Dr. Susan Barber

In June 2022, Dr. Barber published two short stories in Flying Kites: Narratives of Prison Literacy in Essays and Art (NY: DIO Publishers) where “the voices of the incarcerated soar across the firmament, bearing witness to the grave injustices of the prison industrial complex…It is a book that needs to make its way into the hands of educators everywhere as a testament to the human spirit and the triumph of self and social transformation towards a compassionate and justice-seeking greater good” (Peter McLaren, advance praise). Dr. Barber’s first story, “Reading the Road Ahead,” is an excerpt from the novel at the centre of her PhD thesis, while the second story, “The Nepali Alphabet,” focuses on the experiences of women: some guilty of crimes, others imprisoned due to mental illness, who along with their small children somehow draw on resilience and continue to believe in hope and goodness.

Dr. Sean Chorney

Creating new mathematics is always exciting. Last month, the International Journal Of Mathematical Education In Science & Technology published my paper "Making Electoral Districts Count: A Mathematical Exploration” in their section “Classroom Notes,” where educators describe classroom activities (mathematical in this case) that are noteworthy or led to some interesting results. Following on my research into mathematizing social issues, I have recently engaged my students in thinking about the mathematics of gerrymandering. Specifically, my students and I have investigated the minimum number of people needed to elect a majority, which sometimes happens in our voting system. For example, in October 2021, while the Conservatives received more votes in our federal election than the Liberals, the Liberals nonetheless were able to form a minority government. In my classes I use a simple square grid, such as 4 by 4 or 9 by 9, and we think about how we can configure the cells such that the minimum number can win an overall district majority. In brief, the answers we came up with formed a sequence that is now hosted on the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (https://oeis.org/A341319).

Dr. Brenda Davis

On May 17 and 19, 2022, Dr. Davis made two presentations at Congress 2022 / Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The first was for the Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE), entitled “Reconciliation: Learning From our Past, Navigating the Present, and ‘paddling forward’: Weaving Indigenous Law and Legal Understanding into the Canadian Curriculum.” This presentation proposed an educational approach to further the TRC Call to Action #62. The second presentation, “Ed-Tech & On-line Privacy: Are Your Students Tech-Savvy or Click Bait?” for the Canadian Association of Teacher Education (CATE), examined the importance of technology and social media in students’ lives, the rapid shift to online learning in the pandemic, and the challenge of becoming informed digital citizens.

Dr. Joel Heng Hartse

From February to June 2022, I was a visiting scholar in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University at Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where my activities included giving a presentation about my SSHRC-funded study of international EAL undergraduate students' use of paid private academic support services (PASS). The PASS study launched in May, and data collection and analysis will continue throughout the fall. More information is available at www.pass-study.ca. In June, I was one of twelve writers invited to take part in one of the Collegeville Institute's summer writing workshops at St. John’s University in Minnesota. I am writing this before attending, but I hope I got some good work done.

Dr. Cher Hill

Dr. Hill published several article this spring, including “Seeking Serendipity: Teacher Educators as Adaptive experts during COVID” (with Paula Rosehart, Awneet Sivia, Sarine Sadhra, and Janice St. Helene in the Journal of Education for Teaching) and “Working in a ‘Community Engaged’ University During an Era of Reconciliation” (with Margaret MacDonald in The Australian Educational Researcher). She was privileged to present at AERA and ICQI with colleagues Vicki Kelly, Kau’i Keliipio, Awneet Sivia, and Paula Rosehart on their work to re-envision self-study research methodologies through an Indigenous lens.

Dr. Gillian Judson

In April, Dr. Judson attended the AERA conference in San Diego. She shared her research on the role of imagination in equity-focused leadership and co-presented on research methods pedagogy (with Dr. Rebecca Cox and Dr. Meaghan Dougherty). While at AERA, she received the Research to Practice Award from the Research Use SIG for her work applying Imaginative Ecological Education theory through the Walking Curriculum. In May, Dr. Judson published a resource called Walking Forward: Learning from Place, co-authored with Indigenous educator Heidi Wood from the Network of Inquiry and Indigenous Education (NOIIE). Walking Forward reframes walking practices through an Indigenous lens and includes the place-based inquiries of 14 educators who employed imaginative ecological education practices to support students’ learning about the First Peoples Principles of Learning.

