RAN chairs since 2012

I have been an Associate Professor for the Teacher Education department at UFV for almost ten years. There is no better group of people to work with than aspiring teachers!

A varied and interesting career path has brought me to this place. After completing a BFA in Theatre (Acting) at UVIC, I moved to New York City to pursue a career in musical theatre. After performing in a number of shows in and around New York (No, nothing big!) I decided to travel and found my way to Japan where I worked as an actress, a commercial print model, and an English teacher.

It was my work as an English teacher that helped me to realize that I could combine my two passions (education and theatre) into one by becoming a high school drama teacher. Two years later I moved back to Canada, where I completed a BEd at UBC and began teaching high school in Burnaby school district.

During the next few years, I completed both a MEd and a PhD at SFU. In my PhD dissertation, Appreciating Autism: Stories of my Son, I used autoethnography as my research methodology to complete an appreciative inquiry into autism, writing about my experiences of raising a child with high-functioning autism. While completing my doctoral work, I left my school district and began working in the Faculty of Education at SFU, primarily within Professional Programs (Teacher Education) as a Faculty Associate and later as a Program Coordinator. A highlight of my time at SFU included working in support of the International Teacher Education module (based in Dharamsala, India) where SFU teacher candidates are paired with Tibetan-in-exile teachers for a semester of learning.

As part of my work in Teacher Education in BC, I sit on the BC Teachers’ Council as the Association of BC Deans of Education (ABCDE) representative.

I am a certified teacher with the BC Teacher Regulation Branch, an active member in three affiliate associations of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, and a member of the American Educational Research Association.

I currently teach courses in Secondary Language Arts, Elementary Fine Arts, Secondary Arts-based Education Methods, Indigenous Education, Diversity Education, and Reflective Practice.

My curricular interests include the following: teacher education, language/literacy education, arts-based education, social justice and anti-racist education, and Indigenous education. I am particularly interested in how teacher candidates construct their identities, and how to support them as they go about decolonizing and Indigenizing their practice.