Scholarship and Research Focuses

My scholarship and cross-disciplinary research focuses on three main areas:

• Legal literacy of youth, also referred to as law-related education or public legal education, which examines the roles and rights of the citizen in a democratic society;
• Cyberbullying at K-12 and university, including ways to foster cyber-kindness;
• Ethics of care as understood and enacted in schools, with particular attention to engaging marginalized or vulnerable populations.

A primary aim of my research is to impact policy and practice in schools and post-secondary institutions. As Director of the endowed Centre for Education, Law and Society (CELS), which I co-founded, I have a mandated responsibility to ensure that my scholarship, as representative of the work of the Centre, informs and is accessible to schools and the wider community.

The mandate of CELS is to improve the legal literacy of youth through a program of research, teaching, curriculum development, and community-based initiatives. Much of my scholarship, therefore, is directed towards knowledge mobilization, and actualizing a role of public intellectual. In other words, mobilizing research-based findings into actionable knowledge. I employ mixed methods approaches in my research, particularly survey research, case study, and interview methodologies, and collaborate in action-based research with cross-disciplinary colleagues, community agencies, and schools.

Keywords: 

• Legal literacy; law-related education; public legal education,
• Cyberbullying; cyber-kindness; cyber-civility; netizenship
• Ethics of care; marginalized or vulnerable student populations