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J. Douglas Adler
Bio
I
Dr. Adler graduated from the University of British Columbia (UBC) two-year elementary programme. His experiences both within and outside the classroom prompted him to pursue a MA and PhD in Science Education at UBC. Dr. Adler’s expertise is in K-12 teacher education, and he teaches elementary science methods and secondary science Inquiry seminars. Dr. Adler teaches a number of graduate courses with a focus on research methodologies and methods. While he is in science education he does not see the label as a border not to be crossed.
David Anderson
Bio
Dr. David Anderson is a Professor in the fields of Visitor Studies, Museum Education and Science Education, and is the Director of the Master of Museum Education (MMEd) degree program at UBC. He has made significant contributions to these fields through initiating, reforming and strengthening collaborations between museums, schools and universities. Through these reforms his work has been instrumental in energizing the remarkable wealth of cultural, historic, and social significance represented in museum institutions. He is a Japan Foundation, Ritsumeikan and Unversitas 21 Research Fellow, and his research contributions span the Globe, but have had particular impact and relevance for the nations of Asia, including China, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Japan. He has worked on the leading edge of the trends in educational reforms in Asia, identifying the needs, working harmoniously within the changes, and bridging disconnected groups in ways that are yielding considerable benefits to education. His work is releasing and revitalizing the extraordinary educational wealth of culture and history held in museums throughout the World.
Daniel Bakan
Bio
Prior to joining the faculty at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Education, Daniel Bakan taught creative arts pedagogy at Ryerson University’s School of Early Childhood Education and Interdisciplinary Creative Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. In addition to his work in higher education, schools and non-school community settings, Daniel is an established musician, composer and theatre artist whose artistic portfolio includes several CDs, performances across North America, theatrical productions, dance scores, children’s musicals, and appearances on CBC, syndicated US radio, and NPR. In 2015, Daniel Bakan completed his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in curriculum studies with an award-winning dissertation on songwritng and artography.
Marie-France Berard
Bio
An art educator and art historian, Marie-France Berard has been committed to art museum education for more than twenty years. She holds both B.A. and M.A. in Art History from the University of Montréal, and was Responsable des visites at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal from 1995-2008. Marie-France is a member of the education team at the Vancouver art Gallery and she is also president of the Special Interest Group in Education and Mediation in Museum (SIGEMM) within the Canadian Society for the Study of Education. Under the supervision of Dr. Dónal O’Donoghue, she completed her Ph.D. in Curriculum Studies/Art Education at the University of British Columbia. Her doctoral research is an inquiry into the experience of encountering art using the theoretical concepts of desire and assemblage from philosopher Gilles Deleuze. She is also invested in contemporary art theory, the notion of the art museum educator as the Deleuzian ‘mediator’, in complicating the concepts of interpretation and knowledge in the art museum, and in creating pedagogical spaces of encounters for pre-service teachers. Read Full Profile
Penney Clark
Bio
Dr. Penney Clark is Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. Dr. Clark’s research interests centre on the production and provision of elementary-high school textbooks in historical contexts, the historical development of history and social studies curricula in Canada, and history teaching and learning. She has published widely in these areas. S) She has been awarded the Canadian History of Education Association Founders Prize (2012) (with co-authors Mona Gleason and Stephen Petrina) and again in 2022 (sole author). She has also been awarded the Canadian Association of Foundations in Education Publication Prize (2013) (with graduate student Wayne Knights). Her most recent major publication (with Alan Sears) is The Arts and the Teaching of History: Historical F(r)ictions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020.)
She has served in multiple leadership roles in the department and beyond. Department roles include Deputy Head, Graduate Coordinator, Undergraduate Coordinator, and Social Studies Area Chair. Along with Dr. Mona Gleason, Dr. Clark completed a five-year term as co-editor of Historical Studies in Education/Revue d'histoire de l'éducation in 2020 and she currently serves on the Board of this journal. She served as President of the Canadian History of Education Association (CHEA) (2010-12), on the Council of the Bibliographical Society of Canada (2012-15) and is currently serving on the SSHRC Awards to Scholarly Publications (ASPP) Committee.
Dr. Clark is currently co-lead of the Curriculum and Resources cluster in the “Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future” project that was recently awarded a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership Grant (2019-2026). This grant brings together various constituencies involved in history education including academic historians, history education scholars working in faculties of education, Indigenous scholars, graduate students and highly qualified personnel (HQP), museum educators, teachers, ministries of education, policy makers, and local, provincial and national history and heritage organizations to achieve the following goals and objectives:
1. Map the terrain of history education in K–12;
2. Ascertain to what extent history and social studies teaching helps students engage with the key issues or problems facing Canadian society today;
3. Identify and develop evidenced-based practices in history teaching, learning, assessment, and resource development, and evaluate their efficacy in providing powerful and engaging learning experiences for students, particularly in terms of building trans-systemic understanding across knowledge systems;
4. Cultivate communities of practice with pre and in-service teachers, that are grounded in theoretical and empirical research on history education pedagogy to promote engaged and critical historical thinking; and,
5. Using findings that emerge from the research, make evidence-based policy recommendations for history curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment through proactive connections with ministries of education, faculties of education, museum educators, Indigenous organizations and stakeholders, publishers, other curriculum developers, and practicing teachers.
In 2008, Dr. Clark was awarded a $2.1 million Strategic Knowledge Cluster Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The History Education Network/Histoire et Éducation en Réseau (THEN/HiER) (2008-2016) promotes the development and maintenance of a community of inquiry among the various constituencies involved in history education: academic historians; public historians in museums, archives and historic sites; practising teachers; researchers based in faculties of education; and curriculum policy makers. It aims to disseminate current Canadian and international research on history education out of the universities to broader communities of stakeholders; provide opportunities for engagement with, and critique of, this research, with the aim of bridging research and practice; and to promote new classroom research. This project collaboratively develops teacher resource materials and on-line museum-based activities for schools, as well as authentic approaches to assessment of students’ historical literacy. Co-Applicants: Margaret Conrad, Professor and CRC, University of New Brunswick; Kevin Kee, Associate Professor and CRC, Brock University; Jocelyn Létourneau, Professor and CRC, Laval; Stéphane Lévesque, Associate Professor, University of Ottawa; Ruth Sandwell, Associate Professor, OISE/UT; Peter Seixas, Professor and CRC, UBC; Amy von Heyking, Associate Professor, University of Lethbridge.
In 2015, Dr. Clark received the Education’s 100 prize, an award given to 100 faculty alumni who were selected for their “dedication, impact and expertise as community leaders in their professional area.” Dr. Clark was the recipient of the Killam Teaching Prize in 2006 and the British Columbia Social Studies Teachers' Association Innovator-0f-the-Year Award in 2008. She has taught in public schools in British Columbia and Alberta. She has taught both elementary and secondary social studies curriculum and instruction courses at the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University, and the University of British Columbia. She worked as a social studies consultant for the Edmonton Public School District, where she developed a variety of materials for teacher use. She is co-author of three Canadian history textbooks and co-editor of Learning to Inquire in Social Studies: An Anthology for Elementary Teachers, 4th ed. (2021) and Learning to Inquire in History, Geography, and Social Studies: An Anthology for Secondary Teachers, 4th ed. (2020).
Anthony Clarke
Bio
Dr. Clarke spent twelve years as a classroom teacher in Australia before moving to Canada to work with beginning teachers, classroom teachers, and university instructors at UBC. He has a keen interest in all aspects of the practicum with a focus on teacher mentoring.
Along with his colleague, Professor Juanjo Mena from the University of Salamanca, Spain, he is responsible for the Mentoring Profile Inventory (MPI), a web-based professional development tool for practicum mentors that doubles as a research instrument for teacher educators (www.mentoringprofile.com). The MPI is free and available online in nine languages.
Professor Clarke's research interests also include teacher inquiry, teacher agency, teacher identity, study abroad, and faculty professional development.
Jillianne Code
Bio
Dr. Jillianne Code is a researcher, educator, and learning scientist specializing in learner agency, online learning technologies, and the impact of social media on student success and well-being. As the Director of the ALIVE Research Lab at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Code studies agency ‘unbundled’ from formal education including video games, virtual reality, and social media communities.
