My Teaching Experience

Noteworthy is my pioneering role to introduce both transformative learning and media literacy as teaching approaches in Social Sciences, at university and secondary school levels.

As well, I pioneered a senior secondary course in Native Studies, at a time when Ontario curricula offered only a cursory junior high level course on Native people in Canadian history. Secondary school courses were almost nonexistent, and restricted to schools that had a certain number of Native students, as if other Canadians need not be aware of the reasons why serious injustices continue to be unresolved.

See Workshop and Public Speaking to find related teaching contributions, and also section My Teaching Philosophy for a description of my holistic approach to teaching/learning.

Sessional Professor

University of Western Ontario, Winter 2009, for course "First Nations and Popular Culture," in Department of First Nations Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences.

Course content focused on my 500-year overview of Euro-western representations of North American Native peoples, to which I applied an interwoven transformative learning and media literacy approach, and incorporated oppositional voices of contemporary Native creators who use humour to subvert longstanding stereotypes.

Lecturer

Pickering College, Newmarket, Ontario, May 15, 1997, at a private school defined by the guiding Quaker values of community/service, harmony, equality and simplicity.
Invited by Charles Boyd, Head of History, to speak about the need for cross-cultural awareness and healing, because of the discrimination against, and misrepresentations of, Indigenous people and their traditional spirituality.

Secondary School Teacher

School of Experiential Education (SEE), Etobicoke, Metropolitan Toronto, Ontario, 1989-1997, a senior secondary school, to teach a full credit "Native Studies" course, in the Social Studies Department, for which I designed the course curriculum.

Guest Presenter

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT), 2001, Department of Adult Education and Counselling Psychology:
Invited by Professor Solveiga Miezitis, to demonstrate psychosynthesis principles to her graduate students (experienced helping professionals) in three of her psychology classes: "Creativity and Wellness," Oct. 9; "Personal Values and Organizational Change," Oct. 15; Narrative as Vehicle for Personal Change," Oct. 16.