Welcome to Canadian Politics: Collaboration for Student-Led Knowledge Building

Abstract

In the Winter of 2020, my introductory Canadian politics class started to develop its own online, collaboratively-built, open-access, introductory “textbook” on Canadian politics. Drawing on the principles of critical pedagogy, the assignment engages students in group work to generate plain-language primers that can connect with an audience beyond our classroom while contributing to knowledge-building in the field. Once submitted, students’ work is compiled, edited and uploaded to the project website. Students have multiple opportunities to provide feedback about their experience and the project as a whole. Since the project was piloted in 2020, it has been used twice more in two Canadian politics classrooms, with plans for further expansion. This article chronicles the process of developing, revising, and expanding the project. It identifies the principles behind the assignment, and the challenges the project has faced so far. Further, drawing on scholarship demonstrating that colonialism, racism, and marginality remain peripheral to the study of Canadian politics, it imagines how a student-led, collaboratively-built online “textbook” might also work to contest the historic boundaries of the discipline.

Keywords:

• Textbooks
• Canadian politics
• critical pedagogy
• online learning

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude the students at the University of Waterloo and the University of New Brunswick who have contributed to WTCP over the years. Thank you to Dr. Heather Millar for her ongoing commitment to the project and her feedback on a draft of this paper. Samantha Dalo, Kevin van Mierlo, Christopher Casey, and Shirqille Tisi, provided support to WTCP as teaching assistants, and Emma Nero contributed to this article (and to the broader project) both as a teaching assistant and later as a tireless research assistant. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their helpful suggestions to improve this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the project website at: https://welcometocanadianpolitics.ca/.

2 Please note that an early iteration of this work was co-developed with Emma Nero as a presentation for the 2021 University of Waterloo Annual Teaching And Learning Conference. A draft this paper was also previously presented at the 2021 Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference.

3 See also my discussion of these pedagogical principles as related to another online-oriented assignment in Cattapan 2012.

4 After experimenting with word length over three years, I think that 1500 is an ideal length for this assignment, but up to 2000 would work, depending on the size of the group. Group size and word length could be adjusted to accommodate the size of the class and the teaching and editing resources available.

5 In the Winter of 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic when the course was taught entirely online and students would not meet in person, I asked students to rank their top three choices of topics from a pre-determined list, and then students were assigned to groups accordingly. They could also suggest topics and students had some flexibility to move around once the initial groups were assigned. This worked well, but my preference is to allow students to meet one another first and choose groups they are comfortable with, and then to give them space and time (in an in-class session) to select a topic together.

6 In 2021, for example, the suggested topic list in my class included: Idle No More; limitations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the emergency power; the Royal Proclamation; LGBTQ organizing in Canada; the demolition of Africville; debates over Senate reform, the Acadian expulsion; the Charlottetown Accord; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; the Royal Commission on the Status of Women; the Mohawk Resistance/Oka Crisis; Debates over the role of the Crown; the Clarity Act; referenda on electoral reform; social media in Canadian elections; Justin Trudeau’s “Blackface” scandal; Bill 101 (Quebec); and the Komagata Maru affair/Continuous Immigration Act.

7 Although the entire group receives the same grade, I do make clear to students in the assignment materials and in class that I reserve the right to give any individual student a different grade if it becomes clear in the in-class sessions and the feedback we received from their group that the contributions to the assignment differed substantially (i.e., one member did not contribute at all, another member did all the work, etc.).

8 In 2021, the project received funding which allowed us to hire a research assistant to support editing and other tasks related to the project. See discussion regarding “scaling up” in this article’s conclusion.

9 See the project assessment form at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegqusuO4TE2WCv-b8-ookFWpf6EI-Q7Sf3RY-BCQKUiPIqtw/viewform?usp=sf_link.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Waterloo.

Notes on contributors

Alana Cattapan

Alana Cattapan is the Canada Research Chair in the Politics of Reproduction and an Assistant Professor in Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. She studies gendered inclusion in policy making, identifying links between the state, the commercialization of the body, and reproductive labor. As an educator, she is committed to critical pedagogy and the recognition of diverse learning styles. Her work on Wikipedia as a site of feminist pedagogy is the subject of an article in Feminist Teacher.