Faculty Research Highlights

Dr. Susan Barber

Education lecturer Susan Barber received an ISTLD Grant for university-wide Creative Writers Workshops. These workshops will be conducted from September 2017 to June 2018 with participants in the Faculty of Education, Back on Track program, Health & Counselling Centre, and Student Engagement & Retention Program. The goal is to support students in academic writing, narrative writing for self-development, learning about narrative as an educational tool, and to support students who are struggling with mental health issues. In addition, Barber attended the Global Conference on Education and Research (GLOCER) at the University of Southern Florida in May, where she presented three peer-reviewed papers.

Dr. Elina Birmingham

Dr. Birmingham co-authored an article titled “Spontaneous gaze following during naturalistic social interactions in school-aged children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder” for the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. Dr. Birmingham also co-authored an article for the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders titled “Mentoring university students with ASD: a mentee-centered approach’.

Dr. Wanda Cassidy

Dr. Cassidy continued her research into cyberbullying at the K-12 and post-secondary levels. She is co-editing and writing three chapters with colleagues Chantal Faucher and Margaret Jackson for a Routledge book titled Cyberbullying at University: A Cross-Jurisdictional, Multi-Disciplinary Perspective. This book draws on research from eight countries, with chapters written by scholars from the disciplines of education, psychology, criminology, communications, sociology, law, health sciences, social work and business. Dr. Cassidy is also co-authoring an invited chapter called A Canadian perspective on bullying and cyberbullying among youth from school to university: Challenges, insights and possibilities for a Cambridge University Press book titled Bullying, cyberbullying and pupil well-being in schools: Comparing European, Australian and Indian Perspectives.

Dr. Rebecca Cox

Dr. Cox co-authored an article titled “Neoliberalism across borders: The impact on community college students with children” for the Journal of Higher Education. Dr. Cox also co-authored another article for the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy titled “Does this feel empowering? Using métissage to explore the effects of critical pedagogy”.

Dr. Pooja Dharamshi

Dr. Dharamshi was the recipient of a $6,000 SFU Teaching and Learning Development Grant. The study started last May and reflects on how Indigenous perspectives can be integrated into literacy methods courses. The main objective of the study is to bring attention to Indigenous perspectives in her teaching of EDUC 472 Designs for Learning: Elementary Language Arts. Additionally, Dr. Dharamshi travelled to San Antonio, Texas and presented two papers and one-round table at AERA.

Dr. Mark Fettes

Dr. Fettes is currently engaged in editing a collection of articles on ecoportraiture, an emerging methodology in environmental education research. The collection draws on work completed at the Maple Ridge Environmental School and the Davis Bay Nature Program, UBC, the University of Calgary, and the University of Colorado Denver. In June, Dr. Fettes took part in an invited symposium at the Banff Centre on Language and Politics in the US and Canada. His contribution was a paper titled Language, Land and Reconciliation: Policy Directions from Indigenous Teachings and Scholarship. Dr. Fettes argues that the existing “rights paradigm” for addressing Indigenous languages at the policy level does not connect with Indigenous understandings of the links between language, land, culture and spirituality.

Dr. Huamei Han

Dr. Han participated in different conferences in the United States, where she presented individual and panel papers that reflect on linguistics theories. This July, Dr. Han presented her paper Class Stratification, Grassroots Multilingualism and Working-Class Mobility in the Periphery and Semi-Periphery: The Case of China-Africa Trade Migration at the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) Conference in Seoul, Korea. Additionally, Dr. Han has been following and supporting a human rights tribunal case focusing on language use in the housing crisis in Vancouver and she participated in a university-wide Engaging China workshop hosted by the VP-Research at SFU.

Dr. Joel Heng Hartse

Dr. Heng Hartse published a chapter for the book Researching Chinese English: The State of the Art: Chinese and Non-Chinese English Teachers’ Reactions to Chinese English in University Students’ Academic Writing. Additionally, Dr. Heng Hartse had the chance to present his paper Implementing a Writing-About-Writing Approach in a High-Stakes Foundational Writing Course at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Dr. Cher Hill

Dr. Hill collaborated with different scholars, including Dr. Margaret MacDonald, and published several papers, including Using engaged philosophical inquiry to deepen young children’s understanding of environmental sustainability: Being, becoming and belonging for the Journal of Philosophy in Schools. She also presented the paper Navigating community-campus partnerships in teacher education: The co-constructive dance at the Community to University Expo in Vancouver in May.

Dr. David Kaufman

Dr. Kaufman facilitated two Philosophers Cafes at Mount Pleasant Library on Ageism and the Impact of Technology on Society. He also travelled to the city of Florianópolis in Brazil to attend two conferences: the 16th ERGODESIGN, USIHC and CINAHPA conference, where he presented keynotes on using digital games to enhance learning, health, and social engagement, and the International Conference on Innovation in Education at the University of Santa Catarina, where he presented keynotes on enhancing education with digital games. He was invited to return next winter and to replicate his research in Florianópolis.

Dr. Dan Laitsch

The World Education Research Association (WERA) has approved an application Dr. Laitsch led under the auspices of the Centre for the Study of Education Leadership and Policy. This initiative aims to establish an International Research Network (IRN) based on his paper Teaching, Learning & Literacy for Health, Safety, Life Skills, Inclusion, Social & Sustainable Development.

