This volume explores the importance of inter-generational oral culture and stories that transcend time, space, and boundaries transmitted historically from one generation to the next through proverbs, idioms, and folklore tales in different geographical and spatial contexts. These important stories and their embedded life lessons are introduced, explained, and supplemented with pre and post educational activities and lesson plans to be used as learning resources. The centering of orality as a tool and medium for educating the future generation is a reclamation and reaffirmation of Indigeneity, Indigenous knowledges. and non-hegemonic approaches to support students in a socio-culturally sustaining manner. Through this understanding, this book explores the interconnectedness between culture, traditions, language, and way of life through oral storytelling, sharing, and listening.

This book examines the history of standardized testing in Ontario leading to the current context and its impact on racialized identities, particularly on Grade 3 students, parents, and educators. Using a theoretical argument supplemented with statistical trends, the author illuminates how EQAO tests are culturally and racially biased and promote a Eurocentric curriculum and way of life privileging white students and those from higher socio-economic status. This book spurs readers to further question the use of EQAO standardized testing and challenges us to consider alternative models which serve the needs of all students.

Foregrounding diverse lived experiences and non-dominant forms of knowledge, this edited volume showcases ways in which narrating and sharing stories of pain and suffering can be engaged as critical pedagogy to challenge oppression and inequity in educational contexts. The volume illustrates the need to consider both the act of narrating and the experience of bearing witness to narration to harness the full transformative potentials of counternarratives in disrupting oppressive practices. Chapters are divided into three parts - "Telling and Reliving Trauma as Pedagogy," "Pedagogies of Overcoming Silence," and "Forgetting as Pedagogy" - illustrating a range of relational pedagogical and methodological approaches, including journaling, poetry, and arts-based narrative inquiry. The authors make the argument that the language of pain and suffering is universal, hence its potential as critical pedagogy for transformative and therapeutic teaching and learning. Readers are encouraged to reflect on their own lived experiences to constructively engage with their pain, suffering, and trauma. Focusing on trauma-informed non-hegemonic storytelling and transformative pedagogies, this volume will be of interest to students, faculty, scholars, and community members with an interest in advancing anti-oppressive and social justice education.

Equity as Praxis in Early Childhood Education and Care aims to map, deconstruct, and engage with different models of equity as they pertain to the early childhood education landscape in Ontario. Drawing on marginalized narratives of gender, race, Indigeneity, dis/ability and inclusion, and migration, immigration, and displacement, the authors discuss how to advance the field and make it more equitable for children, families, early childhood educators, and all other practitioners. This edited collection outlines the current political climate of early childhood education and care in Ontario through a critical analysis of policies and dominant discourses of equity and inclusion. By prompting readers to reflect on and critique their understandings of children, families, communities, and practices in the field, the authors seek to provide counternarratives to Eurocentric developmentalist hegemonies and an alternative strength-based approach to critical and transformative praxis.This vital text encourages rethinking how narratives of equity and inclusion are constructed and what this means for young children and their families in Ontario, as well as throughout Canada. This is an essential resource for students in early childhood education and care, early childhood studies, and education programs. FEATURES: Includes perspectives from multiple positionalities in the field to provide a critical and interdisciplinary approach Draws on a reconceptualist lens to present a critique of developmentalist approaches Encourages readers to engage with the content by practising critical self-examination and considering social factors and forces that inform their own concepts

This book examines the history of standardized testing in Ontario leading to the current context and its impact on racialized identities, particularly on Grade 3 students, parents, and educators. Using a theoretical argument supplemented with statistical trends, the author illuminates how EQAO tests are culturally and racially biased and promote a Eurocentric curriculum and way of life privileging white students and those from higher socio-economic status. This book spurs readers to further question the use of EQAO standardized testing and challenges us to consider alternative models which serve the needs of all students.