Research

My doctoral dissertation research project

Dissertation title: Middle and High School Teachers Investigate Care: Pedagogical and Curricular Implications

At present, scholars are examining Covid19’s effects on education, and while some research emphasizes the extra care students should receive at this time, there is scant investigation into the presence or practices of care in the professional lives of teachers. This discovery is troubling since there are reports on worsening mental health and stress in the lives of both teachers and with some calling the situation a public health concern. Given that teachers’ well-being is intrinsically connected to the well-being of students, my dissertation research explores the impact of centring a practice of care with a small community of middle and high school teachers (located in New York City and Toronto) from September 2022 to February 2023 and the effects of that practice and community on their lives, pedagogy, and curriculum.

Research projects I contribute to

Addressing Injustices: A Critical Literacy and Participatory Research Project

Principal Investigator: Dr. Rob Simon

My role for this project is a Research Assistant. This project explores the question: What happens when studentes and teachers work together to address social injustices through reading, writing, and art-making? Those of us behind the design, implementation, and dissemination of the research project believe that when students are invited to collaborate with and work alongside teachers, community members, teacher educators, and researchers, they become motivated to engage in the world around them in creative and critical ways. We also understand literacy education as an activity that involves not just reading and writing but also one that makes links to issues of concern to students and aims to critically re-read and re-write the world, with the goal of increasing equity and justice.

Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice

Principal Investigator: Dr. Kathleen Gallagher

My role for this project is a 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 found that youth agency is mined relationally, and that knowledge that is generated collectively is particularly significant in the cultivation of an ethics of care. This current project builds on that work as it orients this ethics of care to the environmental-social nexus and explores whether the experiences of ‘learning-in-relation' and deep listening that emerge in collective theatre-making can also help participants understand the mutual imbrication of the environment, society, and culture at a time of ecological and socio-political polarization.

Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) Doctoral Seminar, Centre for Community Partnerships,
University of Toronto