Dr. Peter Liljedahl

In April, Dr. Peter Liljedahl was selected as the recipient of the 2017 Cmolik Prize for the Enhancement of Public Education in BC. The $100,000 Cmolik Prize is awarded biennially, and recognizes new and innovative approaches that enrich learning opportunities with students from across the province. His project Building Thinking Classrooms involves creativity, insight and discovery to adapt students to a progressive classroom environment. This approach aims to foster the understanding of numeracy tasks and construct knowledge by applying collective thinking. This award will complement 12 years of empirical work indicating that implementation has reached more than 95 per cent of success after training.

Dr. Danièle Moore

Dr. Moore co-authored one article titled “Voices from the “Heart”: Understanding a Community-Engaged Festival in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside” for the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Prof. Moore also conducted some workshops with Science World, as part of her SSHRC-funded research on multilingual and science literacies development.

Dr. Susan O’Neill

Dr. Susan O’Neill published two book chapters: Young people’s musical lives: Learning ecologies, identities and connectedness for the Oxford Handbook of Musical Identities, and Music and social cognitive development in adolescence for the Routledge Companion to Music Cognition. She completed a project funded by SFU’s International Engagement Fund titled Global Citizen Intercultural Communication and Creative Practice: A Canada-Brazil Partnership, and a SSHRC-funded partnership development project on Informal Participatory Learning with colleagues at Laval University in Quebec.  In April, Prof. O’Neill delivered a keynote address titled Exploring a “learning lives” approach to connection and collaboration in music education at the Joint (Ad)Venture Music Conference, 25th European Association for Music in Schools (EAS) and the 6th International Society for Music Education (ISME) European Regional Conference at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, Austria.

Dr. Özlem Sensoy

The second edition of Dr. Sensoy’s award-winning book Is Everyone Really Equal? An introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education was released in August 2017. This new edition is based on Dr. Sensoy’s extensive experience in social justice, and includes new features such as a chapter that discusses contemporary activism, White Settler societies and colonialism. It also includes new user-friendly examples that illustrate key concepts for engaging professional development in social justice education.

Dr. Slava Senyshyn

Dr. Senyshyn presented a paper titled Enhancing learners’ engagement in collaborative practices in the music classroom through a focus on reciprocity at the Joint (Ad)Venture Music Conference, 25th European Association for Music in Schools (EAS) and the 6th International Society for Music Education (ISME) European Regional Conference at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, Austria. He is also preparing a piano concerto by Liszt, which he will perform with orchestras in Brazil including a youth orchestra as part of the International Federation of Eurochestries.

Dr. Nathalie Sinclair

In March, Dr. Sinclair received the Dr. Jonathan Borwein Mathematics Ambassador Award from Partners in Research (PiR). This award recognizes her contributions to the field of mathematics, which includes several books and tools that enable students to interact with mathematics concepts in substantial ways. Dr. Sinclair also visited Europe in March to attend several conferences in Italy and Germany.

Dr. Valia Spiliotopoulos

Dr. Spiliotopoulos has represented the Centre for English Language Learning, Teaching and Research (CELLTR) at several academic conferences, such as ISSOTL (International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning), TESOL, and University of Ottawa's Symposium on Immersion in Higher Education to present in the areas of language support, assessment, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Dr. Spiliotopoulos has also been collaborating with Dr. Cécile Sabatier on a $30,000 research contract from the BC Ministry of Education to make recommendations on BC's French as a Second Language Eduction Policy.

Dr. Saskia Stille

Dr. Stille co-hosted “Mapping the Landscape: Language in the Canadian University”, a SSHRC-colloquium attended by researchers and administrator from 12 universities across Canada, including a panel on Indigenous languages and four international keynote speakers. Additionally, she received a SSHRC Insight Grant award for the project “Language and literacy learning among refugees in Canadian secondary school classrooms” which she will work on collaboratively with Dr. Maureen Kendrick - PI (UBC), Dr. Margaret Early (UBC) and Dr. Shelley Taylor (Western University).

Dr. Jeff Sugarman

Dr. Jeff Sugarman published a coauthored journal article with his doctoral student Erin Thrift. The article appears in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and is called "Neoliberalism and The Psychology of Time," which attempts to address the question of why people feel the continual press of an absence of time. It also discusses how psychologists have attempted to help with the problem and examine the connection between the current psychology of time and notions of fulfilment.

Dr. Phil Winne

Dr. Winne published a paper in the Teachers College Record titled Leveraging big data to help each learner upgrade learning and accelerate learning science. He also published a chapter titled Learning analytics for self-regulated learning in the Handbook of Learning Analytics, where he describes a software system his research group is developing called nStudy. This software is designed to gather comprehensive data about what learners study and how they self-regulate as the critical factors that shape how well they learn.

Dr. Rina Zazkis

Dr. Zazkis’ book Scripting Approaches in Mathematics Education: Mathematical Dialogues in Research and Practice is currently in press with Springer. This book highlights how script writing can be used as a pedagogical approach and research tool in mathematics. This technique provides an opportunity to articulate mathematical arguments and approaches.