Preservice teachers will get a preview of what anti-oppression education looks like through a pilot course this fall, the precursor to a required course launching in 2022 as part of a package of undergraduate program renewal changes.

Second language education professor Bill Dunn was looking for a way to enliven an online class he was teaching during the pandemic. By taking advantage of a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) program with the University of Paderborn in Germany, he was able to create a more enriching learning experience, but it turned out to be a worthwhile professional development experience for him as well.

Michelle Lavoie wanted to find new ways to mentor 2SLGBTQ+ youth and young adults through art practice. Her research using narrative inquiry methodology yielded hundreds of creative works and new insights into co-created, dialogic, non-hierarchical ways of thinking and knowing. It also earned Lavoie one of the most prestigious academic awards a Canadian student can receive.

Profound thanks and warmest well-wishes to Dr. André P. Grace, who is retiring from the Faculty of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology at the end of June. Dr. Grace joined the Faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies in 1999.

It’s hard not to feel discouraged by where we find ourselves more than a year into the coronavirus pandemic here in Alberta. Soaring infection rates and the corresponding public health measures recently introduced to bring them under control make it seem like we’ve made little progress in emerging from the conditions that have constrained our activities and kept us apart from colleagues, friends and loved ones.

Carol Ann Page says she always had a love of learning and dreamed of becoming a teacher. She was the first person in her extended family to attend university. While relying on student loans and working part time, her determination and strong work ethic resulted in a superior academic standing in her first year, and she was selected as a candidate for a foreign exchange scholarship. The opportunity was dismissed at home.

Educators seeking effective, authentic ways to incorporate more First Nations, Metis and Inuit (FNMI) ways of knowing, being and doing in their teaching will find the support they’re looking for at the Faculty of Education’s Summer Institute.

The 2021 Summer Institute, which takes place July 5-23 on the U of A’s North Campus, comprises two courses designed to deepen understanding of Indigenous foundational knowledge and knowing, and how those understandings might be expressed in institutional settings for the benefit of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students alike.

Leith Campbell (‘73 Dip(Ed), ‘78 MEd) says there wasn’t much research to fall back on when he began working in the early 1970s as a counselor with students from the Enoch Cree Nation who were attending Edmonton schools. In fact, he felt like he was starting from scratch.

“I had no list of children, I had no files, and I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do,” Campbell recalls.” There was nothing on paper at all about how to work with Indigenous children at all when I started.”

One of the first lessons Karen Barnes (’93 MEd, ’03 EdD) learned when she took a job at Yukon College in 2008 was that the North didn’t need assistance to become self-sufficient. It needed tools.

And, as vice-president of academics, she knew education was the key to that tool box.

Danielle Skogen says she just wanted to see a bit of the world and work on her Spanish when she decided to take a short break from her new career as an elementary school teacher in Calgary to travel to Guatemala. “I thought I’d follow that passion for six months, get it out of my system, and come back to Alberta ready to settle down and move forward as a teacher,” said Skogen, who completed her bachelor of education degree at Campus St-Jean in 2011.