Background

I am a full time LTA professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. I have a PhD in Education. I am an interdisciplinary educator and scholar. My research expertise is in environmental education and youth civic engagement.

Background
My pathway to an academic career has been directly informed by my early informal teaching experiences as a wilderness canoe guide, summer camp director, and classroom teacher in the Himalayan village in Chhomrong, Nepal. Upon pursuing my Bachelor of Education within Queen’s University’s Outdoor and Experiential Teacher Education Cohort, I became a practitioner of experiential, place, inquiry, and community service project-based learning. My practice strengthened through several privileged and unique experiences as a young educator. I was a classroom teacher working with elementary-aged First Nations children in Bella Bella, British Columbia. As a secondary school teacher I worked with a diverse body of high school youth within the Limestone District School Board in Kingston, Ontario. I taught Limestone’s interdisciplinary, 4-credit environmental leadership program. My praxis was further informed by my five years of work as Education Director for Students on Ice– an internationally recognized organization that leads learning expeditions with high school students to the Arctic and Antarctica. Through a dozen polar expeditions and the opportunity of working with thousands of culturally, socio-economically, and academically diverse youth, I became a fervent advocate for the need to make learning locally relevant, culturally appropriate, and experiential. In this way youth are enabled to position themselves, their lived experiences, and their paths of interest and inquiry at the centre of their learning. I am committed to supporting teachers and co-creating with youth learning experiences that challenge them to question their/our relationship(s) with the more-than-human world and the critical intersectionalities between sustainability and citizenship.

For a PDF of my bio click here.

For my full CV, click here.


“The volume of education continues to increase, yet so do pollution, exhaustion of resources, and the dangers of ecological catastrophe. If still more education is to save us, it would have to be education of a different kind; an education that takes us into the depth of things.”
(E.F. Schumacher, 1973, Small is Beautiful)