Before coming to the University of British Columbia, Jillianne was Associate Professor of Educational Technology and Psychology in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria (UVic; 2011-17), and a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Assessment and Learning Technologies (2010-11). Dr. Code holds a Ph.D in Educational Psychology from Simon Fraser University, a M.Ed in Educational Psychology with a specialization in Instructional Technology, and a B.Ed in Secondary Science and Art Education from the University of Alberta.
Dr. Code is also a two-time heart transplant recipient, heart failure survivor, and co-founder of the HeartLife Foundation of Canada whose mission is to engage, educate, and empower the voices of those living with heart failure.
Please check out her profile and contact her if you have further inquiries.
Click here for the Wikipedia entry written about Professor Code.
| W: http://jillianne.ca | T: @jilliannec | IG: @jilliannc.phd |
Peter Cole
Bio
Peter Cole is a member of the Douglas First Nation, one of the Stl’atl’imx communities in SW British Columbia, and also has Celtic heritage. He has taught at universities in Canada, the United States and Aotearoa-New Zealand, most recently as Associate Professor in Aboriginal and Northern Studies at the University College of the North where he was Chair of the Research Ethics Board. Peter has played key roles in the development of the Aboriginal & Northern Studies degree program at UCN; the Developmental Standard Teaching Certificate with four Vancouver Island First Nations communities to certify language teachers to teach their Indigenous languages in schools; and, while at Massey University in Aotearoa-New Zealand, was invited by Maori colleagues to participate in the reshaping of the pakeha Technology in the New Zealand Curriculum document into Hangarau: i roto i te Marautanga o Aotearoa, a curriculum based on Maori spiritualities, knowledges, and technologies. Beginning in January, 2001, Peter has been instrumental in initiating a dialogue with the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada to be more inclusive and respectful of Aboriginal research protocols, epistemologies and methodologies.
Peter has been a Visiting Noted Scholar at Deakin University (Australia), Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University and Noted Scholar at UBC, and has given keynote addresses at several conferences including the 4th Biennial Provoking Curriculum Studies Conference (2009), 5th World Environmental Education Congress (2009), and Technological Learning and Thinking Conference (2010).
Peter has published in many national and international literary and academic journals and books, and is the author of Coyote and Raven go Canoeing: Coming Home to the Village (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), a bookbased on research with Indigenous Peoples internationally in the area of culturally relevant education. This book was written using poetic, dramatic and storytelling voices which helped to break new ground by making orality the foundation of its scholarship. Peter is also co-editor of Speaking for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada (UBC Press, 2009).
Peter’s PhD is in Curriculum Theory & Implementation which he completed at Simon Fraser University (2000).
Shawn Forde
Bio
I grew up in Campbell River, on Vancouver Island, and following high school came to UBC to complete an undergraduate degree in Human Kinetics and then a bachelor’s degree in education. After my degree I worked for a BC Offshore School in China as a physical education teacher and department head. During this time in China, I developed an interest in the role that sport plays in development and completed a Certificate in International Development from UBC Continuing Studies. Following my time in China, I returned to Canada for a year and worked as a Teacher on Call in Richmond and Delta School Districts. Following this, I took a job with a sports-based HIV/AIDS prevention program operating in Lesotho. Building on this work, my graduate studies at UBC focused on sports-based community development, education, and social change efforts. My master’s research examined the curriculum used by sports-based HIV/AIDS prevention programs and my doctoral research involved ethnographic and historical research into the social and political role that soccer played in a South African township during and after apartheid. Utilizing arts-based research methods, this research illustrated how sporting clubs offered forms of community education that promoted political consciousness, community solidarity, and mutual aid. Overall, my research is concerned with the variety of ways that sport and physical activity have historically been, and continue to be, used for the purposes of community development and political engagement.
Susan Gerofsky
Bio
Susan Gerofsky brings experience in a number of fields to bear in an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to mathematics education and environmental education and curriculum theory. She holds degrees in languages and linguistics as well as mathematics education, and worked for twelve years in film production, eight years in adult education (including workplace and labour education), and nine years as a high school teacher with the Vancouver School Board. Dr. Gerofsky has been involved in interdisciplinary research and teaching involving embodied, arts-based mathematics education, garden-based environmental education, applied linguistics, and film.
Dr. Gerofsky has studied and taught in England, Brazil, Italy, Germany and Cuba. She speaks several languages, and is an active musician with Tiddley Cove Morris Dancers, Sospiro Misterioso, Reed Isle, The Mandelbrot Set, and formerly with Orkestar Slivovica, Tootalute, and Grist to the Mill ceilidh band (playing squeezeboxes, pennywhistle and baritone horn). She serves on the board of EartHand Gleaners Eco-artists.
Lindsay Gibson
Bio
Dr. Lindsay Gibson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. Prior to starting at UBC on July 1, 2019 Lindsay was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta from 2015-2019. He completed his PhD in Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC in 2014, and taught secondary school history and social studies in Central Okanagan Public Schools (Kelowna, B.C.) for twelve years.
For more than a decade Lindsay has collaborated with various organizations including The Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2), Historica, and others to develop learning resources and professional learning opportunities for pre and in-service teachers that promote historical thinking and historical inquiry. Lindsay has worked on K-12 social studies curriculum writing teams in B.C. and Alberta over the last five years, is on the Executive Board of the Historical Thinking Project, and organizes the annual Historical Thinking Summer Institute in partnership with Canada’s History.
Lindsay’s research focuses on various aspects of history and social studies education including curriculum design, assessment, historical thinking, historical consciousness, teacher education, inquiry, difficult history, and teaching and learning. He has published several journal articles and book chapters about historical thinking, historical inquiry, historical narratives, history teacher education, the ethical dimension of history, and assessment of historical thinking.
Several research studies and funded projects Lindsay has been a co-applicant and principal investigator on have received funding. Most recently, Lindsay was a co-investigator on the “Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future” project that was recently awarded a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership Grant (2019-2026). This grant will bring together various constituencies involved in history education including academic historians, history education scholars working in faculties of education, Indigenous scholars, graduate students and highly qualified personnel (HQP), museum educators, teachers, ministries of education, policy makers, and local, provincial and national history and heritage organizations to achieve the following goals and objectives:
1. Map the terrain of history education in K--12;
2. Ascertain to what extent history and social studies teaching helps students engage with the key issues or problems facing Canadian society today;
3. Identify and develop evidenced-based practices in history teaching, learning, assessment, and resource development, and evaluate their efficacy in providing powerful and engaging learning experiences for students, particularly in terms of building trans-systemic understanding across knowledge systems;
4. Cultivate communities of practice with pre and in-service teachers, that are grounded in theoretical and empirical research on history education pedagogy to promote engaged and critical historical thinking; and,
5. Using findings that emerge from the research, make evidence-based policy recommendations for history curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment through proactive connections with ministries of education, faculties of education, museum educators, Indigenous organizations and stakeholders, publishers, other curriculum developers, and practicing teachers.
J Scott Goble
Bio
Dr. Scott Goble is Associate Professor and Chair of Music Education at the University of British Columbia. Prior to his appointment at UBC in July 2000, he held faculty positions in music performance and music education at San Francisco State University, Boston University, and Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. He completed the Ph.D. in Music: Music Education at the University of Michigan in 1999, having previously earned a M.M. in Conducting at the University of Washington (1985) and a B.A. magna cum laude in Music Education at Seattle Pacific University (1979). He began his career as a choral and instrumental music teacher in public schools near Seattle, Washington.
Dr. Goble has authored journal articles and book chapters on music education philosophy and history, music cognition and semiotics, and music and media issues. He served as event coordinator for the MayDay Group of critical theorists in music education (2002-2008) (see http://www.maydaygroup.org/), and he is presently Co-Chair of the International Society for Music Education (ISME) Commission on Policy: Culture, Education, and Media (2006-2012) (see http://www.isme.org/).
At UBC, Dr. Goble teaches undergraduate courses in Choral Pedagogy, Curriculum and Instruction in Music in Secondary Schools, and Conducting and Rehearsal Techniques. On the graduate level, he teaches Theory and Principles of Music Education (History and Philosophy), Advanced Conducting and Rehearsal Techniques, Introduction to Research Methodologies, and special topics courses in his fields of research specialization. He also supervises work of M.Ed., M.A., and Ph.D. students.
