Public education is tasked not only with educating, but also with instilling values, knowledge and skill building, and preparation for citizenship Noddings, 2016;Westheimer, 2015). In Canada, education is provincially mandated, but there have been growing pressures and efforts to standardize policy, curricula, and practice across the country under the banner of inclusion, testing and assessment, and accountability within a globalized neoliberal society (Polster & Newson, 2015;Stack, 2016;Westheimer, 2015). Of particular concern is how these pressures are manifested within education policy and how they may in turn affect the way students and citizenship are invoked and talked about.This study critically investigates the discursive construction of particular actors (students and citizens) within policy-level education discourse (PLED). Informed by Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), I combine the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2016) and corpus-assisted discourse studies (Mautner, 2007(Mautner, , 2016 to analyze the discursive construction of and agency afforded (or not) to students and citizens. A total of 22 policy texts collected from the Ministries/Departments of Education across the provinces and territories between 2018-19 formed the basis of the small reference corpus, from which six provinces-British Columbia,
This article is based on various versions of a panel presented at multiple writing centre and writing studies conferences as well as conversations across partners. Our perspectives come from discussions between our four universities before, during, and after an initial global North/global South writing support partnership meeting in the summer of 2018. During that summer, four universities (two in southern Africa and two in North America) partnered to begin a collaborative project of capacity building in the areas of writing centres and writing support across all levels of these universities, offering writing support to undergraduate and graduate students as well as early-career researchers/faculty. In this article, we share some of our ongoing concerns and considerations for ensuring this partnership moves forward in a collaborative, egalitarian, decolonial way that avoids both Western colonial and neo-colonial approaches to capacity building and program development. Reflections in this article can perhaps inform others working in the field of writing centre scholarship wanting to build similar global collaborations.
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