Education

Music education in Canada is a vast enterprise that encompasses teaching and learning in thousands of public and private schools, community groups, and colleges and universities. It involves participants from infancy to the elderly in formal and informal settings. Nevertheless, as post-secondary faculties of music and programs are growing significantly, academic books and materials grounded in a Canadian perspective are scarce. This book attempts to fill that need by offering a collection of essays that look critically at various global issues in music education from a Canadian perspective. Topics range from a discussion of the roots of music education in Canada and analysis of music education practices across the country to perspectives on popular music, distance education, technology, gender, globalization, Indigenous traditions, and community music in music education. Foreword by composer R. Murray Schafer.

Youth, Education, and Marginality: Local and Global Expressions is a close examination of the lives of marginalized young people in schools. Essays by scholars and educators are complemented by youth poetry, prose, and visual art.

The book includes insights from Australia, United Kingdom, Polynesia, United States, and Canada and is grounded in educational and community practice and policy. The content covers the range and intersections of marginalization: poverty, Aboriginal cultures, immigrants and newcomers, gay/lesbian youth, rural–urban divides, mental health, and so forth. Presenting challenges faced by marginalized youth alongside initiatives for mitigating their impact, the contributors critique existing systems and engage in a dialogue about where to go from here.

Chronicles the rise and decline of Ontario universities from the halcyon 1960s to the Common Sense Revolution through the history of its planning association, the Council of Ontario Universities.
Collective Autonomy: A History of the Council of Ontario Universities, 1962-2000 is the first full-length account of an organization that has played a major role in the development of the university system in Ontario. Edward J. Monahan served as the council’s chief executive officer for over fifteen years. This is his insider’s account, enhanced by archival material, of the key role the universities played in planning the high academic quality of the Ontario provincial university system.
Collective Autonomy traces the evolution of Ontario universities over a period of forty years, from the halcyon days of the 1960s, during which massive injections of public funds transformed these institutions from ivory towers to public utilities, through the 1970s and ’80s when universities were downgraded as a government spending priority and problems began to develop. It concludes by looking at the problems created by the “Common Sense Revolution” and the resulting severe cutbacks in government grants to universities. It chronicles the efforts of the universities to preserve their autonomy while expanding their service to the common good, and their efforts to maintain the delicate balance between university autonomy and public accountability.

Leadership and Purpose: A History of Wilfrid Laurier University tells the story of the creation and growth of one of Canada’s leading universities.
On October 30, 1911, a jubilant crowd of nearly 1,500 people gathered in their Sunday finest on the lawn of a large home on the rural outskirts of Waterloo, Ontario. They were there to mark the opening of the Evangelical Lutheran Seminary of Canada. With just four students and one full-time professor, the seminary was modest in size but it had the enthusiastic support of an entire community. Even the most optimistic supporter, however, could not have foreseen how this small religious school would evolve over the next 100 years into a thriving public university with 17,000 students and a national reputation for teaching and research excellence. In Leadership and Purpose: A History of Wilfrid Laurier University, historian Andrew Thomson tells the remarkable story of an academic community whose vision, determination, and perseverance are a testament to the transformative power of education.

This fourth volume in a series of state-of-the-art reviews of religious studies programs in Canadian provinces traces the formative role of religion in the establishment of the universities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Despite strong roots in denominational colleges, with their confessionally oriented study of religion, by the 1960s, “there was a diffused sense in the culture of the need for a religious perspective, and even a quest for religious experience, but at the same time there was a growing dissatisfaction with the conventional ways of being religious.” This new perspective, coupled with rising enrollments and increased funding, both a result of the explosion of post-secondary education in Canada, was reflected in a shift away from the theological study of religion to an academic one.
New Religious Studies departments that reflected a “science of religion” philosophy were founded, and faculty hired and curricula developed to meet these broader concerns. Current issues, such as graduate studies, research and publication, and faculty hiring are also treated, as are the Bible colleges and theological seminaries which play such an important role in both provinces. Assessments of religious studies research programs and their relation to the general community situate the programs in a wider context and indicate future directions. This solid, sensitively written volume adds considerably to our knowledge of religious studies in Canada and illustrates how yet another region is meeting the needs of a pluralistic society by providing new contexts for the study of religion.