In addition to his research and teaching, Scott Goble is a conductor of choirs and orchestras, performing in educational, professional, church, and community contexts throughout North America, and he often serves as a guest conductor and clinician. Choral ensembles under his leadership have won regional, national, and international awards.
https://edcp.educ.ubc.ca/community/feature/broadening-frame-music-education
Peter Gouzouasis
Bio
Bio
Peter Gouzouasis is a Professor of Music Education in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at The University of British Columbia. Dr. Gouzouasis is a lifelong learner of music and media, and considers himself a serious student of guitar and other fretted instruments with performance in jazz, North American folk, Celtic, and Greek music contexts.
Over the past 32 years, my work at UBC has evolved through three, connective strands: (1) teaching and learning in music (including digital media and technologies), (2) developing an understanding of learning in and through the Arts and general curriculum using Arts Based Educational Research methods and digital technologies, and (3) a relational-metatheoretical, developmental perspective – Relational Developmental Systems (RDS) – of lifelong learning. These strands, or themes, have shaped my current scholarship as distinctive, innovative, and expanding the methodological and pedagogical boundaries of the field of music education. For me, pedagogy is the art of both teaching and learning, informed by theory and praxis.
1) In 2007, I conducted a landmark, longitudinal study that examines factors in arts participation and academic achievement of British Columbia grade 12 students. The overall objective of this research is to learn about various factors, relationships and differences in academic, social and arts (music, visual art, drama & dance) achievement of all students across BC from 2001-2004. That research uses quantitative methods to analyse large data sets (n=60,000 per year) to determine the predictive relationships and differences – between academic achievement in language, mathematics, social studies and science – of students who achieve highly in and participate in arts programs and those who have no involvement with the arts in secondary school. The most recent population level study by Guhn, Emerson & Gouzouasis (2020) takes all of that work one step further. We find that students involved in extended music engagement (up to grade 12) do one full year better academically than non-music peers, particularly when engaged in instrumental music sustained over years of schooling. Also, music achievement predicts academic achievement in math, science and English (while controlling for gender, socioeconomic background, ethnicity, and prior achievement in numeracy and literacy in Grade 7). See https://summon.altmetric.com/details/62627951#score for details on the impact of this research and a link to a free, Open Access copy of the paper.
More recently, a number of papers that use autoethnography to describe music learning and teaching contexts have been published, are in press, and are in review as well as an exciting new, edited book (in press). You can access some of my work at Academia.edu (https://ubc.academia.edu/PeterGouzouasis) and Research Gate (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter-Gouzouasis).
2) While arts-based educational research has now a 25 year old form of inquiry, work from my masters’ thesis (completed in 1987) enabled me to write papers in this research form as early as 1995. My interest in Marshall McLuhan’s notions of media coincides with five years as the music programming director of what became the most listened to American Public Radio (APR) jazz radio station in North America (JAZZ90/WRTI) in the Department of Radio, Television, & Film at Temple University. That knowledge provided me with practical insights to the inner workings of the radio and records industry that are documented in my publications (1995, 1996, 2000, 2005, 2011). However, one of the problems faced by arts educators is in the dilemma we face in reconciling practice with research. A number of my writings (2002, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2013) address the struggles of “musician performer as researcher” and provides a rationale for the consideration of artist researchers. Other focuses in arts-based educational research are rooted in the perspectives as the arts as technè, foundational to the content of all forms of new digital media, and historical-sociological issues surrounding the evolution of arts media over the past century (2000, 2001, 2003, 2004). Very few music educators are involved in arts-based educational research, but Peter guest edited a ground breaking issue of the ACT Journal in 2019 to plant the seeds for new research in the profession. Moreover, few research teams have been assembled across the arts to do work in this field. Independent and collaborative projects with colleagues at UBC in the acquisition of grant funding (SSHRC 2004, 2008, 2012, 2013; and UBC-Hampton), international conference presentations, and emerging publications now place UBC at the forefront of research in arts-based educational research.
3) The early strands of my work is rooted in research with young children and adolescents. I studied various aspects of music aptitude and achievement since graduate work in 1982. Under the tutelage of Edwin Gordon (from 1959-1990 the most published researcher in the field of music education), I emerged as one of the early researchers in North America who helped revive interest in the development of new teaching techniques and research strategies in early childhood music education.
This theme also involves traditional and emerging forms of media. Studies on the use of video conferencing technology in the delivery of music instruction for children were the first such published papers on the topic. They were based on the premise of the lack of interaction and lack of music instruction in passive television viewing habits of young children. That work revealed early insights into the efficacy of new forms of emerging media in the delivery of music instruction in distance education contexts.
The examination of multimedia constructions of children was fueled by my expertise in computer literacy through arts applications. Considering the mechanistic mainstream of “technology education,” it is a unique approach that acknowledges the contributions of artists and the arts in the development of hardware and content in all forms of traditional and contemporary media. My expertise was recognized internationally by leading software developers (e.g., Macromedia), universities in North America and Australia, practitioners, and small corporations. That early work prepared me to develop the first on-line interactive teaching materials using WebCT (“The Interactive Guitar”) as well as take a leading role in The University of British Columbia’s teacher education program through the formation of the Fine Arts and Media in Education (FAME) cohort. FAME was the first group of pre-service teachers in North America to work in a ubiquitous, 24/7 learning and teaching environment with wireless laptops in both university and public school classroom settings (2001, 2004 papers). It led to my involvement as a principal collaborator in a nation-wide SSHRC-INE grant to support that research program and the publication of leading edge research (2001 through 2006). One of the most fascinating aspects of this work is that my collaboration with North Vancouver School District 44 led me to develop one of the most progressive school plans in rich media applications in education in Canada.
Harry Hubball
Rita Irwin
Bio
Rita L. Irwin is a Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Art Education and Curriculum Studies and former Associate Dean of Teacher Education and Head, Department of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Rita received her formal education at the University of Lethbridge (B. Ed. and Diploma), the University of Victoria (M.Ed.) and the University of British Columbia (Ed.D.). Rita has been an educational leader for a number of provincial, national and international organizations including being President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, Canadian Society for Education through Art, International Society for Education through Art and Chair of the World Alliance for Arts Education.
Her research interests have spanned in-service art education, teacher education, socio-cultural issues, and curriculum practices across K-12 and informal learning settings. Rita publishes widely, exhibits her artworks, and has secured a range of research grants, including a number of Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada grants to support her work in Canada, as well as internationally in Australia, China, Japan, Kenya, Spain and Taiwan. She is best known for her work in a/r/tography that expands how we might imagine and conduct arts practice- based research methodologies through collaborative and community-based collectives. She is very proud of how collected works and edited volumes have been translated into Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish, with other works translated into Spanish, French, German, and among other languages. Several of her best known edited books are: Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki (co-edited with William F. Pinar), Provoking the Field: International Perspectives on Visual Arts Dissertations (co-edited with Anita Sinner and Jeff Adams), Storying the World: The Contributions of Carl Leggo on Language and Literacy (co-edited with Erica Hasebe-Ludt and Anita Sinner), Visually Provoking: Dissertation in Art Education (co-edited with Anita Sinner and Timo Jokela), and The Flaneur and Education Research (co-edited with Alexandra Lasczik Cutcher).
Rita is an artist, researcher, and teacher deeply committed to the arts, curriculum studies and education. In recognition of her many accomplishments and commitments, she has received a number of awards for her teaching, service and scholarship including the distinction of Distinguished Fellow of the National Art Education Association, of organization where she has also received the Elliot Eisner Lifetime Achievement Award and the National Higher Education Educator Award. In Canada, she has received the Ted T. Aoki Award for Distinguished Service in Canadian Curriculum Studies (CACS), the inaugural Canadian Art Teacher of the Year Award (CSEA), the Killam Award for Teaching Excellence, the Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring and the Murray Elliot Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teacher Education from The University of British Columbia, and the Herbert J. Coutts Award for Distinguished Service to the Canadian Society for the Study of Education. While her life in the education has offered her tremendous opportunities, she is especially proud of the many research creation projects she has pursued with her arts education colleagues and graduate students. It is in this space of living inquiry through the arts, curriculum studies and education that has sustained her very being.
