Faculty Research Highlights

Dr. Naghmeh Babaee

Dr. Babaee collaborated with Dr. Joseph Clark from the School for Contemporary Arts to re-design assignments and offered a workshop on how to study potentially challenging academic texts in CA 186: Art and the Moving Image. She is preparing a research report on the impact of this interdisciplinary collaboration on students’ learning and academic literacy improvement in the discipline of contemporary arts. Dr. Babaee has also submitted two proposals on teaching challenges and opportunities in design-related internationalized university contexts and interdisciplinary collaborations with arts faculty to facilitate learning for multilingual students to the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics Conference to be held at UBC in June 2019.

Dr. Susan Barber

Dr. Barber received a Seed Grant from SFU’s Refugee and Newcomer Advisory Committee to study the collaborative efforts of Surrey Schools, government agencies and private organizations in supporting refugee settlement. In Summer 2018, she presented four papers at the Child’s World conference in Aberystwyeth, Wales, entitled, At risk kids, at risk communities: Starting with social and emotional wellbeing goals for a school district; with master’s student Sharon Tripp: Coding in Kindergarten: Engaging our future problem solvers; with Lorna Ramsay: Preliteracy and trauma: Helping teachers reduce major barriers to education for refugee students and their parents; and, Ramsay and Barber: Arts-based inquiry with collaborative communities of inclusion for mental and emotional health. Additionally, she delivered a paper at the World Conference in Education, Dublin, Ireland, entitled, First you begin with art: Helping teachers welcome refugees into their new global classrooms.

Dr. Geneviève Brisson

Dr. Brisson authored an article titled, “At play in a Francophone minority school in Canada: Discourses on languages” for the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and co-authored, with. Dr. Theresa Rogers (UBC), an article titled, “Reading Place: Bullying and Cultural Displacement in a Québécois Graphic Novel” in Bookbird. Along with Principal Investigator Dr. Diane Dagenais, and PhD students Magali Forte and Gwénaëlle André-Bras, she began fieldwork in homes of bi/plurilingual children to explore multilingual and multimodal story production for their SSHRC-funded research project. She is also working on a research project on representations of plurilingual and immigrant characters in Québécois children’s literature. She was thrilled to present a selection of these books to teachers and student teachers at the annual conference of the Association provinciale des professeurs d'immersion et du programme francophone de Colombie-Britannique.

Dr. Wanda Cassidy

Dr. Cassidy presented a paper on educating children in human rights at the international Child’s World Conference in Aberystwyth, Wales in July. In September she was a featured speaker at the American Bar Association, Law-related Education Conference in Chicago, co-presenting with law professor Dr. Colette Langos from Australia on the topic of “Freedom of expression in the digital world.” Later that month, she participated in a symposium with colleagues Drs. Beck and Bai at the inaugural Care Ethics Research Consortium Conference, held in Portland, Oregon. Dr. Cassidy’s talk was titled, “Cyberbullying, female professors, and precarity: Can care ethics impact university culture?”. Her co-edited book on Cyberbullying at University in International Contexts was published by Routledge in October and a paper discussing what parents can do to prevent cyberbullying and promote cyberkindness was published in November in a special issue of the journal Social Sciences.

Dr. Sean Chorney

Dr. Chorney has been working in two domains of research recently. One involves the carrying out of a SHHRC IDG (with Dr. Nathalie Sinclair) revolving around the iPad app TouchTimes. Dr. Chorney has been working with grade 2 and 3 teachers in developing multiplication tasks that will be used with students in the spring of 2019. This first phase explores the various conceptions teachers have of multiplication. The second strand of his research involves going into mathematics classes in the Vancouver School District to look at how high school teachers are using Desmos, an online graphing calculator. Dr. Chorney has also presented at two conferences. One completes a Teaching and Learning Development Grant that sought to indigenize the mathematics curriculum. The other took place at the Canadian Mathematics Society Winter Meeting here in Vancouver and addressed some of the research around Desmos.

Dr. Joel Heng Hartse

In November, an article that Dr. Heng Hartse wrote with Melek Ortabasi of SFU’s World Literature program and Michael Lockett of Michigan State University, "Languaging about language in an interdisciplinary writing course” was published in the journal Across the Disciplines: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language, Learning, and Academic Writing. He also published “On the Possibility of a Non-Error Based Approach to Second Language Writing” in TESOL’s Second Language Writing Interest Section newsletter. Both articles consider broader perspectives on writing by multilingual users of English that may be more inclusive, sociolinguistically realistic, and pedagogically sound. He was also the keynote speaker at the BC Council on Admissions and Transfers Joint Annual Meeting in November, where I delivered the talk “Beyond ESL: Support for Both Multilingual and International Students in BC Higher Education” which discussed innovative approaches to supporting EAL students at SFU’s CELLTR and other contexts in BC.

