Effective Literacy Instruction for English Learners with Learning Disabilities
As the number of English learners with learning disabilities continues to grow in U.S. public schools, educators are tasked with finding effective ways to support both language and literacy development. This article presents an instructional approach designed to meet the unique needs of this student population by combining current research with practical, language-focused teaching strategies. The approach highlights key areas such as academic vocabulary, syntactic awareness, explicit spelling instruction, and culturally sustaining practices. It also offers guidance on assessment, progress monitoring, and implementation, with classroom tools and real-world examples to help educators apply these strategies in their everyday teaching.
School-Based Youth Participatory Action Research With English Learners: Art-Based Narratives for Change
This paper examines how a high school English Language Arts classroom engaged multilingual learners of English in a School-Based Youth Participatory Action Research (SchYPAR) cycle integrating arts and narrative‑based practices. Drawing on Freirean praxis and ethnographic observation, the study highlights how co‑teaching supported critical literacy, agency, and dialogue. Findings reveal student and teacher transformations in relation to language, identity, and collaborative inquiry, illustrating implications for inclusive and critical pedagogies in multilingual contexts.
Collaborative Action Research: Cultivating Communities of Inquiry Through School–University Partnerships
This article shares reflections from a collaborative action research (CAR) partnership between a regional university and a rural school in Canada. This partnership involved two university educators, two inservice teachers, and two preservice teachers, all of whom are positioned as knowers, learners, and change agents within this research. Specifically, we worked to center teachers’ knowledge through our inquiry into culturally responsive and relevant literacy practices. We highlight some of the affordances of our learning through CAR, including the benefits of learning within a community of inquiry, knowledge generation, and strengthening teacher identities. We advocate for cultivating communities of inquiry through research partnerships.
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Rethinking Spelling Instruction in Elementary Grades
This study examined K–6 spelling instruction through surveys and interviews with 32 teachers (drawn from a pool of 168 eligible K–6 educators) in a western Pennsylvania district. Findings revealed a lack of formalized programs, overreliance on digital tools, and challenges in differentiating instruction. Effective practices included phonics-based and multisensory methods—both cornerstones of the Science of Reading—yet systemic barriers, such as inconsistent resources and limited professional development, hindered implementation. The study emphasizes the need for targeted training in explicit, systematic instruction to improve student outcomes. Implications include developing standardized assessments and robust professional learning. Future research should examine the long-term impacts of these strategies across diverse educational settings.
My PE, My Story: The Use of Vignettes to Understand Student Experiences of Pedagogical Innovation in PE
Our study explores how middle school students experience pedagogical innovation in Physical Education (PE) through the implementation of the Meaningful Physical Education (Meaningful PE) framework. Using a case study design, students participated in eight units throughout the school year that explicitly prioritized meaningful experiences. Data from interviews, reflections, and journals were represented as portrait vignettes that were co-constructed with each student to capture authentic, individualized experiences. This approach highlights students’ voices and the evolving meaning they attribute to physical education over time. Findings aim to inform educators’ practice and advance research on meaningfulness and student engagement in physical education.
Critical Religious Literacy as Equity Literacy: Disrupting Silence in Teacher Education
Religious diversity remains a marginalized aspect of social justice-oriented teacher education, leaving many preservice teachers ill-equipped to navigate the complex religious landscapes of Canadian K–12 classrooms. Drawing on qualitative case study interviews with five Canadian teacher educators, this article examines how teacher educators perceive and navigate critical religious literacy as a form of social justice. Applying Gorski’s equity literacy framework, we find that teacher educators experience silencing and self-censorship, are concerned about potential harms for preservice teachers, and consider dialogue as a point of disruption. These findings suggest that teacher educators who create intentional space for cultural safety and critical dialogue around religious diversity are better positioned to prepare preservice teachers for the religious complexity of contemporary Canadian classrooms. This kind of dialogic practice constitutes an underrecognized but essential dimension of equity-oriented teaching.
