course, offered at a predominantly and historically White university in the southeastern U.S., aims to prepare pre-service ESL/elementary teachers for their future work in multicultural and multilingual contexts. As the course designer and instructor, Maverick developed a mediated approach to support the design and analysis of embodied activities, drawing from posthuman and sociolinguistic perspectives on a range of everyday material-discursive practices across time, place, and media.

The audience is invited to participate by engaging with each other’s everyday trajectories as a way of (be)coming together, grappling with complex reading materials, and (un)making sense of issues around language, race, gender, class, and beyond. Implications point to the affordances of using embodied activities to create openings for the type of criticality that is yet to (be)come. The presentation concludes by discussing challenges and limitations of the study.

Presenter Bio

Maverick Y. Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate, teacher, and activist at The University of Georgia. Their research interests include discourse studies, embodiment, critical multicultural-lingual education, critical posthumanism, teacher education, critical literacy, and functional linguistics. Recent publications:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maverick-Zhang

Presenter
Maverick Y. Zhang

Date/Time
Thursday, March 23
4:30–6:00 p.m. PST

Place
Research Hub
SFU Burnaby Campus

A Performative Conversation with Dr. Celeste Snowber

Celebrating the New Book

“Be surprised by what emerges. All of life is performance—waiting for you to participate in its conversations. What would it mean to let your body take up the call and respond with your torso in conversing with the natural world?” (p. 102)

Join us in a performative conversation with Celeste to experience body stories, dance and poetry that introduce her new book, Dance, Place, and Poetics: Site-specific Performance as a Portal to Knowing, published in December 2022.

Presenter
Dr. Celeste Snowber

Date/Time
Wednesday, February 15
2:00–3:30 p.m. PST

Place
SFU Surrey Campus 3240

Journeying Together in Promoting Inclusion, Equity, and Celebrating Diversity

Classroom Examples of Anti-Racism Work

Focusing on the secondary level, Ami Kambo will share concrete examples of classroom activities and courses that have been tried out with students in class. She will discuss how educators can develop students’ media literacies, address media saturation, anti-racism, and include Indigenous perspectives and content in high school language and literacy classes. Following the 40-minute presentation, participants are invited to join in a facilitated, interactive 20-minute discussion to generate further ideas and strategies.

Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada

Presenter
Ami Kambo
Fraser Heights Secondary

Date/Time
Tuesday, January 31st
1:00–2:00 p.m. PST

Place
Online via Zoom