in education Volume 30, Number 3, 2025 Autumn

Editorial

Valerie Triggs and Kathleen Nolan, University of Regina

As the days become shorter and opportunities for long evenings of reading arise, we hope you will enjoy our 2025 Autumn issue of in education which offers a rich and diverse engagement with calls for inclusions of voices, cultural and national identities, and images of difference, in four provocative articles and two book reviews.

The four articles in this autumn issue investigate the following: an issue of strategic planning in public education where both teacher union and practicing teacher voices are excluded, the importance of creating narrative inquiry research images of curriculum decision-making where thoughtful interconnections can be documented and thus reworked, the challenge to interrupt a homogeneity of ideology in counselling, psychology, and mental health education so that students can work with difference rather than against it, and an argument for more critical engagement with an integrated vision of Canada that is not obscured by war heroism alone.

Our first article, A Critical Policy Analysis of Educational Policy in Saskatchewan, focuses on strategic planning and local educational policy in Saskatchewan. Patrick Richards provides an in-depth document analysis supported by data from qualitative interviews with classroom teachers, regarding a recent education sector strategic plan. Richards argues that while the role of curriculum in public education is well understood, few Saskatchewan teachers have a strong understanding of educational policy. Using critical policy analysis as a methodology, Richards probes the democratic inclusion of the teachers’ union (Saskatchewan Teachers Federation) and classroom teachers in decision-making in Saskatchewan. The author finds that teachers are mentioned only as recipients of outcomes where agency is offered at the implementation stage, while the teacher union voice is fully absent throughout. To conclude, Richards explains the province’s current moves forward with another new strategic plan, an opportunity for renewed awareness of the education field for being observant of whether teacher voice is engaged in these policy processes at all, as well as the timing within which that voice is invited.

In the next article, entitled Documenting Knowing-in-Action: A Mathematics Teacher’s Curricular Decision-Making Images, Elizabeth Suazo-Flores shares research regarding the inclusion and development of images of teachers’ curricular decision-making. Narrative inquiry methodology is used in Suazo-Flores’ study with a veteran secondary mathematics teacher to create two teaching images of the participant’s practical knowledge-in-action. According to Suazo-Flores, teaching images reveal interconnections and associations between past experiences and present teaching moments, expressing how the participating teacher made curricular decisions in the mathematic classroom. The extended field work and conversations of the narrative inquiry process created spaces in this research—spaces for the teacher to revisit lived experience and to imagine new futures for their teaching practice.

In Evaluating the Confronting Hegemonic Ideas Speaker Series: Implications for the Education of Counsellors and Psychologists in Training, the third article of this issue, Teresa Maynes and Robinder Bedi provide evaluation data from a survey sent to several hundred attendees of a speaker series designed to increase awareness of controversial and unorthodox viewpoints. The Confronting Hegemonic Ideas Speaker Series was developed by Maynes and Bedi to encourage listening, consider the perspectives of others and, especially, counter growing reluctance to listen to and learn about unpopular viewpoints. The concerns highlighted by Maynes and Bedi include the inability and unpreparedness of therapists to respond to clients from a broad range of political and ideological backgrounds. These authors maintain that there is a lack of attention to ideological diversity; education and training standards may be reflective of a homogeneity of ideology among counsellor educators, psychology faculty, and mental health professionals whose political beliefs most often lean strongly liberal. Qualitative interview data in this research reveal positive responses from speaker series attendees and common reports that attendees felt better informed on issues discussed. Maynes and Bedi culminate their discussion with reminders to educators of the ethical obligation to foster awareness of personal values and to teach how to avoid imposing those values on clients.

Next, in the essay entitled Remembering Forced Forgetting: The Politics of Remembrance Day Ceremonies in Canadian Schools, Trevor Norris and Frank Deer call for a rethinking of Remembrance Day ceremonies in K-12 schools in Canada. They argue that current ceremonies contribute to the shaping of a Canadian identity that focuses on the heroics of soldiers overseas at the risk of forgetting that various kinds of loss have shaped Canada’s formation, including lives lost as part of colonization within Canada. Norris and Deer call for a hybrid approach to Remembrance Day ceremonies that emphasize, in similarity to the art of Kent Monkman, opportunities for Canadian national identity to be both a cultural fusion and an incongruity, a remembrance taught in these ceremonies that considers violence perpetrated on Canadian territories, as well as those territories overseas. Remembrance Day ceremonies need “a more robust form of remembrance in which Indigenous perspectives and experiences are present” (Norris & Deer, this issue). The authors call for critical pedagogic engagement with students over words and expressions such as ‘honour’, ‘sacrifice’, or ‘the Canadian way of life’. This essay emphasizes more direct student involvement in active inquiry and in the raising and engagement of essential questions that consider war, loss, and nation-building.

Our two book reviews follow well from the themes initiated by the articles. Elizabeth Szymanski provides a review of Unsettling Education: Decolonizing and Indigenizing the Land, edited by Anna-Leah King, Kathleen O’Reilly and Patrick J. Lewis. As Szymanski notes, this book serves as a valuable guide and compilation of tools for scholars and educators in realizing the significance of Indigenous pedagogy and the inherent unsettling at the heart of decolonizing and reconciliatory work. Syzmanski explains how the edited chapters of this text offer opportunities for non-Indigenous educators to reflect on their positionality and privilege while engaging truth and reconciliation strategies and suggestions arising from the experiences shared by Indigenous scholars and educators.

Jaclyn Roach is the author of the second book review, a book entitled Queer Justice at School: A Guide for Youth Activities, Allies, and Their Teachers by Elizabeth J. Meyer. Roach begins her review by returning the reader of this issue to the local context of Saskatchewan once again, where recent education public policy changes have raised significant concerns for students and teachers regarding the requirement of parental consent for using students’ chosen names or pronouns. Roach explains the various ways in which this text offers practical insights, classroom content, and pedagogy that guide teachers in approaching the work of supporting not only queer students but all students in K-12 settings. The book’s theme of joy as a collective form of resistance is highlighted as Roach discusses the important ways that this text helps people feel grounded and supported in the work they are doing.

We hope you enjoy this issue. Thank you for being such faithful readers. We also thank our many anonymous academic reviewers as well as our excellent managing editor, Marzieh Mosavarzadeh, for her wonderful attention to detail and form. Best wishes to all for the final weeks of the Autumn semester and the holiday season ahead.