Harper Keenan
Bio
Dr. Harper B. Keenan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, where he serves as the Robert Quartermain Assistant Professor of Gender & Sexuality in Education. Before arriving at UBC, Dr. Keenan was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, where he also earned his PhD in Curriculum and Teacher Education in 2019. Dr. Keenan completed his undergraduate studies at The New School in New York City, and earned a Master’s Degree from the Bank Street College of Education. He is a proud former New York City elementary school teacher.
Broadly, Dr. Keenan’s research analyzes how adults teach children to make sense of the social world. Much of his work investigates the management, or scripting, of children’s knowledge, and ways that educators and their students might work together to interrupt that process and imagine something different. Dr. Keenan is interested in those social issues that many adults find difficult to talk about with children – things like racism, gender, sexuality, and violence. He is perhaps best known for his 2017 article in the Harvard Educational Review, “Unscripting Curriculum: Toward a Critical Trans Pedagogy.”
Today, Dr. Keenan’s research projects center around two themes: 1.) the history and contemporary interaction of colonialism, racism, and gender in schools and 2.) the continued development of critical queer and trans pedagogies.
Dr. Keenan’s work has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals and popular press outlets, including the Harvard Educational Review, Teacher’s College Record, Curriculum Inquiry, Gender and Education, Theory & Research in Social Education, Slate, The Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, and multiple edited volumes.
Samia Khan
Bio
Samia Khan is an associate professor in science education with leadership experience in higher education. Prior to joining the faculty, she worked in the field of science as a scientist. Dr. Khan is a Canadian public school science teacher with a permanent teaching certificate and experience as a Department Head. With questions from practice, Dr. Khan pursued graduate education. Since at UBC, she has published in major international peer-reviewed journals, such as: Science Education; Science Teacher Education; Educational Technology Research and Development; Computers and Education, and Technology, Instruction, Cognition and Learning. She has also garnered substantial, continuous funding and been awarded the prestigious Prime Minister’s Award of Canada for Teaching Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Technology, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Award, a UBC Research Award, and the Canadian Society for the Study of Education’s New Scholar Award for her research. Dr. Khan has served on the editorial review boards of major journals in education and science education: the Curriculum Journal, the Journal of Science Teacher Education, and the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Dr. Khan recently delivered a keynote presentation at the International Science Educators and Teachers Conference (ISET, 2021). Dr. Khan's work was recently cited in Tech Trends as top research that has shaped the field of educational technology and teacher education (Bakir, 2016). She is the current Director of the Master of Educational Technology (MET) program at UBC with over 430 graduate students enrolled.
Dr. Khan works internationally. Dr. Khan currently leads international research projects in Rwanda, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Scotland and has vibrant partnerships in Germany. Dr. Khan has also been an Associate Dean of Research and a Chair of Education of a School of Education and Social Work in the UK. She has consulted with governments in the UK on teacher education and STEM education policy, including the Academic Reference Committee at the Scottish Parliament (2017-2020) and the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM.
Dr. Khan is actively researching the following research questions with graduate students:
- How should we teach STEM, including to people from diverse backgrounds or those who have learning needs?
- What are the impacts of innovative teacher education and professional development on science teachers?
- How can digital technologies contribute to profound changes in learning and teaching at all stages?
- How can education support sustainability?
Dr. Khan has consistently achieved national funding and welcomes future collaborations with graduate students who wish to do R and D on modeling, cognition, computer simulations, science teacher education, k-16 science education, online education, learning issues, sustainability, case study methodologies or knowledge mobilization.
Anna Kindler
Bio
Professor Anna M. Kindler re-joined the department in 2014 after serving two terms as Vice Provost and Associate Vice President Academic of UBC. She recently took on a new role in the Faculty as Senior Advisor International. In this capacity, she is responsible for strategic planning and oversight of academic international engagement, including collaborative and joint degree programs; professional development initiatives; academic leadership development programs and other international exchanges. She also serves as an elected Joint Faculties senator.
Dr. Kindler received an MA in Industrial/Graphic Design from the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, Poland, followed by a second MA and a doctorate in Art Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She joined the University of British Columbia in 1990. From 2001-2004 she took a leave of absence from UBC to serve as Dean of the School of Creative Arts, Sciences and Technology at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.
Throughout her 10-year tenure as Vice Provost and AVP Academic at UBC, Professor Kindler was responsible for a large and diverse portfolio, including oversight of offices and initiatives related to teaching and learning, Aboriginal strategy and international academic programs. She played a key role in initiating the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative, the new model of TA Training and the creation of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology through the merger and restructuring of related units. She provided oversight of the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund and led efforts to develop UBC Student Evaluations of Teaching Policy and guidelines for Peer Review of Teaching. She introduced a new process of budgetary reviews of academic programs and strengthened quality assurance processes, including reviews of academic units through her work within UBC and externally, as a representative of the research universities sector. She led the University’s effort to reinforce its commitment to teaching and learning and effectively championed the introduction of the Professor of Teaching tenure track focused on teaching and educational leadership. Her contributions helped UBC advance equity in Faculty salaries and CRC nominations. She was also instrumental in establishing and implementing at UBC the Academic Leadership Development Program which prepares and supports academic leaders in their roles and contributed to collective bargaining.
Dr. Kindler has drawn on these experiences in providing advice to governments and universities in Canada and abroad. Examples of her related engagements include consultancies to the British Columbia and Hong Kong governments on matters of curriculum reform and quality assurance and to the design and implementation of international leadership development programs. As a visiting Chair Professor at the National Taiwan Normal University, she provided strategic advice on academic policy development and implementation and continues to serve as Special Advisor to the NTNU President.
Professor Kindler has gained international recognition for her research on artistic development, social cognition of art, museum education, multiculturalism and cross-cultural research, and has published widely in these areas. Her work in teacher education has focused on case-based learning and creativity in the classroom. She has been a member of editorial boards and review panels of major international journals and research granting agencies and served two terms as Vice President of the Canadian Society for Education through Art. She is also a practicing artist exploring the medium of photography and has exhibited her work in North America, Europe and Asia. Professor Kindler’s contributions have been recognized through numerous awards, including the Sam Black Award for Education and Development in the Visual and Creative Arts; the Lowenfeld Award for Outstanding Achievement in Art Education; the International Ziegfeld Award for outstanding and internationally recognized contribution to art education through achievement in scholarly writing and research; the NAEA Distinguished Fellow Award and the University of Illinois School of Art and Design Distinguished Alumni Award.
Shannon Leddy
Bio
Shannon Leddy (Métis) is a Vancouver based teacher and writer whose practice focuses on decolonizing education and Indigenous education within teacher education. She holds degrees in Art History and Anthropology from the University of Saskatchewan (1994), an MA in Art History (1997), and a BEd (2005) from the University of British Columbia. Her PhD research at Simon Fraser University focused on inviting pre-service teachers into dialogue with contemporary Indigenous art as a mechanism of decolonizing education and in order to help them become adept at delivering Indigenous education without reproducing colonial stereotypes. During her time as a public school teacher with the Vancouver School Board, Shannon worked at several high schools as a teacher of Art, Social Studies and English. After a two-year secondment to work as a Faculty Associate in SFU’s Professional Development Program in teacher education, she returned to the VSB to undertake the coordination of an arts-based mini-school. She has also worked as an Instructor in SFU’s Faculty of Education teaching courses in pedagogical foundations and Aboriginal education. In 2013 she was awarded SFU’s Aboriginal Graduate Entrance Scholarship and a SSHRC Bombardier Scholarship in 2015.
Shannon’s personal philosophy of education is rooted in Freire’s model of inquiry as the praxis required to effect transformative change. Her practice as a teacher, and interest in transforming education, is situated somewhere between the discourses of indigenizing the academy and decolonizing education, two of the current and most prominent frames of reference for discussing Indigeneity and the impacts of colonization within curriculum. Shannon is committed to working at finding new and effective avenues for including Indigenous content within school curriculum in meaningful ways, and helping non-Indigenous teachers to learn from Indigenous people. She believes strongly in the power of dialogue to affect transformative change, and works to create learning environments in which each person is both student and learner.
