Changing Canadian Schools

The 15 papers in this collection present a Canadian perspective on providing services to children with disabilities in regular classes and schools. The papers are grouped into three sections: Philosophical, Legal and Historical Overview; Parent and Self-Advocacy; and Innovations and Practical Applications. Chapters have the following titles and authors: "Changing Special Education Practice: Law, Advocacy and Innovation" (Gordon L. Porter and Diane Richler); "Inclusive Education as Social Policy" (Diane Richler); "Education: A System of Social Disempowerment" (Marcia H. Rioux); "Access to Equality in Education: The Power of Parents" (S. Dulcie McCallum); "Principles of Change: A Parent's Perspective on the Education System" (David Jory); "The Road to Inclusion: One Family's Story" (Alene Steinbach); "A Will To Learn: The Experiences of a Self-Advocate in the Education System" (Marcia Marcaccio); "The Methods and Resource Teacher: A Collaborative Consultant Model" (Gordon L. Porter); "Leading the Way: The Role of School Administrators in Integration" (Darlene E. Perner); "The Role of the Classroom Teacher" (Margaret Murray); "Implementing Multi-Level Instruction: Strategies for Classroom Teachers" (Jean Collicott); "Problem Solving Teams: A Thirty-Minute Peer-Helping Model" (Gordon L. Porter et al.); "Student to Student: Curriculum and the Development of Peer Relationships" (Julie Stone and Charlotte Campbell); "Beyond Behaviour: A Case of Social Intervention Strategies for a Student with Challenging Behaviours" (Brian Kelly and Jeff den Otter); "On Campus: Integrated Post-Secondary Education" (Melanie Panitch). (80 references) (DB)

Suggestions are constantly being made, both in the popular media and academic literature, about the kinds of changes schools should make. The research in this text shows that schools are primarily inward-looking organizations, and would benefit from better ways of understanding the changes surrounding them and the pressures on them. This text offers theoretical discussion of the ideas around the topic and a set of suggestions for thinking about them.

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, children in English Canada encountered schools and school systems profoundly different from today's. In How Schools Worked, R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar map the contours of that world, retrieving it from the obscurity created not only by the passage of time but by fundamental shifts in organization, pedagogical values, and beliefs about the role of public education. Moving beyond the rhetoric on school reform that marked the period, How Schools Worked focuses squarely on schooling itself. How many children went to elementary or secondary school, how often, and for how long? What was the range of their educational attainments? How were their patterns of attendance influenced by social class, gender, and where they lived? What and how were they taught? How were they assessed and promoted from grade to grade? What were their teachers' qualifications and experience? What were their school buildings like? Who paid the bills and how much did they pay? How well or badly were children and young people served by their schools? And how did answers to these questions change over time? A sympathetic yet critical analysis, How Schools Worked is a portrait of a complex enterprise at work. Gidney and Millar offer a rich understanding of the period, a reappraisal of some major debates, and insights into educational issues that perplex us still.

The whole landscape of space use is undergoing a radical transformation. In the workplace a period of unprecedented change has created a mix of responses with one overriding outcome observable worldwide: the rise of distributed space. In the learning environment the social, political, economic and technological changes responsible for this shift have been further compounded by constantly developing theories of learning and teaching, and a wide acceptance of the importance of learning as the core of the community, resulting in the blending of all aspects of learning into one seamless experience. This book attempts to look at all the forces driving the provision and pedagogic performance of the many spaces, real and virtual, that now accommodate the experience of learning and provide pointers towards the creation and design of learning-centred communities. Part 1 looks at the entire learning universe as it now stands, tracks the way in which its constituent parts came to occupy their role, assesses how they have responded to a complex of drivers and gauges their success in dealing with renewed pressures to perform. It shows that what is required is innovation within the spaces and integration between them. Part 2 finds many examples of innovation in evidence across the world – in schools, the higher and further education campus and in business and cultural spaces – but an almost total absence of integration. Part 3 offers a model that redefines the learning landscape in terms of learning outcomes, mapping spatial requirements and activities into a detailed mechanism that will achieve the best outcome at the most appropriate scale. By encouraging stakeholders to creating an events-based rather than space-based identity, the book hopes to point the way to a fully-integrated learning landscape: a learning community.

Between 1800 and 1914, Canadian society and its school systems were forged, populated, expanded and reformed. The Promise of Schooling explores the links between social and educational change in this complex and dynamic period. It raises and seeks to answer a number of questions: How extensive was schooling in the early nineteenth century? What lay behind the campaign to extend publicly funded education? What went on inside the Canadian classroom? How did schools address the needs of Native students, blacks, and the children of immigrants? What cultural and social roles did universities serve by the beginning of the twentieth century? And how were schools affected by the economic and social pressures arising from the Industrial Revolution? The book contends that educational authorities built and reformed schools in ways that were not always consistent with their idealistic visions. Economic constraints, political expediency, and the agendas of ordinary citizens all influenced the life of the Canadian school in an era marked by dramatic social change. Drawing from an abundant scholarly literature published over the last two decades, this study seeks to expose readers to the richness of the field of educational history. Written for a broad audience, it also hopes, by providing historical context, to stimulate informed discussion about educational issues.