Grounding Elementary Social Studies Teacher Education in Indigenous Knowledge
This article tracks a multiyear relationship between an Indigenous and a non-Indigenous preservice teacher educator working together on Odenang Inquiry pedagogy. The importance of truth-telling and relationship-building in a reconciliation context is discussed, followed by a discussion of Anishinaabe Wiijiindowin and story pedagogy as Indigenous relational self-study. We present some examples of Odenang Inquiry in social studies preservice teacher education that reflect three interconnected and layered processes. We conclude the article with some reflections on ways that the interconnections among these processes have contributed to the development of our Odenang Inquiry approach.
Honoring Story, Land, and Community: Rethinking Indigenous Literacy Education
In a Western schooling context, literacy education is often narrowly framed through reading and writing, privileging text-based practices grounded in Eurocentric assumptions about knowledge, learning, and achievement. For many Indigenous children, such framings do not acknowledge the relational, embodied, and land-connected ways literacy is lived and learned within family, community, and culture. In this literature review, we engage scholarship on Indigenous literacy education to examine how storytelling, land, kinship, community, and creative expression open broader understandings of literacy. Rather than approaching these as separate themes or as culturally responsive additions to Western literacy instruction, we consider them as interdependent literacies that reshape how meaning-making, teaching, and learning can be understood. We argue that rethinking literacy in these ways invites educators, particularly non-Indigenous educators, to move beyond deficit and classroom-bound frameworks toward more relational, culturally grounded, and collaborative literacy practices with Indigenous students, families, and community.
Dance of the Stick: Relationships With Children in Early Childhood Settings
This study explores the relationships that emerged during outdoor play in an early childhood education setting. Over four months, collaborations deepened through playful encounters and co-constructed learning among children and educators, in nature. Natural materials shaped the play, and traditional hierarchy dissolved as children took the lead, inviting educators into their imaginative worlds. Through observation, documentation, and reflection, the action research illuminated the nuances of children’s behaviors, motivations, and preferences. Weekly outdoor “dances” fostered curiosity, development, and discovery. The findings suggest that when educators release control, they rediscover joy and embrace a negotiated curriculum that centers play and honors each child’s unique capabilities.
Poetry, Reflection, the Human Experience: Creating Spaces for Listening and Becoming
This work is a collaborative, reflective exploration of our lived experiences interacting with students who are directly or indirectly affected by conflict. We inquired into these experiences using poetry and wrote three poems. We present these as visuals to enrich the poetic expression. Through poetry, previously unidentified themes regarding our beliefs about teachers’ roles and identities emerged. This process demonstrated that collaborative reflective practice among educators is immensely valuable for creating inclusive and evolving teaching and learning spaces. Dialogue and open-mindedness in such spaces will foster student growth, enabling them to become confident members of society.
Taking Medicine That Heals: Teachers Engaging in Reflective Inquiry Through Community Cultural Wealth
This study explores how reflective inquiry can empower teachers from marginalized backgrounds, specifically women of color from immigrant families. Through the Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) Reflective Inquiry, K–12 teachers merged their testimonios with theoretical concepts to identify their own funds of knowledge and capital. The CCW Reflective Inquiry was developed through culturally responsive-sustaining methods to meet the needs of the teachers enrolled in a graduate-level course. This study highlights the necessity of integrating culturally responsive-sustaining methods of inquiry into teacher education to support educators in connecting to course content, navigating oppressive environments, and continuing their work toward social justice.
The “Teacher” in the Classroom: A Personal Self-Study With Photographs
This article illustrates a reflective experiment of analyzing the teacher self through personal photographs. While performing an observational study within my secondary English classroom, I embarked on my own exploration of my teacher identity and its relationship to my practice. I open the article by discussing my data collection procedures and discussion of artefacts from my recent past. I then discuss my sorting process with treating my data, as well as my methods of categorization and meaning-making with regards to my photograph collections. I conclude this article with curatorial statements, which highlight my personal engagement of self, expressed through these photographic moments.
Listening Through Storywork: Source Selection for Erasure Poetry in Decolonial Praxis
This reflexive practitioner inquiry examines how we selected Indigenous-authored passages for an erasure poetry activity within an arts-based decolonial praxis. Guided by Jo-ann Archibald’s Indigenous Storywork methodology, we approached the sources as living entities. We came to see source selection itself as a form of teaching—foregrounding emotional resonances, identity exploration, and responsibilities. Two key learnings emerged: first, the importance of honoring passages as existing decolonial pedagogy; and second, the necessity of situating our own narratives within pedagogical practices. This account demonstrates how settler educators might take up Indigenous Storywork to encourage ethical relationality in practice.