Shannon serves as the Co-Director of the Institute for Environmental Learning, a UNESCO Regional Centre of Excellence. As the Institute moves into its next decade, she has come on board to help build relationships with Indigenous community members and Knowledge Keepers to renew the vision of land-as-teacher, to move away from ideas of land as commodity, as recreational, and consumable. Through their work, the Institute will continue to build relationships with land through environmental learning that is relevant, relational, reciprocal and respectful (Kirkness, 1991). Through her work with this group, she aims assist in the co-construction of new understandings of our relationship to land and place, rooted in holistic and sustainable practices that honour not only human life, but all life.
Shannon also serves on the Dean’s Task Force for Race Indigeneity and Social Justice, the mandate of which is to research the current environment for racialized and marginalized students staff and faculty, and to form a final report that includes recommendations for updating policy and procedure in our faculty to address systemic racism.
Karen V. Lee
Bio
Karen V. Lee, Ph.D. is Lecturer, Faculty Advisor, Area Coordinator, and co-founder of the Teaching Initiative for Music Educators cohort (TIME), at the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B. C., Canada. Her research interests include issues of memoir, autoethnography, poetic inquiry, performance ethnography, creative-relational inquiry, women’s life histories, writing practices, music/teacher education, and arts-based approaches to qualitative research. Her doctoral dissertation was a book of short stories titled Riffs of Change: Musicians Becoming Music Educators. She is teacher, writer, musician, teacher/music educator, and researcher. Currently, she teaches undergraduate and graduate students at the university in both traditional and online contexts alongside her academic and scholarly writing pursuits. In 2020, she received the Killam Teaching prize.
Lisa Loutzenheiser
Bio
Dr. Loutzenheiser’s research interests are centered in youth studies, qualitative methodologies, sociology and anthropology of education, anti-oppressive and critical race theories, curriculum policy and gender and queer theories.
Dr. Loutzenheiser’s research interests are focused on the educational experiences of marginalized youth and the teaching and learning directed for and about students labeled as such.
Her current research involves an ethnography of a leadership camp for LGBQ and TTI youth and their allies, and a policy analysis of “anti-homophobia” policy in British Columbia school boards.
She is also particularly interested in the ways theories of race, sexualities, and gender are useful across research projects, methods and methodologies.
Joaquin Muñoz
Bio
Dr. Joaquin Muñoz, PhD (he/him/his pronouns) obtained his Ph. D. from University of Arizona. He is an assistant professor of Indigenous Education at UBC. He grew up on the Pascua Yaqui Indian Reservation in Arizona, where he learned early on about the complicated issues of race, culture, history, and oppression. His research focuses on Indigenous Education and teacher education, with a focus on supporting teachers to be effective when working with diverse Indigenous populations, through cultural awareness, critical pedagogy practices, and culturally responsive pedagogy. Muñoz has spent the past decade developing skills for this work by using methods that include Indigenous Circle Work, the Theatre of the Oppressed, various forms of art, dialogue and literacy tools. He is currently a faculty member in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. He also consults with schools internationally, working on anti-racist education, cultural competency and culturally responsive approaches in the U.S., Germany, Israel and Mexico.
Stephen McGinley
Bio
Steve McGinley is a husband, father and full time Lecturer in the Health Outdoor and Physical Education (HOPE) program area in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Faculty of Education at The University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. He holds a Master’s degree from the University of British Columbia and his research focuses on Enacting Curricular and Pedagogical changes in Physical and Health Education. Steve is a trained K-12 PHE teacher and was previously a secondary PHE Department Head, PHe teacher and Assistant Athletic Director.
Steve’s passions lie in the promotion and advocate for Quality Physical and Health Education and the Physical Literacy movement. He currently teaches PHE K-12 Methods Courses and Teacher Inquiry in the Teacher Education Program and engages all learners and creates and sustains conditions for professional collaboration across education, sport, recreation and health. He also contributes to teaching in the HOPE Ed. Masters Cohort. He is a firm believer that when we open ourselves up to listen, share and collaborate, best practices emerge. Steve has received the UBC Faculty of Education Lecturer Teaching Prize in 2019 for the recognition of the significant contribution that he has made to the Faculty of Education programs. He enjoys coaching a plethora of youth sports including his daughters teams and is an advocate for sport development and the promotion of physical literacy. He has taken on a number of projects including a national focus group with teachers on the 60 Minute Kids Club Challenge, Building Physical Literacy Capacity within Schools, Sport, Recreation and Health sectors and Peer Leadership and Physical Literacy Promotion in Elementary School Children.
Most recently he has been seconded to the management team for a BC provincial health initiative that will support K-7 elementary school teachers in promoting physical activity and physical literacy throughout the school day.
Marina Milner-Bolotin
Bio
Dr. Marina Milner-Bolotin is a science educator within the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. She specializes in science (physics and mathematics) teaching and studies ways of using technology to promote student interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). For the last 25 years she has been teaching science and mathematics in Israel, US (Texas and New Jersey) and Canada. She has taught physics and mathematics to a wide range of students: from elementary gifted students to university undergraduates in science programs and future teachers. She also has led a number of professional development activities for science in-service and pre-service teachers and university faculty: from LoggerPro training workshops, to clicker and tablet training, and to physics content presentations at conferences and PD days. Since 1994, she has been engaged in science education research. Dr. Milner-Bolotin earned her M.Sc. in theoretical physics at Kharkov National University, Ukraine in 1991 and completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in science education at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001. At UT Austin, she investigated how project-based instruction in science courses for future elementary teachers affected their interest in science and their ability to do and teach science. Before joining UBC, she was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Ryerson University in Toronto. Dr. Milner-Bolotin was a member of the Executive Board of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT, 2008-2013) and was a President and a representative for BC Section of AAPT (www.bcapt.ca). At UBC, she was promoted to an Associate Professor in May of 2015. She is actively recruiting graduate students. To learn more about Dr. Milner-Bolotin, visit her research web site at: http://blogs.ubc.ca/mmilner/ .
Samson Nashon
Bio
Professor Samson Nashon is the Head of the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC. Throughout his more than 19 year tenure at UBC he has established multiple and extensive working relationships with scholars and universities world-wide. His scholarship and administrative leadership spans multiple faculties and bodies within UBC and across numerous units within the Faculty of Education. He is an active member of the African Awareness Initiative (AAI) Board; African Studies Minor Program (Faculty of Arts) Board; International STEM Association Advisory Board; Prof. Nashon is a science educator. His research focuses on ways of teaching and learning in diverse contexts. His area of specialization focuses on nature of learning environments and students’ alternative understandings that have roots in cultural backgrounds and curricula, and are accommodative of students with varying degrees of abilities. His major research initiatives have resulted in multiple large-scale collaborations including: the Metacognition and reflective inquiry (MRI); East African Students’ ways of knowing (EASWOK); The status of Physics 12 in BC; The nature of analogies Kenyan physics teachers use, and Students’ access to senior science and mathematics courses in rural BC; Living, learning and teaching in the Dadaab (LLTD) Refugee Camp.
Prof. Nashon’s experience as a former high school teacher of physics and mathematics, teacher educator, and mentor of in excess of 34 PhD and 50 Masters students in the capacity of principal supervisor, co-supervisor or committee member. His extensive experience as an editor of curriculum materials related to science and mathematics, provides him with a lens through which he examines the link between theory and practice in the classroom, the nature of science curricula, how the curricula material is taught, and the role that students’ preconceptions play in the teaching and learning of such material. He previously taught a physics methods course to preservice teachers, Foundations Research Methods, Action Research Methods, and several science education and other advanced doctoral level graduate courses.
Prof. Nashon’s research focuses broadly on ways of teaching and learning science, and is characterized by three main emphases.