Creating Together explores an emerging approach to research that combines arts practices and scholarship in participatory, community-based, and collaborative contexts in Canada across multiple disciplines. Looking at a variety of art forms, from photography and mural painting to performance art and poetry, the contributors explore how the process of creating together generates and disseminates collective knowledge.
The artistic processes and works in an arts-based approach to scholarship make use of aesthetic, experiential, embodied, and emotional ways of knowing and creating knowledge in addition to traditional intellectual ways. The anthology also addresses the growing trend in arts-based research that takes a participatory, community-based, or collaborative focus, and encourages scholars to work together, with other professionals, and with community groups to explore questions, create knowledge, and express shared understandings. The collection highlights three forms of research: participatory arts-based research that engages participants in all stages of the inquiry and aims to produce practical knowing to benefit the community; community-based arts research that has community/public space at the heart of practice; and collaborative arts approaches involving multi-levelled, multi-layered, and interdisciplinary collaboration from diverse perspectives.
To illustrate how such innovative work is being accomplished in Canada, the collection includes examples from British Columbia to Newfoundland and across disciplines, including the fine arts, education, the health sciences, and social work.

What is “Religious Studies” and what is its future in Atlantic Canada? How have universities founded by Roman Catholic and Protestant denominations, and public universities, differed as they approached the study of religious life and traditions?
Religious Studies in Atlantic Canada surveys the history and place of the study of religion within Canadian universities. Following a historical introduction to the public and denominationally founded universities in the Atlantic region, the book situates the departments of religious studies in relation to the distinctive characteristics of the various universities in the region, focusing on curriculum, research and teaching.
Bowlby examines the current strengths of the religious studies departments in Atlantic Canada, and where those departments are fragile, i.e., where departments have thrived because of careful long-term planning, as well as where crises of retirements have radically affected the size and strength of departments. In conclusion Bowlby suggests strategies for future survival and growth in the field of religious studies.
Religious Studies in Atlantic Canada is the last of a six-part series on the state of the art of religious studies in Canada, a unique account of the regional differences in the development of religious studies in Canada. Written for anyone interested in the teaching of religion as well as the specialist, the book provides an introduction and an overview of religious studies curricula, faculty research, and teaching areas at the region’s universities.

Should we stop teaching critical thinking? Meant as a prompt to further discussion, Critical Condition questions the assumption that every student should be turned into a “critical thinker.”


The book starts with the pre-Socratics and the impact that Socrates’ death had on his student Plato and traces the increasingly violent use of critical “attack” on a perceived opponent. From the Roman militarization of debate to the medieval Church’s use of defence as a means of forcing confession and submission, the early phases of critical thinking were bound up in a type of attack that Finn suggests does not best serve intellectual inquiry. Recent developments have seen critical thinking become an ideology rather than a critical practice, with levels of debate devolving to the point where most debate becomes ad hominem. Far from arguing that we abandon critical inquiry, the author suggests that we emphasize a more open, loving system of engagement that is not only less inherently violent but also more robust when dealing with vastly more complex networks of information.


This book challenges long-held beliefs about the benefits of critical thinking, which is shown to be far too linear to deal with the twenty-first century world. Critical Condition is a call to action unlike any other.

Digital Diversity: Youth, Equity, and Information Technology is about youth, schools, and the use of technology. Youth are instrumental in finding novel ways to access and use technology. They are directly affected by changes such as the proliferation of computers in schools and elsewhere, and the increasingly heavy use of the Internet for both information sharing and for communication.
The contributors to this volume investigate how the resources provided by information and communication technology (ICT) are made available to different groups of young people (as defined by gender, race, rural location, Aboriginal status, street youth status) and how they do (or do not) develop facility and competence with this technology. How does access vary for these different groups of youth? Which young people develop facility with ICT? What impact has this technology had on their learning and their lives? These are among the issues examined. Youth from a wide variety of settings are included in the study, including Inuit youth in the high arctic.
Rather than mandate how youth should/could better use technology (as much of the existing literature does) the contributors focus on how youth and educators are actually using technology. By paying attention to the routine use and understandings of ICTs by youth and those teaching youth, the book highlights the current gaps in policy and practice. It challenges assumptions around the often taken-for-granted links between technology, pedagogy, and educational outcomes for youth in order to highlight a range of important equity issues.

