Browsing by Author "DeWolfe, Sacha"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Challenges, opportunities, and key questions in research for Mathematics in Indigenous and Migrational (MIM) contexts through a language-focused lens.
    (North American Study Group on Ethnomathematics, 2023) Culligan, Karla; DeWolfe, Sacha; Simensen, Anita Movik
    This paper presents some challenges, opportunities, key questions, and ways forward for research in mathematics in Indigenous and Migrational (MIM) contexts as discussed by the two featured panelists and mediated by the moderator in the closing symposium of the MIM Conference in Alta, Norway in November 2022. Punctuated with quotations, photos and images, the paper begins by introducing the three researchers, their contexts, and their respective research interests. Next, the paper unfolds as a discussion organized around the four main points (challenges, opportunities, key questions, ways forward). The moderator invited the panelists to examine these discussion points with a view towards the role of language in their respective contexts and research, therefore the theme of language features throughout. The paper concludes with a synthesis of common threads that emerged through the discussion and a focus on action moving forward.
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    Living through desirability: Expanding identity and disrupting discourses and ideologies
    (University of New Brunswick, 2024-08) DeWolfe, Sacha; Benjamin, Amanda
    Utilizing a Foucauldian (1975) critical discourse analysis, my research examines discourses of damage and pathology in literature focused on Indigenous issues and how they can create a discursive frame that influences identity formation in problematic ways. My study embeds three main themes of discourse: problematizing, pathologizing, and culturizing of First Nation peoples. I experienced a myriad of ways that deficit narratives in New Brunswick contributed to a damage-centred frame of reference for First Nation peoples. Consider, for example, the incessant references to the First Nation academic achievement gap or the practice of schools hosting cultural events without meaningful inclusion. These practices contribute to the essentializing of First Nation peoples. There needs to be action that goes beyond visual representations of Indigeneity and a move to address how power operates and truth and knowledge are maintained. I put forth that honouring desire is a way to challenge this framing. Through an autoethnographic documentary film, I explore how problematizing, pathologizing and culturizing discourses inform(ed) my identity, taking the audience on a journey from damage to desire. My research utilizes desire-based strategies to reconceptualize how Mi’kmaq identity might be understood. Tuck (2009) states that “desire-based frameworks are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (p. 416). My research struggles for cultural negotiation and investigates how an expanded dialogue of Mi’kmaq identity informed by desire might create more space for First Nation peoples to thrive.
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    Schooling behind bars: an analysis of the therapeutic community model and how it shapes education for incarcerated youth
    (University of New Brunswick, 2012) DeWolfe, Sacha; Eyre, Linda
    This research takes a post structuralist approach to the analysis of The Therapeutic Community Model (TCM), a policy document that guides all procedures at a youth correctional facility in Canada where I was employed as a correctional officer. It shows how power operates at the level of policy. Through a Foucauldian discourse analysis I challenge the notion that policy making is a rational process based on evidence or truth. I show how the language of the TCM constructs youth as deviant, and how this impacts youth subjectivity and youth education in a prison setting. My research is guided by Foucault's (1975) book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and his idea of social control in the classification, detection and treatment of citizens in conflict with the law. The contradictions, inconsistencies and false sense of liberty apparent in the language of the TCM show that the model needs to be revisited in order for incarcerated youth to benefit from schooling behind bars.