Scholarship of Teaching as Co-Created Community Engaged Praxis Hartej Gill has been a teacher and administrator in North Vancouver and is now a faculty member in the Educational Administration and Leadership (EDAL) program in the Department of Educational Studies. She has worked to co-create both the theory and practice of the Scholarship of Teaching through what she calls co-created community engaged praxis. Working from anticolonial, decolonizing, and social justice frameworks, this approach demands a pedagogy that integrates teaching, learning, capacity building, research and advocacy with a focus on “living our epistemologies”. Explicit in this approach is the
need to highlight the responsibility of educators to develop greater awareness and promote advocacy within their classroom curriculum and school communities to address historical, sociopolitical and institutional injustices that continue to systemically oppress and marginalize many groups in society.
Hartej’s most significant contribution to the teacher education program was her work with Dr. Graeme Chalmers, the David Lam Advisory Board and the Vancouver School District in the co-development, co-implementation and documentation of the Diversity Cohort. This cohort, which she co-coordinated with Mr. Hayne Wai, was the first elementary-level teacher education cohort in Canada fully focused (in all curricular and theoretical courses of the program) on social justice and Indigeneity. It was also the first cohort with a required course in Indigenous education. Among other impacts, this pilot program and the research extending from this initiative (along with the work of the secondary level Social Justice and Humanities Cohort led by Dr. Deirdre Kelly) have informed UBC’s new teacher education program. With the leadership of former Associate Superintendent, Dr. Valerie Overgaard, the work of this cohort also prompted the development of the first Social Responsibility and Diversity Team in the Vancouver School Board.
Dr. Hartej Gill
Associate Professor, Department of Educational Studies 2014 Faculty of Education Killam Faculty Teaching Prize Recipient
This curricular approach strives to move social justice beyond a simple component of the curriculum into a core purpose of public education.
YTE.EDUC.UBC.CA
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