Embedding Social Justice and Ethical Awareness in Course‑Based Research Assignments
This article discusses guidelines for embedding research ethics and social justice into undergraduate and graduate coursework through the University of Victoria’s course-based ethics review framework. Drawing on experiential learning strategies and the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS 2, 2022), this paper illustrates how instructors can design assignments that cultivate ethical reasoning, research integrity, and social responsibility. Practical examples from several academic disciplines demonstrate how students learn to navigate ethical complexities in real-world contexts. The framework affirms that ethical research education is not just procedural but foundational to inclusive inquiry, offering a scalable approach to teaching responsible and justice-oriented research practices.
Teaching Hard History Amid Contemporary Challenges: Inquiry Pedagogies for Impactful Holocaust Education
This article examines four secondary teachers’ experiences with inquiry-based approaches to teaching the “hard history” of the Holocaust after they participated in inquiry-based professional learning focused on Holocaust education. The teachers’ narratives highlight the affordances of inquiry-based pedagogy for overcoming curricular and time constraints, fostering critical thinking, and supporting student agency through studying hard history. The teachers’ narratives further suggest that inquiry-based pedagogies can deepen student perspective-taking, promote classroom discussions, and enhance teachers’ professional resilience. The article underscores the value of reflective, contextually driven, student-centered instruction, concluding with questions for inquiry that might support efforts to teach hard history in local contexts.
“Ask Us, and Not the Interpreter”: A Critical Pedagogy Inquiry on Deaf-Led Empowerment in Sign Filipino Language Teaching
This autoethnographic reflection explores the author’s journey of learning Filipino Sign Language from her Deaf students and how Deaf-led actions led to conscientization and empowerment. Inquiry through critical pedagogy revealed shared self-doubts about abilities and a fear of challenging dominant negative narratives about Deaf people. The article illustrates how Deaf inclusion is fundamentally an inclusion of human rights in education, making it Deaf-centered. It also highlights the importance of creating a safe space for healing from the impact of linguistic and cultural oppression, which becomes an empowering process. This study recommends concrete actions to sustain linguistic and cultural justice for Deaf learners in education.
When Inquiry Leads to the Unexpected: “Ungrading” with Preservice Teachers and the Struggle With Reflection
While the alternate assessment movement known as “ungrading” is increasingly common in K–12 classrooms, it has only recently reached higher education, and very little has been written about its use in teacher education classrooms. This article describes the organization and repercussions of one teacher educator’s classroom inquiry, through which a gradeless approach was implemented and adapted in a capstone course over four years. Given the degree of difficulty the future teachers appear to face when reflecting on their learning, the author considers their challenges in relation to changing perceptions and government expectations of how and why teachers learn, once in the field.
This autobiographical narrative details a veteran science educator’s transformation from a traditional teacher into a scholar-practitioner within a long-term research-practice partnership (RPP). Prompted by mid-career stagnation, the author embraced the STEM-to-STEAM movement, integrating project-based learning and critical making. A 2017 collaboration with McGill University on student-directed inquiry (SDI) served as a critical turning point, forcing her to navigate imposter syndrome and cede classroom control. Over nine years, this work evolved into a robust cross-curricular framework that dismantles subject silos. Now a McGill PhD student and RPP mentor, the author models a “fail forward” mindset, demonstrating how shifting from an all-knowing expert to a curious co-creator enriches student agency.
Mon histoire, ton histoire: Entangling Research, Pedagogy and Theatre
In this article I explore ways Research-based Theatre (RbT) entangles pedagogy, scholarship, and art‑making through embodied, relational inquiry. Drawing on the evolving autoethnographic play Mon histoire, ton histoire, I reflect on a theatre-based workshop in which participants co-created personal and ancestral stories through movement, monologue, gesture, and dialogue. Centering the monologue “Baggage Carousel,” I share how theatrical practices invite rhizomatic forms of knowing that blur boundaries between performer and audience, research and teaching, individual and collective memory. The workshop illustrates how arts-based inquiry can foster relational meaning-making, cultural reflection, and collaborative storying within educational spaces across diverse learning communities globally.
