This study considers the complexities of living a cross-cultural curriculum within the multicultural contexts of Canada through following the experience of some first generation immigrants in a project that employs the multi-dimensional space of the Internet and cyber social communities within a vocational public school in Ontario. Disrupting traditional conceptions of students' production of literacies, the project seeks to rework the boundaries that define multiculturalism as a series of homogeneous hyphenated spaces from which students who are racialized as non-white are expected to speak. Here we consider, "what is at play in the hyphen?" and "how might the networked classroom space be considered a hyph-e-nation?" To explore these questions, we begin with an overview of multicultural education in Canada. We then employ a reading of Third Spaces and quantum physics to reread how students might open up dual Third Spaces through self representations in a social networking space: first through the social network as a Third Space and second, as certain kinds of learners caught in the hyph-e-nated middle of Canadian multiculturalism in an Ontario classroom. The case studies are followed by a discussion that problematizes discourses of comparison between cultural communities of which students with many cultural Living a Curriculum of Hyph-E-Nations 92 backgrounds and experiences are members.

No abstract

Mindfulness and wellness practices are increasingly becoming part of the curricular landscape in secondary schools in Canada, particularly with growing attention to the mental health of students during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. This research examines the implementation of a school yoga program introduced to students bubbled in classroom cohorts in a school in Gatineau, Quebec. This paper employs Derrida’s framework of unconditional hospitality to ask whether it is possible for diasporas to reclaim indigenous knowledges through practices of ethical relationality, even as his philosophy brings to light some of the impossibilities of overturning the historical power relations entrenched in colonial pasts and the ongoing prevalence of White supremacy.

In these conversational field notes, two teachers reveal their experiences with creativity in contexts where students are encouraged to dwell in spaces of ambiguity and vulnerability in learning.  Using anatomy to inform music pedagogy empowers students to work through metaphor-rich instruction in order to develop a grounded approach to artistic interpretation, while using fine art in the science classroom allows students of anatomy to explore the artistic possibilities of imagination in relation to the human body. In both cases, the crisscrossing of pedagogical lines from biology into music and music into art helped to transform students’ relationships with ambiguity from being negative and closed-off, to positive and constructive.