Érudit's RSS Feed

Editorial: The Swiftly Shifting Terrain of CIE/ÉCI

Gary Pluim and Dale M. McCartney

Éditorial : le paysage rapidement changeant de l’ÉCI/CIE

Gary Pluim and Dale M. McCartney

Interconnections of Policies Across Territorial Borders: International Student Mobility Into Canada During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Renata Matsumoto
In this paper, I examine the conditions that give rise to what is said in interviews with international students regarding a web of interconnected policies that regulated their mobility into Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. I adopt Bacchi and Bonham’s (2016) post-structural interview analysis and focus on the production of two subject positions across the interviews: one that becomes associated with risk and one that becomes associated with resistance to certain policy processes. The participants in this study include master’s and PhD students from Brazil, China, Colombia, and India. My analysis suggests the need for an understanding of international student mobility in a more relational way that highlights the geopolitical aspects in the access to higher education in Canada for international students.

A Tutoring Start-Up in COVID-19 Emergency: Lessons Learned

Kelly Gallagher-Mackay, Christine Corso, Carly Manion, Tina Ta, George Tam and Karen Mundy
This action research study examines a university-school board virtual tutoring program developed as an emergency response during the COVID-19 pandemic to support disadvantaged students in Ontario, Canada—a distinctive and underexamined governance context within the global tutoring literature. Situating tutoring as a policy response that circulated internationally during the pandemic, the study evaluates academic and social-emotional impacts using performance data, surveys, tutor reflections, and self-assessments. Positive social-emotional outcomes and strong administrative support marked program successes, while academic gains were limited. The analysis identifies emergency program design features—including limited frequency, after-school delivery, and technical and institutional constraints—as key barriers to academic impact. The study contributes to comparative and international education research by examining how a globally circulating policy response was translated within a decentralized, risk-averse public education system, highlighting implications for equity, innovation, and university-school board partnerships. As public investments in tutoring expand internationally, the findings underscore the importance of context-responsive program design in education-in-emergencies settings.

How First Peoples Principles of Learning Have Been Included in British Columbia Offshore School Inspection Reports From 2018 to 2024

Ian Alexander
This article examines how British Columbia (BC) offshore schools integrate First Peoples Principles of Learning into the BC curriculum taught in these schools located outside Canada. BC offshore schools are in 12 countries and use the same curriculum as in BC. Students who graduate from offshore schools earn the same diploma as Canadians and often attend universities in Canada. A substantial change in the revised BC curriculum was the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives and knowledge with First Peoples Principles of Learning being one of the resources to integrate this knowledge in all courses through the curriculum. This study used content analysis and critical discourse analysis to examine text segments in 282 inspection reports published each year by the BC government. Findings indicate that BC offshore schools have shown uptake and expanded inclusion of Indigenous perspectives but mostly confined to these principles of learning as a portion of the new curriculum.

Letters to Bhutan: A Living Inquiry Into Bhutanese Students’ Cross-Cultural Adaptations in Canada

Hannah Robertson, Ching-Chiu Lin, Kezang Sherab and Chimi Dema
This study explores the lived experiences of Bhutanese international students pursuing higher education in Canada. Grounded in Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a conceptual foundation and using Karen Meyer’s living inquiry framework alongside Young Yun Kim’s cross-cultural adaptation theory, we examine how students navigate cultural transitions through four interconnected dimensions: place, language, time, and self/other. Employing creative methodology through narrative reconstruction in the form of letters to home, this research reveals complex negotiations between GNH values and Western educational paradigms. Findings suggest that students navigate complex adaptation processes across spatial, temporal, and communicative dimensions while developing intercultural identities that integrate heritage and host cultural elements through creative coping strategies. Structural factors including immigration policy, institutional support, and financial pressures significantly shape these adaptation processes. This study contributes to comparative education literature by examining an understudied population and showing how small-nation students navigate globalized higher education through sophisticated meaning-making processes that require targeted institutional support.

Perceptions d’enseignants à l’égard du système de codage basé sur l’approche catégorielle attribuée aux élèves ayant des besoins particuliers en Alberta

René Langevin and Angélique Laurent
The Alberta Ministry of Education has supported inclusive education in its official documents for over 20 years (Alberta Learning, 2004). At the same time, it requires Alberta schools to use a coding system based on a categorical or biomedical approach to diagnose and determine the choice of services offered to students with special needs. Despite the fact that this approach promotes a deficit view of the student and runs counter to the fundamental principles of inclusive education, it remains necessary and even relevant in the eyes of many teachers (Fortier et al., 2018). Given this puzzling observation, this exploratory study aims to gather the perceptions of teachers (n = 130) from French-language schools in Alberta regarding the coding system based on the categorical approach assigned to students with special needs.

La dilution de la politique d’équité, de diversité et d’inclusion (EDI) dans le quotidien d’une faculté universitaire québécoise

Marie-Odile Magnan, Deborah Torquato Schimidt, Fabiola Melo-Araneda, Julie Larochelle-Audet and Abdoulaye Anne
This article analyses the construction of meaning around EDI action plans in French-speaking Quebec universities, through a case study in a social sciences faculty. The inductive thematic analysis is comprised of 13 semi-structured interviews conducted with professors, based on the cognitive analysis of public policies and the cognitive framework of Spillane et al. (2002). The results highlight a dilution of EDI policy due to (1) a lack of knowledge about the policy; (2) the outsourcing of implementation, leading to EDI being perceived as a service provided by the institution; (3) the unresolved tension between the values of excellence and meritocracy and those of EDI. Although the analyzed conversations illustrate various types of support for EDI, they are rooted in an institutional context that prevents the construction of a shared meaning around the policy message.

Michelle Stack (Ed.), Global University Rankings and the Politics of Knowledge, University of Toronto, 2021, 262 pp., ISBN 9781487530402

Jingwun Liang and Yu Guo

Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Michael Frishkopf, Reza Hasmath, and Anna Kirova (Eds), Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada, AU Press, 2024, First Edition, 420 pp., ISBN 978-1-771-99410-1

Latifa Soliman and Robin Persad

Steiner-Khamsi, G. Time in education policy transfer: The seven temporalities of global school reform. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, 242 pp, Open-access eBook (CC BY 4.0), ISBN (print): 978-3-031-82523-1; ISBN (eBook): 978-3-031-82524-8

Zhaohui Shi