About the Speaker

In collaboration with the Teacher Candidates of Colour (TCC) Collective, we are proud to present this workshop with Dr. Tasha Ausman (she/her), who is a Part-Time Professor at the University of Ottawa, and a full-time mathematics and science teacher with the Western Quebec School Board. Her research employs decolonizing, psychoanalytic, and post-colonial frameworks in the areas of Curriculum Studies, Mathematics, and recently, Queer Studies. Her work appears in the Journal of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, Multicultural Education Review, and Transnational Curriculum Inquiry. As well, her co-authored work appears in book collections including Disney, Culture and Curriculum (Routledge, 2016) and The Critical Youth Studies Reader (Peter Lang, 2014). She is presently working on research approaches to decolonize teaching in secondary science and mathematics classrooms, and is currently exploring the intersection between visual-arts-based pedagogies and biology. 

Description

This workshop offers students, Faculty, and Staff the opportunity to engage with the problem of cultural appropriation in education. Often part of the hidden curriculum of schooling, teachers sometimes unintentionally influence the attitudes and beliefs of students in ways that have longstanding cultural, social, and educational ramifications. In this talk and the discussion which follows, Dr. Tasha Ausman presents a recent case study about a school yoga program that occurred as part of a mindfulness curriculum in a school in the National Capital region during the Fall of 2020. The program was designed to help students cope with the new pressures of learning under the constraints of COVID-19. However, its ongoing implementation reveals how white supremacy still prevails in educational spaces when challenges to decolonizing the curriculum are ignored. How can we as educators continue to think through our curriculum-as-planned to ensure that we can become more attuned to historical and cultural inequities which comprise the hidden curriculum of schooling?

Registration 

To register, please click on the link below and use your uOttawa email. You will receive a confirmation thereafter along with a reminder a day before the event and an hour before the event. When registering, add the event to your Outlook calendar, if that helps. ​

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RJcqm49XSwOtyfTDvmjN-w

Due to COVID-19, all our events will be online on Zoom. At the moment, we regret that will be unable to provide ASL interpretation and live captioning (in English) for this event. We are working, however, on making our online events and workshops more accessible.