Marc Higgins, PhD, MEd, BEd, BSc

About

Marc Higgins' research work is an extension of a longstanding involvement with, in, and across the fields of Indigenous education, science education, and media-technology education. Having taken him from Canadian coast (East), to coast (North), to coast (West), this curricular development and pedagogical delivery of inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural educational programming took place in over 50 reserve and urban Aboriginal communities with Ottawa-based, national STEM education not-for-profit organization Actua. From this teaching and learning has stemmed a deep engagement with/in the complexities and complications that occur through the navigation and negotiation of Indigenous and Western modern ways-of-knowing (i.e., epistemology) and ways-of-being (i.e., ontology). In order to work within and against systems that render these encounters a form of pedagogical violence and/or (fore)closure, Marc has been working in the methodological space within and between Indigenous, decolonizing, post-colonial, and post-humanist theories in order to think and practice education and educational research differently around contested curricular concepts (e.g., what "counts" as science) towards ethical forms of Indigenous--non-Indigenous relationality.

Academic Credentials

2016 Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Inquiry in Education, University of British Columbia

Dissertation Title: Wandering within, against, and beyond the pathways of science education: Towards heeding the call of Indigenous science

2010 M.Ed. Lakehead University

Thesis Title: Decolonizing actions that speak louder than words: Science education through multiple lenses in Nunavut

2005 B.Ed. in Intermediate/Senior Physics and Mathematics, L’Université d’Ottawa

2004 B.Sc. in Physics, University of New Brunswick

Research

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research interests include (but are not limited to):

• Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education
• Unsettling curriculum and pedagogy
• Educational research methodologies
• Inter- and trans-disciplinary inquiry in education

RESEARCH SUMMARY

Books

Wallace, M. F., Bazzul, J., Higgins, M., & Tolbert, S. (2022). Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan

Higgins, M. (2020). Unsettling Responsibility in Science Education: Indigenous Science, Deconstruction, and the Multicultural Science Education Debate. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Edited Special Journal Issues

Higgins, M., Wallace, M., & Bazzul, J. (2018). Disrupting and displacing methodologies in STEM education: From engineering to tinkering with theory for eco-social justice. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, 18(3).

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Higgins, M., & Kim, E.J. (2019). De/colonizing methodologies in science education: Rebraiding research theory-practice-ethics with Indigenous theories and theorists. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 14(1), 111-127. DOI: 10.1007/s11422-018-9862-4

Higgins, M., Mahy, B., Aghasaleh, R., & Enderle, P. (2019) Patchworking response-ability in science and technology education. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 2, 3(2), 356-382.

Higgins, M., & McFeetors, J. (2019). Board games as play-full pedagogical pivots for STEM teaching and learning. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 17(1), 90-110.

Higgins, M. (2018). Reconfiguring the optics of the critical gaze in science education (after the critique of critique): (Re)thinking “what counts” through Foucaultian prismatics. Cultural Studies in Science Education, 13(1), 185-203.

Higgins, M., & Tolbert, S. (2018). A syllabus for response-able inheritance in science education. Parallax, 24(3), 273-294.

Higgins, M., Wallace, M., & Bazzul, J. (2018). Disrupting and displacing methodologies in STEM education: From engineering to tinkering with theory for eco-social justice. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, 18(3), 187-192.

Bazzul, J., Wallace, M., & Higgins, M. (2018). Dreaming and immanence: Rejecting the dogmatic image of thought in science education. Cultural Studies in Science Education. DOI: 10.1007/s11422-017-9816-2

McGregor, H., Madden, B., Higgins, M., & Ostertag, J. (2018). Braiding Designs for Decolonizing Research Methodologies: Theory, Practice, Ethics. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 9(2), 1-21.

Wallace, M., Higgins, M., & Bazul, J. (2018). Thinking with Nature: Following the contours of minor concepts for ethico-political response-ability in science education. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, 18(3), 199-209.

Higgins, M. (2017). Post-qualitative mo(ve)ments: Concluding remarks on methodological response-abilities and being wounded by thought. Conclusion for special issue in Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 8(3), 89-101.

Higgins, M., & Madden, B. (2017). (Not so) monumental agents: De/colonizing places of learning. Canadian Social Studies, 49(1), 34-38.

Higgins, M., Madden, B., Bérard, M.-F., Lenz Kothe, E., & Nordstrom, S. (2017). De/signing research in education: Patchwork(ing) methodologies with theory. Educational Studies, 43(1), 16-39.

Higgins, M. (2016). Placing photovoice under erasure: A critical and complicit engagement with what it theoretically is (not). International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(5), 670-685.

Higgins, M., Madden, B., & Korteweg, L. (2015). Witnessing (the lack of) deconstruction: White teachers’ ‘perfect stranger’ position in urban Indigenous education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 18(2), 251-276.

Higgins, M. (2014). Rebraiding photovoice: Putting to work Indigenous conceptions of praxis and standpoint theory. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 43(2), 208-217.

Higgins, M. (2014). De/colonizing pedagogy and pedagogue: Science education through participatory and reflexive videography. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, 14(2), 154-171.

Madden, B., Higgins, M., & Korteweg, L. (2013). “Role models can’t just be on posters”: Re/membering barriers to Indigenous community engagement. Canadian Journal of Education, 36(2), 211-247.

