Reviews/Critiques d’ouvrages
Policy Unplugged: Dis/Connections between
Technology Policy and Practices in Canadian
Schools
by Jennifer Jenson, Chloë Brushwood Rose, and
Brian Lewis. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2007, 176 pp.
The overarching message of Policy Unplugged is
reminiscent of the words of Thomas “Tip” O’Neill—
the long-time Speaker of the House in the US Congress—who once declared, “All politics is local.”
He was explaining how the problems and concerns
of towns and cities around the country affect the
actions of their representatives and senators in Washington, DC. In a similar vein, Jenson, Brushwood
Rose, and Lewis argue that the most enduring and
least-well articulated aspects of educational technology policies in Canada today are the local classroom teachers’ use of computers in the elementary
and secondary schools across the country, especially
the small but not insignificant barriers to both thinking about and actually employing the new tools of
the digital world. The authors demonstrate that most
national and provincial technology policy efforts
have made little impact on the actual practice of
teachers in their classrooms.
Rather than an exhaustive, province-by-province
review of existing technology policies, Policy Unplugged is based on a two-year study of the implementation of information and communications
technology (ICT) policies at thirty-two elementary
and secondary schools across Canada. The book is
largely the result of several previously published
articles, based on the thick, qualitative interviews
and classroom observations that took place between
1999 and 2002. While it would be easy to criticize
the book for being based on now dated information
in a digital world that has changed significantly since
2002, as well as the fact that the research failed to
take a pan-Canadian view of these policies (they
visited schools in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec, thus overlooking 40 percent of the provinces and the three
federal territories), their micro-level, case-based
275
approach and depth of qualitative analysis provide
an unusually rich understanding of the implementation and integration of computer technologies in
the various classrooms and administrative offices
across the country. Indeed, despite the fact that
nearly six years have passed since they completed
the project, virtually all of the “disconnections”
among provincial technology policies, school board
policies, the funding-classroom pedagogy gap, and
teaching practices are still largely unchanged. Their
central view, that provinces and school boards usually cobble together a series of haphazard and insignificant technology initiatives with the noble
objective of “investing in technology,” remains as
descriptive today as it did in 2002.
The authors have an obvious strength in their
understanding of the localized, daily realities of
teaching, where the great disparities across age
groups, genders, school buildings, and individual
learner needs meet top-down, provincially mandated
and board-structured policies, creating endless “disconnects.” Information and communications technologies are the latest example of these politically
charged policies. As they conclude, “macro policies
rarely affect the kinds of practices they seek to regulate—the everyday and mundane—because they cannot and do not reflect how everyday experiences are
formed, mediated, and reconstructed by the continuously shifting social, cultural, and institutional backdrop of schools and districts” (p. 147). The book is
extremely effective at bringing the series of local,
school-based issues associated with new technologies to the fore. For policy-making, it is critical to
recognize that much of the evaluation of new technologies in the education system has been based on
short-term, quantitatively driven measures of how
computers and student access to them are “paying off”
in the eyes of school officials, politicians, and parents.
Policy Unplugged draws on a series of critical
local issues that need to be part of any effective
policy on ICT, including the realities of the actual
culture of learning in our schools today. Part One of
the book includes a critical analysis of the actual
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276 Reviews/Critiques d’ouvrages
spatial arrangements of our aging school buildings.
Policies to address the “new knowledge economy”
and to “reflect international and national student
achievement standards” have resulted in top-down
provincial and boardwide policies, largely ignoring
the essential role of the teacher, the diversity and
individualized nature of the curriculum in the classroom, as well as the critical role of professional
development of our teachers. One of the most important contributions of this work is the assertion
that teachers must have a central role in any effective ICT policy. The authors argue that professional
development will have to recognize the largely ignored issue of gendered relationships with technology and the way in which males are privileged within
most ICT policies.
CANADIAN PUBLIC POLICY – ANALYSE DE POLITIQUES,
Part Two provides an updated context for policymaking in Canadian schools and school districts and
how the new educational imperative of technology
skills for the twenty-first century will pose a significant challenge for those who wish to bridge the
policy gaps between teaching and technology. The
authors offer a clear vision for policy-makers and a
set of policy principles, should we ever hope to
achieve world-class learning outcomes for our students. As Tip O’Neill suggested for politics many
years ago, perhaps all effective ICT policy will be
local, with people as the focus, rather than the
technology.
MICHAEL FOX, Department of Geography and Environment, Mount Allison University
VOL . XXXIV , NO. 2 2008
Reviews/Critiques d’ouvrages
Coasts under Stress: Restructuring and SocialEcological Health
by Rosemary E. Ommer with the Coasts under Stress
Research Project Team. Montreal and Kingston,
London, Ithaca: McGill-Queens University Press,
2007, 574 pp.
The title of this book might more appropriately be
Coasts in Trauma. Stress is too mild a term for the
massive depletion of natural resources and the social disintegration resulting from the social-ecological restructuring that is so well documented by
Rosemary Ommer and the Research Project Team.