Dr. Cher Hill

Dr. Hill received a community engagement grant to fund the q̓íc̓əy̓ and q̓ʷa:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ Creek Restoration Project, enabling the Nature-based MEd cohort to work collaboratively with local First Nations groups and environmental organizations to create awareness about the dire state of our creeks, and work towards restoring ecosystems. She presented at the following conferences: Inquiry into Practice: Be/coming diffractive (Shifting Ground: Relocating Pedagogical Innovation from Schools to Communities, SSHRC connection grant, Toronto, Canada); Supporting educators in teaching, learning, and leading within place: A campus-community partnership (EECOM, Cranbrook); Interference and co-intentionality as a decolonizing and inclusive curricular practice (IAACS, Brisbane, Australia); and Providing teachers with empowering and authentic learning pathways: An example from a graduate program ‘north of the border’ (ICET, Lardeo, Texas.)

Dr. Gillian Judson

Dr. Judson gave two keynote presentations: the Manitoba Nature Summit, Winnipeg in September titled, “#getoutside: Resources For Cross-Curricular, Place-Based Learning In Your Schoolyard”, and the Empowering Modern Learners Conference, PEEL School District, Brampton, Ontario in August titled, “A Walking Curriculum: Evoking Wonder & Developing A Sense of Place (K-12)”.

Dr. David Kaufman

Dr. Kaufman published a chapter on Teaching and Learning in Medical Education: How Theory can Inform Practice in the third edition of a book published by Wiley and entitled Understanding Medical Education: Evidence, Theory, and Practice. This book is used worldwide by dozens of Masters degree programs in Medical Education. He published a paper with his students in the Ageing and Society journal entitled Digitising the Wisdom of our Elders: Connectedness through Digital Storytelling. Dr. Kaufman also presented a four-hour workshop at the HCI International conference in Las Vegas. He presented papers at this same conference as well as at the Future Technologies conference and Canadian Association for Gerontology conferences held this year in Vancouver. In the community, he gave five interviews on CBC radio that were broadcast to Vancouver, Victoria, Kamloops, and Kelowna.

Dr. Angel Lin

Dr. Lin was invited to give plenary presentations at the following international conferences in the Asia Pacific: International Conference on Trans Disciplinary Teaching and Translanguaging, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan (Dec 9, 2018), 2nd International Conference on English Across the Curriculum, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong (Dec 4-5, 2018), and CLESOL Conference for Community Languages (CL) and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), Christ's College, Christchurch, New Zealand (Oct 5-7, 2018).

Dr. Paula MacDowell

Dr. MacDowell is grateful to receive a Faculty Inquiry Grant for an innovative project: Creating augmented reality experiences with students to enrich curriculum and build community. Paula's team is making a large-scale augmented reality (AR) abacus. This interactive sculpture invites viewers to interact with place and space in both physical and virtual environments. At SFU DEMOfest 2018, she showcased her students’ brilliant work and presented how to integrate AR technologies with curriculum for meaningful learning. Dr. MacDowell also received an ISTLD grant to study Co-creating curriculum with students: An exploration in designing interactive, multi-touch course iBooks. Paula fostered a design-studio learning environment in four classes and challenged students to research, design, and publish a media-rich course iBook (available on iTunes). The primary goal of this research is to achieve a better understanding of how to build a classroom community focussed on inquiry.

Dr. Masahiro Minami

Dr. Minami received the Insight Development Grant (2018-2020) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to expand the reach of his community psychosocial reconciliation program to people in desperate need in the most remote areas of Rwanda. This community-nested services-research project is advancing to the next phase of field feasibility and acceptability testing. Dr. Minami is currently developing a psychosocial reconciliation measure to prepare for the national expansion plan to begin in summer, 2019. Dr. Minami also presented his research at the 5thInternational Conference on Genocide, held at the California State University in Sacramento.

Dr. Kevin O’Neill

Together with a recent MA graduate, Elyssa Derban, Dr. O’Neill published a paper in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education entitled "Technology Disruptions and Elementary Teachers' Problem Solving in an Urban Canadian District: A Case Study." Details are here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15391523.2018.1525327 He also had two papers accepted for AERA in Toronto next April: 1) A solo-authored paper entitled "Doing no harm? How 100 years of 'progress' in medicine does and does not make it an exemplar for education" for Division B, Curriculum Studies, and 2) a collaborative paper with Natalia Lopes, Suzanne Reinhardt, Kanthi Jayasundera and John Nesbit entitled "Examining Undergraduates’ Choice of Course Modality: A Large Sample, Multi-Discipline Study" for the Online Teaching and Learning Special Interest Group.

