This article examines a popularized term, the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), and its underlying paradigm of neoliberalism. It elucidates neoliberalism's maddening effects on the education sector, especially public education. To analyze these effects, I draw from and adapt Michel Foucault's analytical approach to madness. My analysis…

This article details the author's reimagining of the undergraduate theory and method course, in which intentional, disciplined comparison is employed to challenge and problematize traditional narratives about Religious Studies as an academic discipline. Doing so helps to answer calls to decolonize our curricula, not only by critiquing historical…

A multitude of forces are driving Canadian universities, as well as many other institutions across the country, to enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion ('EDI'). All organisations instinctively turn to educational initiatives to instil and promote EDI. The value of EDI education, notably training about unconscious bias and how to mitigate its…

For 40 years, the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education has been instrumental in promoting debate on critical pedagogical approaches and sharing best practices in engaging in transformative education models. A few months into 2020, it became clear that not only were we in a new age--the digital age--identified by some as the Fourth…

Human Rights Education exists as an implementing entity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Scholars such as Andre Keet and others have criticized the dissemination of universal rights through education because it covets Western ideology over local ethical and epistemological constructs. Using Tibbitts' revised typologies of Human Rights…

On October 16, 2017, over 12,000 faculty, librarians, and counsellors in 24 independent postsecondary colleges in Ontario, Canada went on strike for the fourth time since they organized in 1971 as members of the Civil Service Association of Ontario and won their first collective agreement the next year. Begun as an apolitical, self-consciously…

The purpose is to briefly summarize forty years of research on the learner outcomes of the modern homeschooling movement and address whether educators should be promoting home education. Studies show that homeschooling (home education) is generally associated with positive learner outcomes. On average, the home educated perform better than their…

How is it that neoliberal education policies, often lacking evidentiary basis, come to be endorsed--often by the very people they alienate and marginalize? This work seeks to expose how this kind of exclusive policy is sold to a public through intricate hortatory tools. Using critical policy analysis with an emphasis on historical development and…

In education, there is a tension between exploring practice (focusing on the practicalities of an educator's daily work) and critical praxis (problematizing positionality as it relates to pedagogies and engaging in a societal critique). I do not set this up as a duality, a dichotomy, or a continuum, but as a skewed Venn diagram, in which there is…

At the beginning of December 2014, Canada's Prime Minister and Minister of State (Science and Technology) released their science, technology and innovation strategy and launched the Canada First Excellence Research Fund (CFERF). This brief looks at the implications of the proposed policy on academic research and on research and development…

Over the past few years, Canadian universities have been at the forefront of institutional changes that identify Aboriginal people, internationalization, and pedagogical change as key areas for revision. Most universities' strategic planning documents cite, at least to varying degrees, these three goals. Institutions have facilitated these changes…

In 1998 the World Bank published a "Reform Agenda" for higher education in the new millennium designed to accelerate privatization and the restructuring of the academic workforce. Before analyzing the report, I consider how changes in Canadian universities reflect the growth of the "knowledge-based economy." I then provide a…

With contributions from leading experts across disciplinary fields, this book explores best practices from the field's most notable researchers, as well as important historically based and politically focused challenges to a field whose impact has reached an important crossroads. The comprehensive and powerfully critical analysis considers the…

This paper examines the debate over the teaching of Canadian history that has been in progress in Canada since the early 1990s. It considers four criticisms: schools do not teach enough Canadian history and students, therefore, do not know it; the history that is taught is no longer sufficiently national; social history has destroyed the old…

The subject of this article is the report, "Ontario: A Leader in Learning" (Rae, 2005), presented to the government of Ontario by its principal author and key public face of the document, Bob Rae. The presentation is divided into four main parts: (1) the authors attempt to summarize the political philosophy of Bob Rae, the former Member…