Category Archives: BC Education

Great Schools Teach-in

Posted on November 16, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Great Schools Teach-In:
How Should We Assess Our Schools?

Saturday, December 1
10 am to 12:30 pm–coffee from 9:30
Simon Fraser University Surrey Campus (Surrey Central Sky Train)
250 – 13450 – 102nd Avenue

The Great Schools Project is a collaboration among individuals who want to strengthen and protect public education in British Columbia. For almost four years, educators, parents, researchers, and leaders, both inside and outside the education system, have met to discuss how to improve the way we evaluate and assess our schools.

We feel the current system is both too narrow (focused on only a portion of the important work schools do) and too punitive (with substantial negative impact on individual students and educators).

After extensive discussions of the current system of Foundation Skills Assessment (FSAs) and their use to rank schools, the GSP working group has developed ideas about alternatives that would better serve both students and public schools.

The Great Schools Teach-In provides an opportunity for us to present some of these ideas and for you to debate them and provide your input.

 Program:

  1. Alfie Kohn, outstanding critic of standardized testing and proponent of richer ways of understanding how well our children and their schools are doing (by videocast).
  2. Speakers from the Great Schools Project
  3. Discussion and debate.

Please RSVP to: dlaitsch@sfu.ca

For more information see our website: Great Schools Project

Great Schools Project Working Committee

  • David Chudnovsky (retired teacher; former MLA; BCTF President 1999-2002
  • Janet Dempsey (retired teacher; ESL specialist)
  • Iglika Ivanova, (Ecomomist and Public Interest Researcher CCPA)
  • Bill Hood (recently retired teacher; current PDP Faculty Associate SFU)
  • Larry Kuehn (Director Research and Technology BCTF)
  • Daniel Laitsch (Associate Professor Education Leadership, SFU Surrey; Founding Director SFU Centre for the Study of Educational Leadership and Policy; Co-Editor International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership)
  • Sandra Mathison (Professor of Education UBC; Co-Director Institute for Critical Education Studies)
  • Adrienne Montani (Provincial Coordinator First Call: BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition; former Chair, Vancouver School Board)
  • Marion Runcie (former Chairperson BCTF Teacher Personnel Services Committee; Facilitator, Programme for Quality Teaching; co-designer, Burnaby School District Professional Growth Programme)
  • Paul Shaker (Professor Emeritus, Dean of Education SFU 2003-2008)
  • Michael Zlotnik (retired teacher; retired BCTF staff person: President, Public Education Network Society 2007-2012)
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New Issue of Workplace Launched

Posted on August 1, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor has just published Issue #20, “The New Academic Manners, Managers, and Spaces.”  This issue includes key conceptual and empirical analyses of

  • the creation and avoidance of unions in academic and business workplaces (Vincent Serravallo)
  • the new critiquette, impartial response to Bruno Latour and Jacques Ranciere’s critique of critique (Stephen Petrina)
  • the two-culture model of the modern university in full light of the crystal, neural university (Sean Sturm, Stephen Turner)
  • alternative narratives of accountability in response to neo-liberal practices of government (Sandra Mathison)
  • vertical versus horizontal structures of governance (Rune Kvist Olsen)
  • teachers in nomadic spaces and Deleuzian approaches to curricular practice (Tobey Steeves)

We invite you to review the Table of Contents for Issue #20 for articles and items of interest. Thanks for the continuing interest in Workplace (we welcome new manuscripts here and Critical Education),

Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES)
Workplace Blog

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Mapping desire and power within the field of education policy in British Columbia

Posted on May 30, 2012 by | Leave a comment

BCTF’s Teacher Newsmagazine just published an essay by UBC graduate student Tobey Steeves that aims to “map the winners and losers within BC’s education policy-making arena.”

Teacher Newsmagazine (May/June 2012)

Mapping desire and power within the field of education policy in BC

By Tobey Steeves

In their overview of qualitative interviewing (QI) as research methodology, Kvale & Brinkmann (2009) insist “…knowledge is power. The social practice of research interviewing may become a form of democratic practice that can be used to help create a free democratic society.” With this generalized goal in mind, I initiated an interview-based research inquiry into education policy in British Columbia. Beginning with the question: What desires are privileged by education policy in BC?, I solicited the participation of a well-established policy maker/ analyst and organized a series of questions that were designed to elicit a rudimentary outline of education policy in BC as a field of power. Phrased more succinctly, I used targeted questions to map the winners and losers within BC’s education policy-making arena. …

Read the full article here.

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Horton Hears an Idiot

Posted on April 24, 2012 by | 5 comments

This story in the Globe and Mail gets the story wrong, but the fact that a school administrator is sneaking around snooping in teachers’ cars to see what written materials they possess makes this story quite noteworthy. This Prince Rupert teacher wasn’t using Dr. Suess’ Yertle the Turtle in class, but instead was using a quote from Yertle in a meeting with management. Perhaps, by extension, the director of instruction for the Prince Rupert School District judged Yertle’s political message would creep into the classroom. Well, the question this begs is why wouldn’t one want kids to consider Yertle’s claim: “I know up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here on the bottom, we too should have rights.” Equality is now ‘political’ and should not be a ‘value’ that we would want everyone to seriously consider? Theodor Geisel’s work, like many children’s book authors’ work, is not apolitical, nor should we expect it to be. Teaching about politics, discussing political ideas, developing political perspectives is what teachers ought to be doing… where else do children learn about ‘citizenship?’