Dr. Kristiina Kumpulainen

I would like to acknowledge some wonderful opportunities I have been recently blessed with. First, I was invited to give a keynote at the Developing Minds 2022 conference on the theme of “Critical Thinking and Lived Experience: Education in the Information Age.” Second, I had the pleasure of collaborating with doctoral student Quincy Wang from the ETLD program. Not only has our book chapter— “Augmented Reality and Museum Education: Rethinking Interactive Learning Experiences in Museums”—been accepted for publication, but our recent conference presentation entitled “Augmented Reality Affording Immersive Learning Experiences in Museum Education” (Wang and Kumpulainen) was awarded the Immersive Learning Pedagogy Award at the iLRN2022 International Conference.

Wang, Q., Kumpulainen, K., & MacDowell, P. (2022, in press). Augmented reality and museum education: Rethinking interactive learning experiences in museums. In A. Sinner & T. Osler (Eds.), Ecologies of practice: Canadian perspectives in museum education. Intellect.

Dr. Dan Laitsch

With John Malcolmson and Larry Kuehn, Dr. Laitsch published “Critical response to a short history of K-12 public school spending in British Columbia” (2022) in the Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy. The article takes issue with a claim that BC’s spending on K–12 education increased by 250 percent from 1970 to 2020. In April 2022, he and Doug McCall co-presented on “Health and Life Skills Education: Results of a Global Fact-Finding Survey and Document Review,” for International Views on Health and Well-Being in Education at The World Educational Research Association in San Diego, CA. Dr. Laitsch also serves as principal investigator for a project in support of the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership ($52,500), funded by a SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals Grant (April 2022–March 2025).

Dr. Angel M. Y. Lin

Dr. Angel M. Y. Lin has been recognized in a study published by Stanford University as among the top 2% of the world’s most-cited scientists and scholars. The Stanford ranking is based on bibliometric information (citations) in the Scopus database, which includes more than 180,000 researchers. Since September 2019, Dr. Lin’s TL-TS Research Channel on YouTube has organized over 30 research seminars featuring both seasoned and emergent scholars in applied linguistics and education from all over the world. The Research Channel has now over 1,000 subscribers and over 15,000 views.

Dr. Lin’s students have expressed appreciation for her substantial and sustained efforts to be a leader in our academic community. She frequently brings in noted scholars, arranges for seminars and other forms of scholarly engagement with these researchers, and serves as a model for how a Canada Research Chair should be responsible for making research visible.

Dr. Danièle Moore

In May 2022, I participated in a symposium hosted by Angelica Galante for the ACLA/CAAL conference. The symposium, entitled “Plurilingual Pedagogies for Empowerment and Social Justice: Language Teachers and Learners Shifting Power Dynamics,” gathered Canadian-based scholars working in plurilingual education. In my talk, I discussed the potential of inquiry-based plurilingual, creative, and interdisciplinary projects to encourage critical awareness of plurality in the context of higher education and teacher training. Using international participatory and collaborative approaches to teacher-training, I examined diversely situated ecologies (Canada, Honduras, Uruguay, and Japan) to explore how plurilingualism contributes to raising awareness of translingual practice as an asset to challenge beliefs and praxis and produce alternative knowledges around teaching, learning, and researching-as-teacher-training. With an emphasis on embodied and sensory experiences—using multimodal and creative approaches to learning and research—the participants and I explored language biographies, linguistic landscapes, and multisensory and sensitive maps. 

These innovative visual and pedagogical strategies are sensitive and reflective ways to engage educators in developing plurilingual interdisciplinary pedagogical design that is more pervasive in learners’ social, spatial, and lived experiences.

Dr. Yumiko Murai

In August this year, a paper I co-authored with Dr. Yoon Jeon Kim, Stephanie Chang, and Dr. Justin Reich, “Principles of Assessment in School-Based Making,” was published in Learning: Research and Practice. The paper reports on what we learned from a collaborative design project with middle school teachers from California and Virginia. We worked on the question of how assessment should look for hands-on, project-based, collaborative maker classrooms. This research has inspired a new project that Dr. Kristiina Kumpulainen, Dr. Susan Crichton, and I will be working on next year, with the support of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant we received in 2022.