- Understanding the nature of science curriculum and instruction and development of theoretical and pedagogical models to improve the practice of science teaching: Understanding the nature of science curriculum and instruction was the focus of his Diploma in Educational Studies (DES), MEd, and EdD dissertation topics. In both the DES and MEd theses, HE explored questions about and proffered suggestions regarding the nature of science offered and the associated pedagogy in Kenyan high schools. HIS EdD dissertation also raised questions about the viability of the widely used anthropomorphic analogies in Kenyan high school science instruction. Further, the doctoral work formed the foundation for part of his research program here at UBC, which focuses on the development of theoretical and pedagogical models to improve the practice of science teaching, including “Working with Analogies” (WWA) published in OISE Papers for STSE Education (Nashon, 2000), Canadian Journal of Science Mathematics and Technology Education (Nashon, 2004), and Research In Science Education (Nashon, 2004). Prof. Nashon has also developed “School Physics Instructional Model” (SPIM) based on insights from the study, High school science in BC: The status of physics 12 (Nashon, 2007), which highlights the issues of instruction and teacher beliefs as among the key factors influencing student subject choice.
- Understanding the science learner: Prof. Nashon investigates the nature and character of the conceptions of science that learners hold from a phenomenological perspective. Also, he elucidates the effect of learners’ prior knowledge and experience, socio–cultural background and learning contexts on their individual and group learning through research projects such as, The Nature of Metaphorical, Analogical and Simile–like Expressions for HIV/AIDS: A case study of Ugandan Biology Classrooms, which revealed how Ugandan students’ preconceived understandings of HIV/AIDS affect classroom instruction about the science of HIV/AIDS. The study served as a motivation for a 2006 – 2010 SSHRC funded study, East African Students’ Ways of Knowing in Science Discourses, which aimed to investigate and elucidate EA students’ ways of understanding the world. Within this realm of research, a 2010-2015 SSHRC funded study that investigated the effect of students’ learning on teachers’ teaching in East Africa was developed with very interesting insights being generated and disseminated through various academic and professional media or forums.
- Understanding the deep meta–level mechanisms of science learning: This line of research focuses on identifying, describing, and understanding the underlying higher–order learning processes or agents that govern knowledge construction including: (a) Metacognition, as is the case in the SSHRC funded multi–national research collaborative study, Metacognition and Reflective Inquiry (MRI): Learning Across Contexts, which provided theoretical insights into how students engage metacognition in novel problem solving situations. The study led to the inclusion of a field trip to an amusement park in our physics methods course for pre–service teachers here at UBC with the intent of fostering appreciations of the richness of this context in providing novel learning opportunities for students. As an offshoot, “BC Brightest Minds Competition”, with Prof. Nashon as one of the two lead facilitators and sponsored by Pacific National Exhibition (PNE), was inaugurated in 2006 as an annual event for several years before funding ended. (b) Ways of knowing through one’s position/view on the nature of science and cultural lens(es), such as the 2006–2010 SSHRC funded research project, East African Students’ Ways of Knowing in Science Discourses on which Prof. Nashon was principal investigator. It examined East African students’ Ways of Knowing in science through case studies of selected Kenyan schools. The study concluded that students’ Ways of Knowing are shaped by their socio–cultural backgrounds, which in turn translate into their worldviews and perceptions of science. The study, which commenced in September 2006, investigated East African students’ Ways of Knowing in the context of science curriculum implemented through a program that integrated analysis of Jua Kali (an informal sector defined by UNESCO as “small–scale manufacturing and technology–based services”) production activities with conventional classroom science. Building on findings from this study another SSHRC funded study (2010 – 2015), Teacher Pedagogy and School Culture: The Effect of Student Learning on Science Teachers’ Teaching and Culture in East Africa on which Prof. Nashon was also the principal investigator, was framed to investigate the transformations in East African science teachers’ teaching culture, their pedagogies, and collective school culture as they navigate through and experience their students’ learning mediated through science curricular reforms. The 2006–2010 SSHRC funded study revealed the importance of the effect of students’ learning experiences on teachers’ teaching culture, their pedagogies, and school culture. Understanding this effect has been critical to helping Kenyan science teachers design curricular and pedagogical models to enhance science teaching through local contexts. Moreover, student learning and performance are very important motives behind any curricular or pedagogical reform. Thus, the study provided new insights into teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) in cultural contexts beyond Western perspectives.
In all, the studies Prof. Nashon conducts are largely framed around the three emphases. His objective is to share research findings with others through forums such as collaborative course development and implementation, mentorship programs for graduate students, national and international conferences, and print publications.
Cynthia Nicol
Bio
Cynthia Nicol is a Professor in the Faculty of Education and holds the David F. Robitaille Professorship in Mathematics and Science Education. She lived and taught on Haida Gwaii in B.C.’s Pacific Northwest coast before moving to Vancouver to pursue her doctoral studies. With teachers and communities, she explores new ways of making mathematics responsive to all learners by connecting Indigenous community, culture, and mathematics; emphasizing place and community-based education; re-imagining mathematics education through social and ecological justice issues; and challenging human-centric conceptions of place and STEM education. A current project involves working with teachers, community members, and Elders to explore the nature of culturally responsive pedagogies (CRP)-approaches to teaching that build upon students’ cultural and community experiences and histories. Another project includes working with teachers in the Dadaab refugee camp, Northeast Kenya, to deepen understanding of what it means to live, learn and teach in the largest protracted refugee camp in the world.
Cynthia is committed to research and community engagement that challenges colonial logics in mathematics and teacher education through practices that are grounded in students’ community and cultural experiences. She is a co-editor of multiple books including: Tluuwaay ‘Waadluxan: Mathematical Adventures (co-edited with Joanne Yovanovich, 2011) a collaboration between teachers and community members, where Indigenous Elders’ stories form the inspiration for mathematical adventures; and Living Culturally Responsive Mathematics Education with/in Indigenous Communities (co-edited with Jo-ann Archibald Q’um Q’um Xiiem, Florence Glanfield, and the late A.J. Sandy Dawson, 2020) that examines practices of CRP within Indigenous communities from international perspectives.
Sofia Noori
Bio
Dr. Sofia Noori is an Assistant Professor at UBC Faculty of Education, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. Dr. Noori received her PhD from York University’s Department of Social and Political Thought. She also holds degrees from University of Toronto (Hons. Human Biology), University of Windsor (B. Education) and OISE (M. Social Justice Education). Dr Noori’s research and writing focuses on young refugees who move to Canada and work to establish a stable sense of self and belonging. Her research and writing provide readers with a better understanding of how refugee youth navigate various systems including, but not limited to schooling, health and healing, and procedures to citizenship in the aftermath of living in civil unrest, war, migration, transitory states, refugee camps, and resettlement. Her work is informed by developmental psychology and postcolonial theory. Dr Noori is closely following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on refugees worldwide and writing on the issue as it pertains to youth in Canada, currently. Her most recently co-edited volume, Partisan Universalism looks at the scholarly work, influence and pedagogical reach of African Canadian Philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu. Dr Noori is also an award-winning educator, who is passionate about teaching and supporting her students. She has taught classes ranging from kindergarten up to high school, college, undergraduates, and professional teaching training courses. She is a strong advocate for student mental health and inclusivity and bravely tackles difficult knowledges in her student-centered classrooms.
Dónal O'Donoghue
Bio
Dr. Dónal O’Donoghue is Professor (Art Education) in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy and a Faculty Member of Green College. His research and scholarship focuses on contemporary art, specifically its pedagogical nature and its capacity to function as a distinct mode of scholarly inquiry and research. Informed by contemporary art theory, continental philosophy and the study of art making and art interpretation, his work contributes most significantly to two fields: art-research and art education. His major contributions to both fields are in four areas: (a) studying how art-research operates in gender research and, in particular, what it reveals about life in boys’ schools, and the gendering practices that occur there; (b) exploring how art practices and forms (and the interpretation of them) suggest alternative inquiry and representational approaches for research conducted in fields such as history education, sociology, visual sociology, visual research, gender research and gender studies; (c) studying contemporary art and curatorial practices and genres (most especially ‘the turn to experience’ and ‘the turn to education’) for their implications for K-12 Art Education theory and practice; (d) preparing artists to become art-researchers and educators, and studying how artists are educated at the tertiary level.
Dr. O’Donoghue has published widely in the areas of art, education, art-led research, and masculinities and has received a number of awards for his scholarship including the 2010 Manuel Barkan Memorial Award from the National Art Education Association (United States) and the 2014 Canadian Art Educator of the Year (Research Impact) from the Canadian Society for Education through Art.