Dr. Susan O’Neill

Dr. O’Neill gave two keynote addresses at Music China in Shanghai, and the International Expert Seminar on Mapping the Musical Lifecourse, Laval University, Quebec, on the topic of mapping young people’s music engagement and the affordance of spaces and learning ecologies. She gave an invited talk at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts, Finland. She also gave two papers at the 33rd World Conference of the International Society for Music Education, Baku, Azerbaijan and a paper with co-authors Dr. Valerie Peters and Dr. Zara Vaillancourt (Laval University) at the 20th International Seminar of the International Society for Music Education (ISME) Commission for Music in the Schools and Teacher Education (MISTEC), Prague, Czech Republic titled, “Digital media use and secondary music education”.

Dr. Suzanne Smythe

Dr. Smythe’s collaboration with UBC literacy scholars resulted in a co-edited special issue published in August 2018 in Language and Literacy entitled Equity and Digital Literacies: Access, Ethics, and Engagements. The issue includes an article on participatory technology design,  co-authored with Dionne Pelan and Sherry Breshears. Dr. Smythe’s article, Adult education in the control society, was published in Adult Education Quarterly, exploring the consequences of automation and machine learning for literacy theories and pedagogies. This has led to a collaboration with the Downtown Eastside Literacy Roundtable to host a forum on Digital Justice in early 2019, with funding from the Digital Justice Lab. Dr. Smythe is a co-applicant in a 2018 – 2021 UBC-SFU partnership development grant (Dr. Heather O’Brien, UBC, PI) to make research knowledge generated in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside more accessible to that community and more aligned to its priorities. A Routledge book on new materiality and literacy and language pedagogy co-edited with Dr. Kelleen Toohey and Dr. Diane Dagenais will appear in early 2019.

Dr. Celeste Snowber

Dr. Snowber has had two chapters come out recently connected to her research. One is entitled, Embodied perspectives on creativity published in the collection, Creativity Under Duress in Education? Resistive Theories, Practices, and Actions edited by C. Mullen (Springer, 2019). The other is Embodied inquiry in holistic education published in The international handbook in holistic education edited by J. Miller, M. Binder, S. Crowell, K. Nigh and B. Novak (Routledge, 2019). The interview and short documentary by Jennifer Chrumka of CBC, connected to her previous full-length performance, Perfect Imperfections: The Art of a Messy Life was played on North by Northwest with Sheryl Mackay.  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/north-by-northwest/episode/15607366  Segment starts 1 hour and 44 seconds.

Dr. Kelleen-Toohey

Dr. Toohey published the second edition of her 2000 book, Learning English at school: Identity, socio-material relations and classroom practice (2nd edition). In October 2018 she gave an invited address at the University of Edinburgh on EAL teacher education, and published an article in Applied Linguistics entitled "The onto-epistemologies of new materialism: Implications for language pedagogy and practice".  In March 2018, she gave a paper presentation at the American Association of Applied Linguistics conference in Chicago. This year Dr. Toohey was also invited to be an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Language and Literacy Education at UBC. 

Dr. Phil Winne

Dr. Winne was recently awarded a subgrant of US$742,000 from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Collaborating with colleagues at George Mason University, Rutgers and Brigham Young University, the 5-year $4M research-practice partnership project is investigating ways to enhance computational thinking and self-regulated learning in high school biology, chemistry, earth science and physics classrooms. Phil’s main charge is to expand features of the nStudy software suite to create a computational thinking “workpad” plus a parallel suite of online tools teachers can use to plan computational thinking lessons and projects. As students engage with computational thinking projects their teachers developed, the system will generate real-time learning analytics to support students’ self-regulated learning and teachers’ adaptations to teaching. In June, Dr. Winne will give a keynote address at the annual Learning Analytics Summer Institute. This year’s event, co-hosted by UBC and SFU, will be held on the UBC campus June 17-19. Details will soon be posted at http://solaresearch.org/events/lasi/lasi19/.  On the publication ledger, the 7th edition of Educational Psychology, co-authored with Anita Woolfolk and Nancy Perry, and 4 book chapters on self-regulated learning, learning analytics and contributions learning technologies can make to educational research will hit bookstore shelves in time for summer term.

Dr. Rina Zazkis

Dr. Zazkis published a chapter titled, “Canada is better – An unexpected reaction to the order of operations in arithmetic” in the recent (2018) book, Teaching and Learning Secondary School Mathematics—Canadian Perspectives in an International Context. The chapter discusses the acronym BEDMAS used in Canada vs. PEMDAS, used in the USA, to help students memorize the conventional order of operations in arithmetic. While according to the mathematical convention multiplication (M) and division (D) have the same priority, many students erroneously interpret the acronym as an indication of a rigid order. However, performing division-out-of-order before multiplication (according to BEDMAS) yields to a correct result (try 2×10÷5) while performing multiplication-out-of-order before division (according to PEMDAS) results in an error (try 10÷5 ×2). Conclusion: “Canada is better”. While Dr. Zazkis totally agrees with the student’s claim, she find the reason for this declaration of national pride rather intriguing.