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ICES Delivers Petition to BC Legislature

Posted on March 15, 2012 by | 1 comment

At lunch hour today, we collated and delivered, to BC Premier Clark and Minister Abbott, 400+ signatures from faculty members, librarians, administrators, students, and staff in post-secondary institutions across the province in support of BC Teachers and the BCTF.  See Petition Site for more.

Thank you to all who helped circulate and signed this petition!  Your activism and presence make a difference.

 

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ICES Appeal to Boost Support BCTF Petition to 500+

Posted on March 13, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Post-secondary Support of Teachers / BCTF Petition

We want to forward this petition to the Ministry at the 500+ mark today or tomorrow morning.  Please circulate and let’s boost this to 500+!  We are currently at 399 signatures…

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Secondary Students Assert Power at the BC Rallies

Posted on March 9, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Over a three day stretch, secondary students organized, marched, walked, spoke, and shouted out against oppressive labour legislation in British Columbia and for their teachers and the BCTF.  It’s rare that secondary students get opportunities to unify as a political force at the provincial level, but now in this labour dispute the students are making a difference.  On Friday, 2 March, thousands of students walked out of their classes and schools and rallied across the province.  In Vancouver, the students descended en masse for a rally at the gallery.

On Tuesday, 6 March, at the BC Fed and BCTF rally hundreds of the youth marched with the unions down Government Street and to the steps of the BC Legislature.  For the crowd of 6,000, two young women, Hannah Case and Erin Galbraith, spoke a lotta truth to a power undermining their teachers’ rights.   In Vancouver, on 7 March for the rally at the gallery, secondary students Navi Rai and Melissa Wong stood together on the steps and voiced their support for the teachers’ rights and their right to a fair government.  Both were active in organizing Friday’s walkout.  And raising the roof of nature, Chandler McCorkingdale rapped.  Sorry, BC Liberals, the students and the public are standing with the teachers.

Now, where in the world are the missing BC post-secondary students, especially the Education majors?  Especially now?  I know that some are organizing online.   And I know that the Canadian Federation of Students BC is 100% behind the BCTF and the teachers.  But across three rallies not a single post-secondary student signed onto the speaker’s lists.  Not a single one spoke while thousands of the secondary students have shown their strength as a political force.  Perhaps UBC’s Teacher Education Officer John Yamamoto’s interview with the CBC’s Morning Edition on 7 March is telling.  Yamamoto advised that the Education students should, nay must, remain neutral.  Some advice for the teacher candidates– one gets the sense that he thinks he is advising 700 administration candidates!  Where are the post-secondary students and will the CFS BC organize the group to be heard or present?

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Posted in BC Education, Disputes, Strikes & Labor, Unions

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“Proverbial snowflake, hellbound” is Liberals’ Fate in BC

Posted on March 8, 2012 by | Leave a comment

For two solid days in dozens of cities and towns across British Columbia, tens of thousands of students, parents, faculty members, peer unions, and the BC Federation of Labour turned out in support of the BCTF and teachers.  For the rally in Victoria yesterday, the President of the Canadian Federation of teachers flew across the country to be there, as did peer teaching union presidents and representatives from as far as Nova Scotia.  This is bigger than the BCTF BC Fed President Jim Sinclair announced over the last two days.  For the BC Fed and everyone showing their solidarity, this is about standing up for the province, for what is right and just, for rights, for workers, for people young and old struggling from day to day as citizens.  This is about democratic rule and the BCTF and BC Fed are in this for the long haul.  BCTF President Susan Lambert rallied today in Vancouver, promising the BC Liberals’ as they move on oppressive, debilitating legislation, that this governing party’s chance of re-election is that of a “proverbial snowflake, hellbound!”

BCTF President Lambert Speaks out at Vancouver Rally

That’s powerful and resonates with the vast system of public support that is turning out for the rallies across the province.  To try and govern workers– to try and suppress a labour movement that is ascendent and increasingly unified– with this might of legislation, Bill 22, is foolish.  The opposition party, the NDP in BC, is doing all it can to undermine and debate this anti-democratic legislation that is Bill 22.  Adrian Dix, Leader of the NDP, guaranteed the labour movement yesterday in Victoria that his party was not resting and would do everything in its power to give teachers the fair right to bargain– a right that every public or private sector union or professional association deserves.

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BC Leg Bill 22 “Offences” Draconian

Posted on March 5, 2012 by | Leave a comment

BC Legislature Bill 22, undermining teachers’ / BCTF rights to fair bargaining and job action.  BOO !

Offences:

(1) An employee, the BCTF or an officer of the BCTF or of a local of the BCTF or a representative of the BCTF or of a local of the BCTF, who contravenes section 3 (1) (b), (c) or (e), as the case may be, commits an offence and is liable to the following:

(a) in the case of an employee, a fine amount of not more than $475 for each day on which the offence occurs;

(b) in the case of the BCTF, a fine amount of not less than $1.3 million for each day on which the offence occurs;

(c) in the case of an officer of the BCTF or of a local of the BCTF or a representative of the BCTF or of a local of the BCTF, a fine amount of not less than $2 500 for each day on which the offence occurs.

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BC Federation of Labour Plans Rally & Petition

Posted on March 5, 2012 by | 1 comment

The BC Fed is Rallying at the Legislature, moving on a massive petition, and planning rallies around the province.  Support the Teachers / Stand up for BC !!!

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