Higgins, M. (2011). Finding points of resonance: Nunavut students’ perceptions of science. in education, 17(3).

Book Chapters

Rotas, N., Nxumalo, F., Higgins, M., Madden, B., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (in review, invited). Encountering Indigenous and new materialist onto-epistemologies in educational research. In O. Cielemęcka and W. Stark (Eds.) New Materialism: Networking the European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.

Higgins, M. (2022). Toward a hauntology of science education. In J. Beier & j. jagodinzski (Eds.) Ahuman Pedagogy (pp. 77-95). New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan.

Dutt, P., Fateyeva, A., Gabereau, M., & Higgins, M. (2022). Redrawing Relationalities at the Anthropocene (s): Disrupting and Dismantling the Colonial Logics of Shared Identity Through Thinking with Kim Tallbear. In M. Wallace, J. Bazzul, M. Higgins, & S. Tolbert (Eds.) Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene (pp. 109-119). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Kirby, V., & Higgins, M. (2022). In Conversation with Vicki Kirby: Deconstruction, Critique, and Human Exceptionalism in the Anthropocene. In M. Wallace, J. Bazzul, M. Higgins, & S. Tolbert (Eds.) Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene (pp. 331-347). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wallace, M. F., Bazzul, J., Higgins, M., & Tolbert, S. (2022). Conclusion: Another Complicated Conversation. In M. Wallace, J. Bazzul, M. Higgins, & S. Tolbert (Eds.) Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene (pp. 365-371). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Steinhauer, E., Cardinal, T., Higgins, M., Madden, B., Steinhauer, N., Steinhauer, P., Underwood, M. Wolfe, A., Cardinal, B. (2020). Thinking with Kihkipiw: Exploring an Indigenous theory of assessment and evaluation for teacher education. In S. Cote-Meek and T. Moeke-Pickering (Eds.), Decolonizing and Indigenizing Education in Canada (pp. 73-90). Vancouver, BC: Canadian Scholars.

Higgins, M. (2019). Positing an(other) ontology within science education: Towards different practices of ethical accountability within multicultural science education. In K. Scantlebury & C. Milne (Eds.), Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education (pp. 67-89) . New York: Springer.

Higgins, M. (2019). Pursuing response-ability in de/colonizing science education. In J. Bazzul & C. Siry (Eds.), Critical Voices in Science Education: Narratives of Hope and Struggle (pp. 223-233). New York: Springer.

Higgins, M., & Madden, B. (2019). Refiguring presences in Kichwa-Lamista territories: Storying with Indigenous place. In C. Taylor and A. Bayley (Eds.), Posthumanism and Higher Education: Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research (pp. 293-312). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Higgins, M., Wallace, M., & Bazzul, J. (2019). Staying with the trouble in science education. In C. Taylor and A. Bayley (Eds.), Posthumanism and Higher Education: Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research (pp. 155-164). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Higgins, M., & Madden, B. (2018). (Not idling at) the Flâneur in Indigenous Education: Towards being and becoming Community. In R. Irwin & L. Cutcher (Eds.), The Flâneur and Education Research: A Metaphor for Knowing, Being Ethical and New Data Production (pp. 1-28). New York: Palgrave Pivot.

Higgins, M. (2016). Decolonizing school science: Pedagogically enacting agential literacy and ecologies of relationships. In C. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman Research Practices (pp. 267-289). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Book Reviews

Higgins, M. (2020). Review of A World of Many Worlds by M.de la Cadena and M. Blaser, eds. Transmotion, 6(1), 297-302.

Kothe, E. L., Higgins, M., Stiegler, S., Madden, B., & Bérard, M.-F. (2015). A quick guide to speed-dating theorists through thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives [Review of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives by A. Jackson & L. Mazzei]. The Canadian Journal for New Scholars in Education/ Revue canadienne des jeunes chercheures et chercheurs en éducation, 6(1), 68-78.

Research Reports

Freeman, S., Fraser, B., & Higgins, M. (2021). Examining the Alberta K-6 Draft Science Curriculum for Markers of Colonial Influence. ERA: Education and Research Archive.

Teaching

Courses Taught

EDU 100/300: Contexts of Education

EDEL 316: Communication through Mathematics

EDEL 415: Issues in Elementary Mathematics Education - Mathematics Education for Reconciliation

EDEL 415: Issues in Elementary Mathematics Education - Mathematics Education in a Minor Key

EDES 501: Possibilities for Reconciliation and Peaceful School Communities

EDPS 506 - Science Identity and Nature of Science: A Critical Curricular Dis/juncture

EDSE 451: Integrating Theory and Practice in the Advanced Professional Term (Secondary Science Education)

EDSE 455: Curriculum and Teaching for Secondary School Science Majors II

EDSE 502: An Inquiry into the Intersection of Teachers, Narrative, Emotion, and Depression

EDSE 502: Intersectional Approaches to Science Education

EDSE 504: Curriculum Inquiry

EDSE 511: Research Design in Secondary Education

EDSE 670: Postcolonial Perspectives, Theories, and Curriculum

EDSE 900: Research/Capping Excercise