Empowering educators, innovating curriculum, and advancing equity in teaching and learning.
I am an educational developer, with a passion for social and educational justice. For detailed information about my education and work experience, please take a look at this copy of my full CV (currently being updated).
What I do
In my work, I use principles of equity, critical pedagogy, and openness to support the development of open educational resources (OERs); teach about open education, digital learning, and humanizing higher education; support the scholarship of teaching and learning; promote effective teaching practices; and collaborate with subject-matter experts on intentional course and curriculum design.
Philosophy in Brief
The very term ‘educational development’ connotes movement; a benevolent venture – fraught with uncertainty – towards the continued improvement of higher education. But to consider this type of movement straightforward or unidirectional would be disingenuous. While I persist in my efforts toward betterment, I am well-versed in the iterative cycles of theorizing, practicing, failing, and reflecting; a key component to any scholarly work that seeks to understand the world or make it a better place.
It follows that my work as an educational developer is both intentional and uncertain; fast-paced, yet slow and methodical; independently reflective, and grounded in community; subversive, while understanding how to work within existing structures. But pursuing the enhancement of a system as dynamic and complex as a university or college is not without challenges.
Institutions have layers of complexity baked into them, with the pathways to decision-making being unclear most of the time. Effective conductors of change must be resilient in their efforts, flexible in their approach, and able to navigate this complexity without getting lost in it. As an educational developer, I endeavour to understand the current and historical context of the institution, its individual units, and education more broadly. This helps position my work for high impact, whether I am working with individual instructors, entire faculties, or smaller support units.
Further, my educational development efforts centre the human experience. This means the human experience of being a learner, a teacher, an administrator, a caregiver, and a person. But it also means the human experience as it relates to sociocultural phenomena, to nature, and to the entirety of the world around us. No singularity exists without connection. I believe it is our job as educators to consider the connections between what we do in our classrooms, in our workplaces, and in our homes, to the planet and her inhabitants; and to use the spirit of justice to inform our pedagogical values and educational practices.
My history in my words
Initially impassioned by the desire to help marginalized people live better lives, I have come to recognize and appreciate that most of society indeed lives at the margins, with intersectional identities compounding the barriers we experience throughout our lives. As a middle-class white person, and a visitor on Turtle Island, I have had many privileges bestowed on me that have most often made life easier than for those with other racial and cultural identities. As a neurodivergent, assigned-female queer person, I have also experienced the ways in which the modern world was not created for people like me. Through this realization, I have been able to shift my focus from “white saviourism” to an inclusive and collective fight towards liberation for all people.
Earlier in my journey, I completed my B.A.[H] and M.A. in psychology, in addition to a post-graduate certificate in Autism and Behavioural Science. Through my experiences in the Foundations of University Teaching Certificate and subsequent PhD internship with the Office of Open Learning (OOL) at the University of Windsor, I began my journey into educational development, recognizing the potential of this field to drive societal change through the empowerment of students, staff, and educators in higher education.
My personal research interests include the measurement of and discourses around student success, and how these ideas intersect with individual characteristics such as emotional intelligence, and social variables such as disciplinary cultures, course design, instructor pedagogy, and institutional student supports. I am also interested in exploring how neurodivergence (specifically ADHD) in educators relates to educational experiences.
As a former PhD candidate in Applied Social Psychology, I explored the relationships between emotional intelligence, motivation, learning strategies, and student-defined academic success. Through completing my comprehensive requirements, I recognized substantial gaps in the ways we discuss student success. My dissertation was proposed to examine these relationships across disciplines to help inform first-year transition and ongoing student support programs. However, I took a stop-out in the spring of 2020 when the pandemic necessitated a shift in direction for my dissertation study. I decided, instead, to focus my efforts on my full-time job in the Office of Open Learning, and support the rapid shift to online learning.
The years between then and now have shaped who I am as an educational developer today. Activating my longtime commitment to social justice, I push toward a more equitable and just academic institution for everyone.
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Lilla Watson in collaboration with an Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s