According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s Calls to Action, post-secondary institutions have an important role to play in Indigenous knowledge recovery and mobilization, both as a site of research and in preparing future educators to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods in their classrooms and curricula.

The kinds of mobile technology kids like to use are generally considered distractions in an educational setting, but a University of Alberta education researcher is teaming up with colleagues around the globe to examine how these devices are used in and outside the classroom—and how they might be integrated to improve literacy education.

Jennifer Kelly was proud to have some of her research about black communities in Alberta on display at the legislature when the Alberta government officially recognized Black History Month at the beginning of February this year. But the University of Alberta Faculty of Education professor says it’s time to move black history from yearly observance to part of the national narrative.

“In many ways the questions around refugee youth in Canada are a window into bigger issues in Canadian society that we have a hard time talking about,” says Sara Carpenter, a professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of Educational Policy Studies.

David Lewkowich knows something about the stress teachers can experience when they start out in their chosen careers because he’s been there himself.

“When I worked as a high school teacher, I had a year of insomnia,” says Lewkowich, now a professor and researcher in the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Education.

It can be challenging for instructors to provide useful feedback on exam performance to university students in a timely way, even more so when the classroom has upwards of 300 students. And it’s another challenge entirely to get students to heed the feedback.

Okan Bulut, a professor and researcher in the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Education, is hoping to change that with an automated interactive process he calls “next generation formative feedback.”

Most people have stories about at least one really great teacher who helped bring out their best and connect with learning in a whole new way. The fact that we remember these teachers as exceptional suggests they brought something to the classroom that not all teachers demonstrate: the ability to motivate students.

One of the artifacts from Margaret Mackey’s childhood is a picture book about Santa Claus that’s part of her earliest memories. She describes it as a cheap little thing printed on flimsy paper with no discernible literary merit. But when she recently found a copy and flipped to a page depicting kids making Christmas cookies, Mackey says the image stirred an internal experience she could scarcely put into words.