Kurt Thumlert

• York University

Introduction/Abstract

With the support of the Helen Carswell Chair in Community Engaged Research, the Sounds out of Bounds project provided modular synthesizer instruments, curriculum, and faculty training to Community Music Schools of Toronto (CMST) to support youth-directed engagement in the practice of modular synthesis. Our research focused on a 3-day CMST instructo...

Since the 1960s, electronic sound synthesis and the keyboard interface have been so closely associated that many young musicians have come to see them as inseparable components, if not interchangeable terms. In this article, we ‘disconnect the keyboard’ and explore an alternative history of electronic sound synthesis – modular synthesis – that has...

This article discusses a 2021 survey of French as a second language (FSL) teacher candidates (TCs) in Faculties of Education in Ontario whose practice teaching experiences were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, pivoting them into remote FSL teaching and learning. The survey, which formed a component of a larger mixed method SSHRC-funded research p...

This article discusses a 2021 survey of French as a second language (FSL) teacher candidates (TCs) in Faculties of Education in Ontario whose practice teaching experiences were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, pivoting them into remote FSL teaching and learning. The survey, which formed a component of a larger mixed method SSHRC-funded research p...

Algorithms are interwoven in the fabric of digital culture. They increasingly mediate our experience of politics, culture, identity, and agency. Building on critical research in other fields, critical educational theorists are exploring the pervasive role of algorithms, AI, and 'smart learning' tools in reshaping what and how we learn. This work is...

The New London Group’s 1996 manifesto was a clarion call to educational researchers to fundamentally redesign language and literacy education for the needs of global learners communicating in evolving digital media environments. In this conceptual overview, the “how”, “what” and “why” of multiliteracies are critically re examined from the perspecti...

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt communal musical play and create obstacles to sites of formal music learning. Under these conditions, we must attend to how emerging musical communities of practice, outside of educational institutions, are recreating themselves to support their own informal learning, making, and participation practices. T...

Article Info. Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt communal musical play and create obstacles to sites of formal music learning. Under these conditions, we must attend to how emerging musical communities of practice, outside of educational institutions, are recreating themselves to support their own informal learning, making, and par...

The New London Group's 1996 manifesto was a clarion call to educational researchers to fundamentally redesign language and literacy education for the needs of global learners communicating in evolving digital media environments. In this conceptual overview, the "how," "what" and "why" of multiliteracies are critically reexamined from the perspectiv...

The ongoing work by educators responding to calls for equity, diversity, and inclusion in music education shows the breadth of difficult work that has been accomplished as well as the challenging work that lies ahead. Our work explores efforts to rethink music education—for all—from the ground up, which requires disrupting many of the norms through...

In this article, we present findings of a research study centered around a 10-week digital production workshop developed specifically for families in an urban school board, a population rich with culturally diverse immigrant families and English language learners (ELLs). The aim of this research was to support parents/guardians in an urban communit...

This article reports on a research project, Re/Map, that looked at how pre-service teachers might question the taken-for-granted nature of digital maps as constructed sociotechnical artefacts, and then creatively speak back to the dominant historical narratives embedded within them through the production of their own media artefacts. Though analysi...

While initiatives advancing STEM education are pervasive within the global landscape of educational reform today, STEM discourses and reforms largely fail to articulate or enact theoretical and epistemological shifts that critically conceptualize the impacts of science and technology in bio-physical and social worlds. The urgency to adopt STEM refo...

Critical work in music education has interrogated eurocentric values and representational systems in music curricula, as well as idealized constructions of musicianship grounded in Western aesthetic practices. In this chapter we argue, further, that inherited eurocentric music pedagogies enact a ‘distribution of the sensible’, a self-evident regime...

STEM education initiatives currently pervade the global landscape of educational reform. Unfortunately, the rush to adopt STEM reforms in North American schools and develop students for competitive 21 st century knowledge economies has encouraged an uncritical embrace of underlying STEM narratives and purposes, thus foreclosing critical discussion,...

Historically, researchers have positioned MMORPGs as "training grounds" for leadership competences. This conceptual paper takes as its point of departure a reversal of contemporary literature on the transferability of leadership skills purportedly learned in MMORPGs to articulate new questions about how these games do not so much "mirror" organizat...

Abstract: While recent educational research has focused on what/how people learn through playing digital games, there is less work focusing on what and how young people learn through game design and critical digital making. Drawing upon our own research and pedagogical interventions, this conceptual paper describes how digital gamemaking enacted th...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a commissioned research study that analyzed a schooling initiative with the ambitious goal of transforming learning environments across the district by advancing innovative, inquiry-driven pedagogical practices combined with 1:1 iPad distribution. The paper explores impacts of the init...

'Community participation' has, over the past decades, become a key component of nature conservation initiatives worldwide. 'Participation', a term that signals the involvement of local stakeholders in conservation practices, is central to Integrative Natural Protected Areas (INPAs) in Latin America, where INPAs have become the dominant form of envi...

In this study, we examine what and how intermediate age students learned from playing in a health-focused game-based digital learning environment, Epidemic. Epidemic is a playful interactive environment designed to deliver factual knowledge, invite critical understanding, and encourage effective self-care practices in dealing with viral contagious...

This article extends a recent educational engagement with the work of Jacques Rancière by linking his meditations on 19th-century worker emancipation to present cultural contexts and media forms. Taking Nick Prior’s (2010) notion of the “new amateur” as point of departure, I argue that new media and attendant production contexts offer an unpreceden...

Building upon a recent call to renew actor-network theory (ANT) for educational research, this article reconsiders relations between technology and educational theory. Taking cues from actor-network theorists, this discussion considers the technologically-mediated networks in which learning actors are situated, acted upon, and acting, and traces th...

Background We contend that a conceptual conflation of simulation and imitation persists at the heart of claims for the power of game-based simulations for learning. Recent changes in controller-technologies and gaming systems, we argue, make this conflation of concepts more readily apparent, and its significant educational implications more evident...

This article identifies a set of persistent methodological and theoretical challenges to research on Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), and to studies of virtual worlds more generally. Critically examining some of the ontological, epistemological and ethical lacunae and, in some cases, missteps that characterize well-respected, well-public...