Dalene Swanson
SSHRCC Postdoctoral Scholar, University
of Alberta
Associate, Centre for Culture, Identity and Education, University of British
Columbia
Dalene Swanson is a SSHRC postdoctoral scholar in the Department
of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta, and an Associate
of the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education at The University
of British Columbia. Prior to her current position, she was a postdoctoral
scholar with the Imaginative Education Research Group at Simon
Fraser University. She completed her Ph.D. in Curriculum Studies
and Mathematics Education at the University of British Columbia.
Her doctoral work is a critical exploration of the construction
of disadvantage in school mathematics in social context. For her
dissertation, Voices in the Silence: Narratives of disadvantage,
social context and school mathematics in post-apartheid South Africa,
she was awarded the 2006 Illinois Distinguished Qualitative Dissertation
Award; the 2006 American Educational Research Association Outstanding
Doctoral Dissertation Award, Curriculum Studies Division; the 2005
Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies Outstanding Doctoral
Dissertation Award; and the Ted T. Aoki Prize for the most Outstanding
Doctoral Dissertation in Curriculum Studies.
Dalene’s research interests span curriculum studies; mathematics education;
teacher education; critical pedagogy; cultural studies; indigeneity; sociology
of education; interdisciplinarity; arts-based approaches to teaching, learning
and inquiry; narrative and poetic inquiry; innovative approaches to qualitative
research; performativity; and social, ecological and global justice. In her teaching,
Dalene focuses on the integration of the arts into mathematics and other curricular
subjects, while affording her work a strong critical, anti-oppressive and democratic
focus. She embraces alternative methodologies and performativity towards decolonizing
practices in research, teaching and learning. Dalene has also instructed in the
UBC online international distance education course on ‘global citizenship.’
Dalene’s research emphases have included a focus on the critical relationship
between social difference discourses, identity and constructed disadvantage.
In this sense, her research attends critically to the contextual and subjective
intersections of race, class, gender, poverty, ethnicity, ableism, language and
cultural differences, and other social difference discourses, towards contesting
oppression and hegemony, co-creating transformative and empowering discourses
and practices, and advocating for participatory citizenship ‘glocally.’
Dalene was born and educated in South Africa. She successfully auditioned for
the National School of the Arts in Johannesburg specializing in Classical
Ballet and Flamenco dance, where she graduated from school. She also became accomplished
in contemporary dance, tap, modern, classical Greek, and folk and (inter)national
dance. She completed a Licentiate in Speech and Drama from Trinity College, London,
and her Advanced Exam in Classical Ballet through the Royal Academy of Dance,
London. She went on to a B.Sc. in Mathematics and further degrees in Education,
including a Master’s at the University of Cape Town. She taught secondary
school mathematics, drama and dance, in South Africa and Canada, for more than
twelve years, and over the last several years she has been teaching and researching
at the Universities of British Columbia and Alberta, and Simon Fraser University.
Dalene is a poet, a dramatist and also used to dance professionally. She also
enjoys writing narrative. She has a wonderful husband, daughter, and cat that
she lives with in Vancouver.
For what I have experienced and understood, … I answer with my life.
Mikhail
Bakhtin
(updated 10/07)