The book is a state-of-the-art account of the overall
health of Canada’s coastal areas, with a cohesive
theory that helps to make sense of how it arrived at
such an unhealthy condition. It is their comprehensive view of health, ranging from the health of ecosystems, specific natural resources and communities,
geographic regions, and individual people, along
with an analysis of the linkages between these various types of health, that makes this book a unique
and important contribution for all those concerned
with the future of Canada’s coastal areas.
Their research is deeply interdisciplinary. The
names of those comprising the Research Project
Team is a twelve-page list of natural and social scientists, graduate students, research assistants, and
staff. Their study area is British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador. The analytical framework
of the book is resiliency theory, a theory that focuses on complex adaptive systems, social-ecological health, and cross-scale governance. Thus, the
analytical approach of Ommer and the Research
Project Team emphasizes the effects of social and
ecological restructuring from the perspective of interactive processes, the health consequences of
multiscale alignments or misalignments, and the
multiscale governance models required for promoting resiliency. Restructuring is most simply understood as the effects of globalization resulting from
neo-liberal policies, while scale occurs in temporal, organizational, and spatial dimensions. Two
277
other key elements in their approach is a community-based analysis and an examination of knowledge production. Therefore, as one example, the
collapse of Newfoundland and Labrador cod stocks
can be seen as resulting in large measure from various scale misalignments: the differing knowledge
of scientists and local fishers (organizational scale)
about cod in large fisheries management zones versus local bays (spatial scale), and the incapacity of
scientists, managers, and fishers to adjust management
and harvesting measures in response to data about
short- and long-term trends (temporal and organizational scales).
Coasts under Stress is divided into three parts.
Part One is an historical overview, largely using case
studies from fisheries, forestry, and non-renewable
resources, that convincingly demonstrates the ups
and downs in ecological and social health during
pre-contact conditions, colonization, modernization,
and globalization.
Part Two describes the human impact of restructuring and social-ecological health. This is the most
compelling section of the book. It begins with a
detailed analysis of the restructuring of health care
by the governments of British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador during recent decades. This
discussion is followed by statistical analysis of the
impacts of health care restructuring on health outcomes in these two provinces. The analysis is complemented by community-based studies and
interviews on health, nutrition, and diet. Finally,
these health studies are compared with the current
situation of youth and their education. Throughout
this section, linkages are made with previous discussions about ecological and social health. After a
careful reading of this 140-page analysis, it is crystal clear how unemployed fishers, barren fishing
grounds, closed emergency rooms in rural hospitals,
the availability of groceries only in distant chainstore malls, increasing domestic violence, and massive outmigration of youth can be seen as pieces that
fit perfectly into the same puzzle.
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278 Reviews/Critiques d’ouvrages
Part Three presents alternative governance options for Canada’s coasts. This section is less compelling and somewhat disappointing as there is a
return to a more natural resource focus compared to
the holistic notion of health in Part Two. Acknowledging the inadequacy of current federal policy, primarily as seen in the implementation of the Oceans
Act, Rosemary Ommer and the Research Project
Team propose a comprehensive notion of “co-management with stewardship” as the means of restoring ecological and social health. Co-management
ensures that all levels of organizational scale are
brought into the decision-making process, while
stewardship gives a special place in this process to
ecological restoration, community control of local
resources, and a broad range of social values. It is,
as they say, a combining of a top-down with a bottom-up approach. However, if it is the misalignments
of scale that lead to disastrous consequences, then
to avoid misalignments there must be a free flow of
communication and cooperation both up and down
the various levels of organizational scale. This study
demonstrates that communities are already trying
CANADIAN PUBLIC POLICY – ANALYSE DE POLITIQUES,
to take these steps, but it is not clear that there is
any interest on the part of governments to move in
the same direction. The authors’ call for a change in
perspective in the corridors of power is likely to fall
on deaf ears.
Their focus on the co-management alternative
points to a major gap in this book, namely, the absence of an Arctic Ocean perspective. Formal comanagement is well established between the federal,
territorial, and aboriginal governments in the North,
and First Nations’ values similar to or stronger than
stewardship underpin the harvesting and governance
activities of their people. Is there thus evidence for
healthy social-ecological systems in the North?
Whether the answer is affirmative or negative,
Coasts under Stress offers a significant step forward
in broadening the interdisciplinarity, comprehensiveness, and depth of the “new ecology” but provides little that is uniquely fresh in policy options.
JOHN K EARNEY, John F. Kearney & Associates
VOL . XXXIV , NO. 2 2008
Reviews/Critiques d’ouvrages
In Search of Canadian Political Culture
by Nelson Wiseman. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007,
346 pp.