Lyulph Stanley, the uncle of Bertrand Russell, was an influential and articulate aristocrat who believed that every child should learn from a good teacher in a comfortable building. He championed the school board cause during the latter half of the Victorian era, a time of tremendous educational change in England. With the great increase in urban populations, the schooling provided by voluntary organizations had become inadequate. The state had taken control of education, working through its local representatives, the elected school boards. But controversy arose between churches, which were opposed to secular education, and school boards, and between local and central authorities.


The author follows Stanley's political career, clarifying the views of the school board supporters and analyzing the political differences underlying the controversies. Students of education, history, and politics can benefit from his contribution to the re-assessment of this turbulent period in English educational history.

Recently, a conference of scholars considered resources and results in Kierkegaard research. In part one, "Resources," J.C. McLelland gives a short account of the acquisition of the Malantschuk collection by McGill University, H.P. Rohde discusses the collection as a basis for research, and H. Möller comments on its accessibility to scholars. N.J. Cappelørn examines the importance of the Papirer as a resource.




In part two, "Results," H.V. Hong analyzes Kierkegaard's concept of "Thought-Experiment," relating it to Kierkegaard translation. J. Walker elucidates four of Kierkegaard's assumptions concerning communication and notes the difficulties these pose for creating real human community. M. Cargignan's paper presents the concept of the "eternal" as a synthesizing force acting upon body, soul, and spirit. H.A. Nielsen distinguishes between two levels of indirect communication in Mark 6:45-52 and calls attention to the significance of this distinction for understanding Kierkegaard. The last two essays present the results of computer research at McGill: A.H. Khan explores the concept of passion in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and A. McKinnon offers a spatial representation of the relations among Kierkegaard's thirty-four works.








The volume, containing responses by R.L. Perkins, R. Archer, P. Carpenter, D. Lochhead, D. Goicoechea, and R. Johnson, will be of interest to Kierkegaard, Philosophy, and religion scholars, and those engaged in computer research in the humanities.

Music lives where people live. Historically, music study has centred on the conservatory, which privileges the study of the Western European canon and Western European practice . The Eurocentric way music has been studied has excluded communities that are considered to be marginalized in one or more ways despite that the majority of human experiences with music is found outside of that realm. Community music has emerged as a counter-narrative to the hegemonic music canon: it seeks to increase the participation of those living on the boundaries.
Community Music at the Boundaries explores music and music-making on those edges. “The real power of community music,” writes Roger Mantie in the foreword, “lies not in the fiction of trying to eliminate boundaries (or pretending they don’t exist), but in embracing the challenge of ’walking‘ them.” Contributions from scholars and researchers, music practitioners, and administrators examine the intersection of music and communities in a variety of music-making forms: ensembles, university and police choirs, bands, prison performing groups, youth music groups, instrument classes, symphonies, drum circles, and musical direction and performance. Some of the topics explored in the volume include education and change, music and Indigenous communities, health and wellness, music by incarcerated persons, and cultural identity. By shining a light on boundaries, this volume provides a wealth of international perspectives and knowledge about the ways that music enhances lives.

Based on a unique historical source, this book examines the social origins, career expectations, and first jobs of 28,000 students in the “elitist” French secondary schools of the 1860s. Using sophisticated statistical analysis as well as conventional historical sources, the work concludes that schooling reached a wider audience than has been so far believed and that substantial social mobility occurred within the school system, but that family background, rather than educational factors, directed students’ career aspirations and achievements. It also argues that although education expanded in urban, industrialized areas, mobility did not increase in these areas. A final chapter reconsiders nineteenth–century thought concerning education in the light of findings about the social effects of schools.