Dr. John Nesbit

The Simulation-Based Inquiry Learning (SAIL) laboratory, led by principal investigator John Nesbit and co-PI Phil Winne, published two research articles in the first half of 2022:

Liu, A. L., Hajian, S., Jain, M., Fukuda, M., Obaid, T., Nesbit, J. C., & Winne, P. H. (2022). A microanalysis of learner questions and tutor guidance in simulation‐assisted inquiry learning. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 38 (3), 638–650. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12637

Fukuda, M., Hajian, S., Jain, M., Liu, A. L., Obaid, T., Nesbit, J. C., & Winne, P. H. (2022). Scientific inquiry learning with a simulation: Providing within-task guidance tailored to learners’ understanding and inquiry skill. International Journal of Science Education 44 (6), 1021–1043. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2022.2062799

Dr. Roger Frie

My work on German memory and the traumatic effects of histories of perpetration continues. Since returning in early January from a DAAD Visiting Professorship in Berlin, I have been invited to speak to audiences in Frankfurt, Tel Aviv and Boston (all virtually). The opportunity to speak to a German organization that seeks to create bridges between descendants of German perpetrators and descendants of Holocaust survivors was particularly meaningful. A revised and expanded German edition of my book, Not in My Family (2017, Oxford), was published in 2021 and formed the basis for our discussion. Additionally, a new edited book entitled, Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis was published by Routledge in May 2022. This is part of my current project on the “silencing” of mass racial violence and genocide.

Dr. Nathalie Sinclair

In May 2022, I published a new book with Dr. Alf Coles from the University of Bristol called I can't do maths! Why children say it and how to make a difference (Bloomsbury). Australia’s Booktopia describes this book as offering “practical strategies to implement new ways of thinking and inspire teacher and pupil confidence in every primary maths lesson.”

Dr. Zuzana Vasko

Together with co-artists Dr. Erica Grimm and Tracie Stewart, Dr. Vasko created a participatory and ecologically based sculpture that explores our entanglement with other species and with the land. Titled “Geodrawing: A Sympoetic Response,” it was shared at the Geopoetics Symposium on Cortes Island in April.

Dr. Vasko’s presentation in March 2022, “Holistic Experience, Invitation and Creative Practice,” described how arts practice can engender meaningful personal connection with natural ecologies, drawing on the work of Jan Zwicky. This was given online at the World Environmental Education Congress (WEEC) in Prague.

Dr. Phil Winne

A research team in Australia and I have begun a 3-year project funded by the Australian Research Council. We are developing state-of-the-art software technologies and new research methodologies to improve undergraduates' skills for researching and writing term papers, lab reports, legal case notes, and other kinds of written assignments. Our software technologies gather and analyze extensive data as students work online, generating big data about how they search, process, and use information. We are investigating how to amalgamate those big data with other information to construct learning analytics that guide students toward more effective learning strategies and help instructors design more successful teaching.

An article published online in Metacognition and Learning—“Modeling Self-Regulated Learning as Learners Doing Learning Science: How Trace Data and Learning Analytics Help Develop Skills for Self-Regulated Learning” (2022)—develops my account that learners do the very same work as “professional” learning scientists. I describe how software technologies and big data can play key roles in supporting learners to learn whatever they study, help them advance skills for learning, and scale up learning science without compromising relevance for each individual learner.

Dr. David Zandvliet

A developing focus on the theme of bio-cultural diversity and education (with UNESCO) has yielded a number of new research grants and teaching initiatives in the Faculty of Education. Recent initiatives include a new undergraduate field school in partnership with the Squamish Nation and the Howe Sound UNESCO Biosphere and a new MEd EcoEd cohort within the community graduate programs focusing on Culture and Environment. Research continues with the Vancouver Botanical Gardens Association (VBGA), along with new funded proposals from the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) and the Marine Environment Observation Prediction and Response Network (MEOPAR).