Dr. O’Donoghue is a founding Chair (with Dr. Freedman) of The Art Education Research Institute (AERI) and currently serves as Chair of The Council for Policy Studies Art Education (CPSAE). Previously, he served as Editor of The Canadian Review of Art Education, Honorary Secretary of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland, Secretary of the Arts-Based Educational Research SIG of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and member of The International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) Executive Board, The Canadian Society for Education Through Art (CSEA) Executive Committee, and Studies in Art Education Editorial Board.
LeAnne Petherick
Bio
I grew up on a small family farm in southern Ontario and I have had the privilege of studying and working at various universities across Canada. Prior to joining the University of British Columbia, I had tenure-track positions at the University of Manitoba and Memorial University of Newfoundland. At both universities, I worked in the multi-disciplinary Faculty of Kinesiology, which broadly speaking is inclusive of degree programs in Kinesiology, Physical Education and Recreation Management. Joining the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy Studies in the Faculty of Education is tremendously exciting for me as it affords me the opportunity to merge my scholarly passions, bringing a critical pedagogical approach to health and human movement.
My research uses a feminist post-structural lens to critically examine curriculum policy, pedagogy and lived experience. In particular, my research is motivated by a social justice approach to health and movement pedagogies, as I am firmly committed to the transformative potential of movement.
In an effort to move towards social justice possibilities, I challenge traditional methods of teaching-learning in health and physical education, particularly focusing on the social and cultural relevance of learning in and through the moving body. More recently, my interest in health education and health-related research centers around a Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) funded project that examines the discourses surrounding the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. I am also on a small project that is exploring issues of surveillance and power in school health initiatives.
Additionally, I am a co-applicant on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project that is examining Indigenous masculinities and physical cultures in Fisher River Cree Nation (Manitoba).
Stephen Petrina
Bio
Stephen Petrina is a Professor (MTSE) in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in Media and Technology Studies (MTS), Science and Technology Studies (STS), Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education (STEM), Design and Technology Education (D&T), Critical University Studies, and of course Curriculum Studies. He is a Fellow in the Institute for Public Education BC.
With extensive expertise in problems of academic labour, including academic freedom, Stephen served on the Executive of the Faculty Association of UBC for four years and is currently a Candidate for Vice President. Most recently, with E. Wayne Ross, Stephen published a trenchant analysis of anti-Black racism at UBC.
At this time (March 2022), he is focusing on philosophy of media & technology for children & youth. In 2021, Dr. Paula MacDowell and I were awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant, "PMT4CY" @ $194, 031 to proceed with this profound research. We are benefitting from the advanced insights of graduate students, including Vicente Regis. Stephen's expertise also includes the philosophy of research, as opposed to methodology.
For fifteen years, Stephen and an amazing team of colleagues & graduate researchers have been focusing on how we learn media & technology across the lifespan. HWL focuses especially on how children, youth, and adults innovate in classrooms, labs, workshops, makerspaces, virtual spaces, home spaces, and workplaces. As a team of environmental activists, we also research learning by ecodesign and natural spaces.
Stephen has recently published in the International Journal of Game-Based Learning, Journal of Military History, Vitae Scholasticae: The Journal of Educational Biography, European Journal of STEM Education, Hacking Education in a Digital Age, Critique in Design and Technology Education, and British Journal of Educational Technology. Recent chapters have been published in Pedagogy for Technology Education, the Handbook of Mobile Teaching and Learning, and the Handbook of Research on Teaching with Virtual Environments and AI.
Awarded $2.6m in competitive research grants and contracts to date, three current grants are indicative of funding awards, most of which support graduate research assistants and underwrite infrastructure: (SSHRC IG, "PMT4CY" @ $194, 031; SSHRC IG, “HWL” @ $371,406; SSHRC IDG, “Critique of M&T” @ $40,033; Mitacs, “Case Study Scenarios and Videos for Intercultural Competence Acquisition” @ $165,000). Stephen is a member of the Cool Tools cluster for climate change education ($1m+).
He has authored or co-authored 150+ publications, including 45 Refereed articles and 46 chapters and proceedings.
Stephen has supervised 140 graduate students to completion, including 8 Ph.D. students, and is current Supervisor and Committee Member for 10 doctoral and masters students. He has also served as Supervisor of 7 Postdoctoral students and mentor to a range of faculty members. Students within and graduating from the Media & Technology Studies program excel in scholarly productivity and career transitions.
Courses include philosophy of media and technology, video ethnography, media studies, design-based learning, doctoral seminars, and research methodologies.
Anne Phelan
Bio
Anne Phelan is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, and co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Teacher Education, at the University of British Columbia. She is also Honorary Professor in the Department of Policy and Leadership at the Education University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on the intellectual and political freedom of K-12 teachers and on the creation of teacher education programs and policies that support that end. Her work has explored (a) the relationship between language, subjectivity, and practice; and (b) the dynamic of judgment and responsibility; and (c) the paradoxes of autonomy (creativity and resistance) in teacher education and in professional life. Her current SSHRC-funded research, with Dr. Melanie Janzen (University of Manitoba), examines the anxiety of obligation in teaching and its relationship to teacher attrition.
William Pinar
Bio
Born in Huntington, West Virginia in 1947, William Pinar took his B.S. in Education at The Ohio State University, graduating in 1969. He taught English at the Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington, Long Island, New York from 1969-1971, returning to Ohio State to finish his M.A. in 1970 and the Ph.D. in 1972. He taught at the University of Rochester from 1972 until 1985, when he moved to Louisiana State University (LSU), where he taught until 2005, when he accepted a Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. After two terms as the Canada Research Chair in curriculum studies, in 2019 Pinar was named the Tetsuo Aoki Professor in curriculum studies.
Pinar has also served as the St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed Professor at LSU, the Frank Talbott Professor at the University of Virginia, and the A. Lindsay O'Connor Professor of American Institutions at Colgate University. He has lectured widely, including at Harvard University, McGill University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as the Universities of Chicago, Helsinski, Oslo, Tokyo, and Vienna. The former President of the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies and the founder of its U.S. affiliate, the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, in 2000 Pinar received the LSU Distinguished Faculty Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Educational Research Association; in 2004 he received an American Educational Association Outstanding Book Award for What is Curriculum Theory?, the third edition of which was published in 2019 by Routledge.
Intellectual bio
Faculties of education often emphasize research on teaching and learning, devising “best practices” of “effective” teaching in order to “facilitate” student learning, often assessed by standardized tests. I am interested in each of these but – as a curriculum theorist - I am less interested in how teachers teach than in what they teach, what students learn (and what they don’t), the impact of standardized assessment on teaching and learning. “What knowledge is of most worth?”: that’s the key curriculum question.
These days that question is often answered in exclusively economic terms - what can students study to ensure a good job upon graduation? - but it is also a political question, evident for example in certain U.S. school districts’ efforts to block the teaching of evolution, or skew the study of slavery. As those controversies make clear, the curriculum question is also an ethical question: what should students study to encourage them to become caring cosmopolitan citizens of their communities and countries and, as climate change requires, of the planet?
The great Canadian educator George Grant underlined the spiritual character of curriculum, insisting we ask why we are alive as well as how should we live, the two questions for him intertwined. For Grant, economics is a subset of ethics. Relegating curriculum to a means – to a good job or even to improve society – devalues it. For him study is an end in itself: a spiritual as well as academic practice.
George Grant was concerned about our relationship to technology, worried we would come to worship it, mesmerized by its many benefits, understating its many dangers, among them pollution, surveillance, the mass casualties of increasingly technological warfare. He predicted technology would produce homogenous societies worldwide, what we now understand as globalization (and the various often violent reactions to it). In that regard, the future of Quebec concerned Grant, but the future of Aboriginal peoples is also affirmed in his commitment to preserve what he termed particularity. Grant was quite critical of the United States, a country (he thought) that would sacrifice anything in the way of profits, now evident in efforts by computer companies to force secondary schools to replace the study of foreign languages with courses in coding.