Introduction to this issue's theme of inquiry in teaching, learning, and research, and overview of the content.
Note about the 30th anniversary issue.
List of reviewers for this issue.
LEARNing LandscapesTM Journal is an open access, peer-reviewed, online education journal supported by LEARN (Leading English Education and Resource Network). Published in the spring of each year, it attempts to make links between theory and practice and is built upon the principles of partnership, collaboration, inclusion, and attention to multiple perspectives and voices. The material in each publication attempts to share and showcase leading educational ideas, research, and practices in Quebec, and beyond. We welcome articles, interviews, visual representations, arts-informed work, and multimedia texts to inspire teachers, administrators, and other educators to reflect upon and develop innovative possibilities within their own practices.
Seeking Care: Youth’s Counterstories Within the Context of Mental Health
In this article, we draw on a narrative inquiry into the experiences of children, youth, and families waiting for mental health support during the COVID-19 pandemic in Western Canada. We foreground two youths’ experiences (Gillian, who self-identifies as transgender, and Malek, who self-identifies as racialized) to highlight the complex barriers and supports each encountered while attempting to secure appropriate care as they navigated moments of crisis within their worlds of home, school, and communities. By inquiring into their mental health stories, we foreground the unique ways these youth enacted counterstories to disrupt hegemonic constructions of their identities, build agency, and support their wellbeing.
An Early Childhood Educator’s Learning Story in the Time of COVID
While it began with a variety of narrative representations of writing personal experiences, since Ellis (2004; Bochner & Ellis, 2016), evocative, performative, and creative nonfiction forms of storying have coalesced to form contemporary autoethnography. For over a decade, Canadian arts education researchers have blazed trails to employ those forms of autoethnography as “learning stories” (Carr, 2001; Carr & Lee, 2012) to study teaching and learning practices in a variety of school and community educational contexts. Learning stories enable educators to reveal teaching and learning experiences that cannot be represented by, or communicated through, other research forms. The present inquiry, which begins with the story of an early childhood educator, is rooted in the fusion of evocative autoethnography and learning stories with arts-based research, particularly a/r/tography.
Reflexive Inquiry’s Impact on Mindful Teaching for Student Wellbeing
This inquiry investigates the effects of trauma on students by analyzing personal experiences and teaching methods. Through the lens of autoethnography, a nonfictional storytelling approach, I reflect on my learning journey to identify compassionate and mindful teaching practices, aiming to foster a trauma‑sensitive classroom environment. Emphasizing the significance of teachers sharing their stories through autoethnography, this exploration contributes valuable insights to the ongoing discourse on trauma-informed pedagogy for student wellbeing.
School Sport for All: An Inclusive Developmental Framework to Improve Participation
Recognizing the contributions that school sport can make to the wellbeing of students, this paper proposes a “re-imagined” school sport framework. School Sport for All (SS4A) places students at the center of building a program where development and wellbeing are prioritized. The SS4A framework fully integrates and promotes key aspects from comprehensive school health, whole-child education, and long-term athlete development throughout all its features. As a whole, SS4A aims to ensure the benefits of sport can be experienced by all, within a school system where teaching and learning are prioritized in the classroom and in the school community.
Maintaining Playground Relationships Through Music During a Pandemic: An Action Research Inquiry
The COVID-19 pandemic’s restrictions for schools and playgrounds threatened children’s social and emotional wellbeing. In response, Grade 4/5 students created music-based activities through action research to sustain playground interactions. This study explored the crucial yet fragile playground relationships and the children’s determination to maintain them. Findings indicate that the student‑initiated projects were not only a medium for self-expression and maintaining friendships, but also served as an important tool for reinforcing the inherent social fabric of the playground setting. Notably, this study underscores the significance of collaborative learning, interpersonal skill development, and intrinsic motivation in fostering social skills and enhancing self-confidence.