Teaching and learning in diverse spaces focus of York symposium

Ad for Critical Approaches Toward a Cosmopolitan Education event

Faculty and alumni from York University’s Faculty of Education will come together on March 9 for a virtual symposium to discuss a new edited collection “Critical Approaches Toward a Cosmopolitan Education” (Routledge, 2021) that aims to reconceptualize teaching and learning in spaces with diverse, multi-racial populations of young people. 

Critical Approaches book cover

The event runs from 3 to 5 p.m. and features presentations from contributors to the book. Presenters focus on schooling experiences and social and cultural adaptation issues that characterize individuals who, through the meaning that they ascribe to lived experiences, gesture to the complexity associated with a cosmopolitan sensibility, and how awkwardly the construct of race fits within such theoretical positionings.

They will explore the impact on students, educator, and social institutions, as issues present that coincide with concerns around civic engagement, individual subjectivity versus social identity, and convergence of context-specific teaching and policy environments on global dynamics in education reform.

Over the past 15 years, the notion of cosmopolitanism has found its way to the cutting-edge of critical educational theory, as researchers take up issues associated with individuals or groups who display practices and values that gesture beyond the speech communities and ethnic enclaves with which others who may originate from similar backgrounds are associated or self-identify.

These alternative ascriptions and appropriations suggest a re-visioning of the notion of diversity within a framework that envisions cross-bordered communities, where sites often localized within multilingual and multicultural societal reflect a host of characteristics associated with transnational, transcultural and intersectional identities.

Presenters include:

  • Sandra R. Schecter and Carl E. James – “Introduction: Critical Approaches Toward a Cosmopolitan Education”
  • Daniel A. Yon – “Clashing and Converging Cosmopolitanisms: Reimagining Multiculturalism and the Question of Belonging”
  • Bronwen Low – “De- and Reterritorializing Identities: The Global Hip Hop Nation at Work in a Youth Recording Studio”
  • Vidya Shah – “The Case Against Exoticism: Troubling ‘Identity’ in Identity-Based Data Collection”
  • María Rebeca Gutiérrez Estrada and Sandra R. Schecter – “Trilingual Instruction in an Indigenous Community in Northwestern Mexico: A Case for Cosmopolitanism from Below in Intercultural Education”
  • Sara Schroeter – “Race in Liminal Space: Youth Discourse in a Francophone School”
  • Jennifer Jenson – “Playing and Making: Re-Fusing the Digital Divide”
  • Nemoy Lewis – “The Impact of Foreclosures on the Ho

Register in advance for this virtual symposium here.