My book on Grant follows others, each providing specific answers to the curriculum question: what knowledge is of most worth? In a book on racial politics and violence in America I juxtaposed lynching and interracial prison rape to show that racial politics and violence were – are - often expressed through the prism of “gender.” My decades-long interest in gender (organized by what gets called queer theory) has acknowledged LBGTQ2 issues, and not only as a series of precious particularities (as Grant might say) but also in play in apparently non-gendered domains, like curriculum reform. In America’s first national curriculum reform – undertaken by the Kennedy Administration in the early 1960s – gender animated affirmations of academic “rigour,” as the Kennedys’ embrace of sport – specifically American-style football – enacted (as John and Robert Kennedy saw it) the masculine toughness needed to fight the Cold War.
Finally, I have devoted years of study to curriculum studies itself, as a field, explicating its intellectual histories and present circumstances, especially in the U.S. but also in Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. (There is a book on each.) Now I am undertaking a study of curriculum studies in Canada, interested in showing how the field here has responded to the various challenges posed to it, prominent among them today truth and reconciliation. Throughout each of these projects, the curriculum question reverberates: what knowledge is of most worth?
Kerry Renwick
Bio
Dr Kerry Renwick has teaching experience in Australian secondary schools in the government, catholic and independent systems in the State of Victoria, Australia; in vocational education and training; and higher education. Kerry also has experience working in public health nutrition with Statewide responsibility for nutrition education in P-12 schools. Within her role at Victoria University, Kerry successfully introduced Home Economics as a secondary specialisation for pre-service teachers. She has undertaken leadership in teacher professional associations including roles President, Treasurer and Editor of journals. Kerry is an associate editor for the International Journal of Home Economics and the Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences, and held the position of Vice President, Pacific Region, for the International Federation of Home Economics (IFHE) 2018 – 2022. She is certified as an International Professional Home Economist by IFHE.
In addition to her research work around health literacy; food literacy; teacher education; and teachers’ professional practice Kerry is also an Associate Member of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm: http://ubcfarm.ubc.ca/about/people/ .
E Wayne Ross
Bio
Dr. Ross is interested in the influence of social and institutional contexts on teachers’ practice as well as the role of curriculum and teaching in building a democratic society in the face of antidemocratic impulses of greed, individualism, and intolerance.
In recent years he has examined the influence of the educational standards and high-stakes testing movements on curriculum and teaching. His most recent research investigates the surveillance-based and spectacular conditions of postmodern schools and society in an effort to develop both a radical critique of the “disciplinary gaze” and a means by which teachers, students, and other stakeholders might resist its various conformative, anti-democratic, anti-collective, and oppressive potentialities.
Dr. Ross is co-founder and co-director, with Sandra Mathison and Stephen Petrina, of the Institute for Critical Education Studies and co-edits the Institute’s flagship, open access journals Critical Education and Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.
He also co-edits Cultural Logic , which has been on-line since 1997, and is an open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal publishing essays, interviews, poetry, and reviews by writers working within the Marxist tradition.
Dr. Ross has written extensively for newspapers and magazines on education and social issues and has contributed to numerous radio and television outlets. His education activism includes playing a key role in the creation of The Rouge Forum, a group of educators, parents, and students seeking a democratic society through dialogue and direct action. The Rouge Forum brings together education activists in a variety of projects and regularly sponsors regional and national conferences.
A former secondary social studies (Grades 8 to 12) and day care teacher in North Carolina and Georgia, Dr. Ross was Distinguished University Scholar and Chair of the Department of Teaching at the University of Louisville prior to his arrival at UBC in 2004. He has also taught at the State University of New York at Albany and Binghamton University, SUNY.
Find Dr. Ross on the interwebs:
Institute for Critical Education Studies
Where the Blog Has No Name
Workplace Blog
Dr. Leyton Schnellert
Bio
Dr. Leyton Schnellert is an Associate Professor in UBC’s Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy and Eleanor Rix Professor of Rural Teacher Education. His scholarship attends to how teachers and teaching and learners and learning can mindfully embrace student diversity and inclusive education. Dr. Schnellert is the Pedagogy and Participation research cluster lead in UBC's Institute for Community Engaged Research (ICER) and co-chair of BC’s Rural Education Advisory. His community-based collaborative work contributes a counterargument to top-down approaches that operate from deficit models, instead drawing from communities’ funds of knowledge to build participatory, place-conscious, and culturally sustaining practices. Dr. Schnellert has been a middle and secondary school classroom teacher and a learning resource teacher K-12. His books, films, and research articles are widely referenced in local, national, and international contexts.
Sandra Scott
Bio
Before joining UBC I was a classroom teacher and also worked as a marine educator and park naturalist. These experiences prompted me to pursue a MA and PhD in Science and Environmental Education. I teach elementary science methods as well as courses in communications, environmental learning, and research methods. I enjoy working with Teacher Candidates and undergraduate science students in my role as Faculty Advisor with the Teacher Education Office. My research focuses on elementary science, environmental education, and teacher education. I view myself as a naturalist, scientist, and educator of, for, and in the environment; I am a passionate advocate for learning experiences that nurture our sense of wonder for the human and more than human world.
I am dedicated to science and environmental education, and elementary science is my home. My goal is for students to become confident, knowledgeable, and excited about teaching science. The Having of Wonderful Ideas in both theory and practice is linked through inquiry, doing, collaborating, wondering, reflecting, remembering, and taking action. My dialogical approach emphasizes hands on direct experiences, long-term engagement, and in-depth observation, conversation, and reflection. My course curricula and pedagogies are informed by scholarly and professional literature exploring inquiry, slow pedagogy, ethical caring, constructivism, Storywork, Indigenous ways and decolonizing perspectives, and place as EcoPedagogy.
Michelle Tan
Bio
I am a teacher and science educator. My teaching and research interests include teacher education, collaborative teacher inquiry and reflective practice, STEM, Science Education, and Outdoor Education and learning. My research focuses on promoting learning that is meaningful and engaging for learners. This includes exploring how students learn through a variety of methods, such as place-based learning, problem-based learning, conceptual learning, through variation, and outdoors. I pay special attention to how students engage with society and confront local community issues that are culturally responsive and informed by disciplinary knowledge and methods. I am interested in how classroom learning can cultivate students’ impetus for social action; in the context of science education, I engage with how teachers and students learn to tackle socioscientific and sociopolitical issues. My research focuses on finding the spaces for students to develop awareness and confront of issues of marginalization faced by minority groups within our society.
I take special interest in how teachers are prepared and professionally developed. To this end, my research goals include encouraging teachers to design innovative pedagogical tools to support student learning. I am interested in how different professional development approaches, such as action research, lesson study, learning study, and professional learning communities can support teachers in their teaching instruction. In this vein, I am interested in how educational reforms and new curriculum could be catalysts for teacher change. I also take interest in teachers' beliefs about learning and their teaching practices. I am interested in how teachers can be empowered to become curriculum makers, teacher scholars and reflective practitioners. I explore this area of my research at the classroom, school and policy levels.
Currently, I have ongoing research projects that explore how teachers’ integration of educational theories to teaching practice could enrich student learning. The theories include neuroscience perspectives (brain-based learning), variation theory, as well as place-based perspectives. I also engage in a study that explores how media and technology can be utilized to promote community-based learning. Specifically, the study focuses on how students produce short films to deepen their own learning and engage with community. Another part of my work examines the practices of turnaround teachers and low-ability learners. I theorize about the teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and strategies, and explore the ways by which they relate, encourage, and increase agency for students who have had little success academically.
Before joining UBC, I was a research fellow at the National Institute of Education in Singapore, and taught at the graduate level and in school leadership programmes. Coupled with my experiences as a plant biology major, former high school teacher of biology, and designer and reviewer of science curriculum materials, these experiences provide the platform by which I theorize and explore the phenomena of teaching and learning.
Andrea Webb
Bio
Dr. Webb spent a decade as a classroom teacher and department head before returning to higher education as a teacher educator. Her research interests lie in teaching and learning in higher education and she is involved in research projects related to Threshold Concepts, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and Social Studies Teacher Education. Currently, Andrea is part of a multinational SSHRC-funded project, Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education <http://holocaustgraphicnovels.org/>