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About Me

Curious about the world and my place in it

I acknowledge that I conduct my research as an uninvited guest on the traditional and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Kwikwetlem. I have directly benefited from the displacement of the Coast Salish peoples from their lands. As a white, heteronormative, cis-gender settler scholar, I acknowledge my privilege and power, and inherent sense of belonging in educational and colonial institutions. I am on a journey of unlearning attitudes and habits of mind that have shaped and helped maintain systems of oppression affecting the educational and institutional experiences of Blacks, Indigenous, Métis, Inuit, Peoples of color, working-class, women, those with visible and invisible disabilities, and members of the LGBTQIA2+ community. I invest the time to create environments where all members feel seen and safe to explore, question, and create.
I see my teaching practice, my administrative roles, and my research projects as intertwined in shaping who I am in the world. As I learn more in one area, I seek to apply it in the practice of the other areas. My understanding of equity, diversity, and inclusion has been shaped by my early teaching experiences in socioeconomically, linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and neurologically diverse high school classrooms. The skills I gained in designing curriculum, evaluating student learning, and managing diverse learning needs has strengthened my leadership and project management skills in the way that I communicate and ensure that the principles of EDI are woven throughout all projects. My research projects have directly stemmed from the curiosity my students shared with me as we learned together. Many of my students felt they were not accurately represented in the texts that we were studying. My research seeks to answer their question of “why does the story of Canadian history seek to marginalized or ignore them?”

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Teaching

Feels privileged to watch students grow

I have over twenty-five years of teaching experience, and it still fills me with wonder and excitement to work with students. In my class, we are co-creators of the learning environment by collectively writing our code of conduct for the semester. Laying this foundation has led to rich classroom experiences where students become active agents in their own learning and hold each other accountable. To ensure an equitable learning environment, I teach, model, and reinforce the academic skills of reading, writing, thinking, and speaking necessary to be successful in academic settings. While I do think it is important that students understand how different groups of people have been and continue to be marginalized, I have worked hard to find examples showcasing marginalized groups’ resilience, strength, and leadership to avoid perpetuating narratives of sensationalized trauma or depictions of passive victims lacking agency to change. I also encourage students to approach the diversity of texts and each other with what I called the 3P Perspective—Place, Positionality, and Purpose. I have found that students are able to engage more thoughtfully with the material and with each other when they recognize that ideas grow out of a particular location and time, are shaped by politics, economics, cultural ideas, educational experiences, and social dynamics of the author, and have a purpose. Students have found this is a useful framework for inserting themselves into academic discussions, and for also explaining why it is difficult for them to do so. I share with students how my own positionality makes it difficult for me to recognize and call out certain racial microaggressions, but that I want to learn from them and seek to change my behavior. Teaching at its very best is a radical act of transformation for both me and my students.

Recent Teaching Experience

Douglas College

Simon Fraser University

Undergraduate Academic Skills

Undergraduate History

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Research

Explores ideas of home, housing, and place-making

One of my earliest childhood memories is of my “Charming House,” a house I created in my basement out of a discarded refrigerator box. I drew furniture and pictures on the walls and invited my parents and grandparents inside to have tea parties with me. This early childhood moment laid the foundation for the kinds of questions I have asked throughout my meandering research career; the common thread has been ideas of home, housing and place-making. I am interested in disrupting the conversations we have about housing, home ownership, home, domesticity, neighbourhoods, and urban environments to expose the legacies of settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and exclusion. This has required an unsettling of my own understanding of my class and race privilege as internalized cultural norms.My SSHRC funded Ph.D. studied the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA) in Vancouver, BC from 1968-1984. This group of residents successfully stopped urban renewal in their neighbourhood by advocating that their sense of home had value. They successfully halted the demolition of their neighbourhood and worked with all three levels of government to rehabilitate existing housing and urban infrastructure. SPOTA formed the Strathcona Area Housing Association, a not-for-profit development corporation to construct new housing. Using mixed-methods research design, I examined the intersection of how domestic structures, housing policies, and the broader cultural narratives of home ownership guided neighbourhood redevelopment practices. I argued that urban renewal should be viewed as second-wave municipal settler-colonialism. I drew parallels between the policies and rhetoric used to justify the displacement of Blacks, Indigenous, and peoples of colour during urban renewal in the 1960s and the ways in which Indigenous populations were dispossessed of their land.My SSHRC funded MA examined the maligned Vancouver Special and in the process discovered that it was a beloved housing style among many numerous working-class families. It was an affordable single-family dwelling that provided room to live with extended family, run a small home-based business, or rent out the bottom floor as a mortgage helper. It gently densified the city, increased the rental market, and allowed families to create a sense of home in the city that provided them with option to remain in place through changing financial and life circumstances.What’s not to Love about the Vancouver Special?

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Publications

Find out more about what I write about