Wiseman’s provocative book expands our understanding of policy options in Canada in a most novel
way. He paints a picture of our existing political
culture by first rejecting any notion of constitutional
change and largely questioning the usefulness of the
Louis Hartz thesis as interpreted by Gad Horowitz
and Kenneth McCrae. For example, Wiseman notes
that Horowitz argued that social democracy in
Canada is a function of the strength of toryism
whose traditional focus on the collective is shared
by socialists. Yet, Wiseman points out, Horowitz
does not explain why Canadian social democracy is
strongest in the West, where the Loyalist stamp is
weakest. Likewise, Wiseman rejects Seymour Martin
Lipset’s views on the origins and nature of Canadian
agrarian radicalism and does not find Harold Innis’s
staple thesis or the Marxian class conflict thesis very
helpful. In looking at Quebec, Wiseman is more open
to the Hartz-Horowitz hypothesis. He sees the shared
commonality between the ancient régime conservatism of New France and modern socialism and uses it
to account for Quebec’s passage beyond its liberal
Quiet Revolution to social democracy.
While largely dismissing these traditional theoretical ways of explaining Canadian political culture, Wiseman turns and examines Canada regionally
and uses the five waves of immigration the country
has undergone since its beginning to define and to
knit these regions together. What is unique is this
thread of immigration that he weaves through his
analysis. He sharply differentiates English Canada
from Quebec: immigration fed ideological development in English Canada, but in Quebec, it was internal, spontaneous combustion.
Wiseman really sees Canada as a country of six
regions. Unlike many scholars in the past, he does
not seek commonality to overarch regional differences. Surprisingly, however, within his regional
approach, he does not include any part of the coun-
279
try “north of 60” and thus leaves aside the three territorial divisions: Nunavut, the North West Territories, and the Yukon. Immigrants to the
environmentally sensitive and resource-wise North
have certainly transformed the political culture
there, but Wiseman gives no explanation for the
North’s absence from his discussion.
In defining the various regions of the country,
Wiseman begins with Newfoundland and Labrador.
Seeing immigration as the defining factor in the
determination of the political culture of Canada’s
six regions, Wiseman views Newfoundland as an
offshoot of the Irish and the West Countrymen of
England. He sees the Maritimes as the oldest and
most homogeneous of the regions of English
Canada, a branch of New England. Quebec was retarded in its development by the culture of New
France and, through a brief flirtation with liberalism, came to embrace socialism in the second decade after the Quiet Revolution. Because of the
United Empire Loyalists, Wiseman understands
Ontario as the counter-revolution of the United
States of America. Then Wiseman deviates from the
general consensus that usually clumps Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, and Alberta together as a “prairie region.” Rather, Wiseman observes a Canadian midwest that includes only Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
European and British immigration was a pivotal factor in the social democracy fortunes of this particular region. He sees Manitoba as the Ontario of the
prairies, and Saskatchewan was shaped by British
immigrants who brought British Labour success to
the prairies. In his Far West region, Wiseman links
Alberta and British Columbia as the upstarts. For
him, Alberta is a splinter of the United States, especially the American Great Plains area, while British
Columbia resembles Australia, with its resourcebased economy in far-flung places and the largely
urban societies both past and present. Both see themselves as a new Eden where utopianism reigns. This
Far West region is the most innovative and controversial, but Wiseman makes a very good case for
joining these two provinces together. For example,
he notes that socialism and the robust labour organi-
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280 Reviews/Critiques d’ouvrages
zations in British Columbia have ties to the United
States just as Alberta has links with the American
Great Plains culture with their potent democratic
ideas. However, he does not neglect their differences
either. Wiseman sees a pronounced secularism in
British Columbia compared with the Christian fundamentalism in Alberta. However, the similarities
are sufficient to join the two into one region, and
today Albertans have more interaction with British
Columbia than with their prairie neighbours.
Wiseman uses Stockwell Day as a typical politician
who has crossed from Alberta to British Columbia
and finds himself at home in both political milieus.
Based on secondary material, Wiseman offers a
very useful, thought-provoking and fresh analysis
of Canadian political culture. Wiseman’s analysis
explains why it is so very difficult in Canada for a
federal government to develop policy of a panCanadian nature. Because the waves of immigrants
have not only arrived at different times throughout
our history but have also tended to settle in specific
CANADIAN PUBLIC POLICY – ANALYSE DE POLITIQUES,
regions as each wave has appeared on our shores,
deeply ingrained political and cultural differences
have developed among regions. Consequently, even
after compromise and negotiation between the various interested parties and federal and provincial governments have taken place, one region or another
often feels alienated because, Wiseman claims, there
is little commonality among the political cultures
of Canada’s various regions. On the other hand,
Wiseman shows why provincial governments are
better able to develop policy that will satisfy and be
accepted by the citizens under their jurisdiction. A
shared political culture in the various regions allows
for policy decisions to conform to the particular
culture of any one province. Policy-makers in
Canada will certainly find this book an essential read
before embarking on their policy-making tasks.
KENNETH MUNRO, Professor of History and Senior
Director of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of
Alberta
VOL . XXXIV , NO. 2 2008