Research
My doctoral dissertation research project
Dissertation title: Middle and High School Teachers Investigate Care: Pedagogical and Curricular Implications
This critical practitioner research study investigates what happens when teachers come together to engage in regular discussions and a creative writing practice to explore, theorize, and enact care post COVID-19, as well as the subsequent implications on teachers’ curriculum, pedagogy, and beliefs about care when they engage in discussions and a creative process centring on the concept of care in their lives. Care is conceptualized following Fisher and Tronto (1990) as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’” (p. 40).
My research contributes a model describing how teachers may reimagine and enact care within curriculum and pedagogy through collaborative inquiry and creative practice. Drawing on Fisher and Tronto’s (1990) definition of care and Ahmed’s (2006) concept of “desire lines,” the study demonstrates how communities of care can emerge within educational settings when teachers collectively reflect on, reimagine, and reshape their practices. While self-care remains important, the findings suggest that sustaining communities of care within schools is essential for the well-being of both teachers and students.
Research projects I contribute to
Writing and Rising: A collaborative research project
Principal Investigator: Dr. Rob Simon
My role for this project is Lead Research Assistant. Since 2023, we have collaborated with Academic Upgrading students at George Brown College to engage asset-oriented, arts-based critical literacies that disrupt typical college curriculum.
I started as a Research Assistant in 2018 with a prior iteration of this project, called Addressing Injustices, in which we explored what happens when elementary students and teacher candidates work together to address social injustices through reading, writing, and art-making.
Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) Doctoral Seminar, Centre for Community Partnerships,
University of Toronto
My role for this project was Co-researcher. I was selected as one of 25 doctoral students from across the University of Toronto to collaborate on research projects with community partners, explore community-engaged research methodologies, and further develop knowledge translation and exchange. For the academic year 2023-2024, I co-researched with three other female doctoral students from the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education, the Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering, and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, respectively. Together, we completed a research project that included a community environmental scan, recommendations of possible future directions, and possible partnerships for the board and community members at Jean Augustine Centre for Young Women's Empowerment in Toronto.
Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice
Principal Investigator: Dr. Kathleen Gallagher
My role for this project was Research Assistant. Previous projects centred Radical Hope and revealed profound connections between the practice of drama in the classroom and the capacity of youth to develop 'care' by learning in relation to one another in intellectual and embodied ways. Dr. Gallagher and her research team had previously found that youth agency is mined relationally, and knowledge that is generated collectively is particularly significant in the cultivation of an ethics of care. The project I worked on from 2021-2023 built on that work as it oriented an ethics of care to the environmental-social nexus and explored whether the experiences of 'learning-in-relation' and deep listening that emerge in collective theatre-making can also help youth understand the mutual imbrication of the environment, society, and culture at a time of ecological and socio-political polarization.