Living a Curriculum of Hyph-E-Nations: Diversity, Equity, and Social Media

Abstract

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.

The ‘Other’ Here and the ‘Other’ There:

“…And, by no means isolated in experiences of grappling with the hyphen. For example, there are documentaries (See Nakagawa's (2005) Between: Living in the Hyphen), written publications (See Yu's Living Hyphen (2018) magazine), and scholarly articles that delve into the complexities of living hyph-enations (See Ng-A-Fook, 2009; Ng-A-Fook, Radford, & Ausman, 2012). In many ways, all people are hyphenated, consisting of experiencing multiple identities at once.…”

Provoking the very “Idea” of Canadian Curriculum Studies as a Counterpointed Composition

“…The hotly debated and divisive Charter of Values in Québec and its rewriting (re/righting) of the history curriculum is another recent example (Curtis, 2013;Either, Cardin, & Lefrançois, 2013). Despite such ongoing politically enacted limit---situations (Freire, 1970(Freire, /1990 continue to invite us to revisit the concept of multiculturalism as a polyphony of lines of movement that grow in the abundance of conjunctive middles, the "betweens," or the doubling of cosmopolitan "hyph---e---nations" that some first generation immigrant youth continue to experience as "third spaces" within the contexts of public schooling (Ausman, 2011;Lewkowich, 2009Lewkowich, , 2012Pinar, 2009;Johnston & Richardson, 2012; Ng---A---Fook, Radford, Ausman, 2012;Watt, 2011). And yet, regardless of such debates, the abundance of different contextual meanings reminds us that normative, performative, material, and psychic notions of "nation" and "multiculturalism" are perpetually shifting and often tremble ontologically with postmodern uncertainty when we utter their names in relation to provoking questions about the very "idea" of Canadian curriculum studies.…”