Faculty Research Highlights

Dr. Naghmeh Babaee

Dr. Naghmeh Babaee’s research focuses on language and academic literacy development of bilingual and multilingual students. She offered the Reading English for Academic Purposes workshop in CMNS110: Introduction to Communication Studies in the Faculty of Communication, Art, and Technology in January 2019. Naghmeh reviewed manuscripts for SFU Educational Review, is a board member and reviewer of Journal of Language and Education Journal Linguistics, and chaired sessions at Middle-Eastern and Islamic Consortium of British Columbia Student Conference at SFU and the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics (ACAL) at UBC. Her research has been presented at various conferences, and her manuscript on bilingual development, submitted to the TESOL Canada Journal, is under revision.

Dr. Heesoon Bai

Dr. Bai has been coauthoring with her students and colleagues for the past 15 years as part of her doctoral supervision work, and in the service of creating a collaborative community of like-minded scholars. Her effort to share her coauthored work, both in terms of production and propagation, was aided by the SFU Library digitization initiative, and she received, in June, 2019, another grant to digitize more current works. Her ongoing effort to support a growing circle of scholars in the contemplative education field has given rise to organizing and hosting many colloquia and symposia for international and national colleagues. Recently, (in 2019) Dr. Bai and her team hosted Dr. Ajit Pyati from the Western University of Ontario who spoke on Thomas Merton. Her team also organized a full-day symposium on contemplative education, which was attended by around 65 colleagues and students from various Canadian universities as well as by local folks. A final item to mention: Dr. Bai was invited to give a talk at UBC (Dept. of Curriculum and Pedagogy) (2019) on revitalizing teacher education.

Dr. Susan Barber

Dr. Barber completed a Masters in Counselling Psychology in May in order to advance her understanding of refugee education and mental health. She also attended the Interdisciplinary Migration and Refugee Workshop: Developing a Research Community at SFU Woodward's.

Dr. Luc P. Beaudoin

Dr. Luc. P. Beaudoin has been developing a new theory of sleep onset and insomnolence; and a theory of emotion (perturbance). CogSci Apps has released Hook (productivity), a new macOS app to improve and research note-taking and information management. With Hook, users (higher education students and professional knowledge workers) can instantly interlink web pages, PDFs, tasks, email, notes, and other information. With one command, users can create and link notes to that which they are about. Hook enables users to instantly navigate between linked items. Dr. Beaudoin is a co-founder, president and shareholder of CogSci Apps Corp.

Dr. Geneviève Brisson

Dr. Geneviève Brisson continued her collaboration with Dr. Diane Dagenais, and PhD students Magali Forte and Gwénaëlle André, on a SSHRC-funded research project focused on multilingual and multimodal story production with ScribJab. They completed fieldwork in homes and schools, and will be going into a public library during the summer. With the same team, she presented the following papers “Story creation assemblages at home” at Wilga Rivers Language Pedagogy Colloquium (Invited colloquia) at AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics) in March, and “L’écologie de la création d’histoires bilingues et multimodales en milieu familial” at ACLA (Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics) in June 2019.

Dr. Joel Heng Hartse

In the first half of 2019, Dr. Joel Heng Hartse has been working on a research project involving private, Chinese-language tutoring companies in higher education; in May he presented a paper on the way these companies advertise their services to students. This work will pave the way for a larger project on the role of para-educational services in Chinese-speaking students' academic language and literacy practices. Dr. Heng Hartse is also currently working on an ISTLD grant project involving case-based teaching about academic integrity.

Dr. Cher Hill

Dr. Cher Hill recently published two articles: Teaching and learning in inter-institutional spaces: An example from a community-campus partnership in teacher education https://esj.usask.ca/index.php/esj/article/view/67848/51713 with her Field Programs colleagues, and Mad I’m mad: Parental-inquiry as wayfaring https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/sfuer/article/view/679. She co-presented with Dr. Margaret MacDonald at the Qualitative Methods conference in Brisbane, Australia: Methodological Entanglement: Becoming teacher: Post Human Teacher Inquiry. Along with her colleagues, Dr. Hill presented two papers at CSSE: Community Creek Restoration Project: Circles of Conversation, Connection and Action, and “This is not about the outcome - this is about the process:” Teachers' experience of sustained professional growth within a practice centred master's degree.

Dr. Gillian Judson

Soon after publishing the CIRCE STEAM Magazine in January, Gillian offered a keynote at the City of New Westminster’s Advancing Women in STEAM Conference. She is collaborating with SFU’s Beedie School of Business to design and teach pedagogy exemplifying Imaginative Education principles. In April, she offered workshops and consulted on a $2.5M NSF-funded grant at Smith College, Northampton, that uses Imaginative Education to teach engineering and design principles. (More information here). She continues to support educators locally and (inter)nationally who are implementing Imaginative Ecological Education (IEE) and, specifically, the Walking Curriculum. (In collaboration with OFFA, the Walking Curriculum was translated into French this Spring.) She is embarking on a research partnership connecting CIRCE/SFU with the Surrey School District and the Network of Inquiry and Indigenous Education (NOIIE). The research will examine imaginative ecological teaching practices through the lens of First People’s Principles for learning. For CIRCE she is facilitating ongoing professional learning opportunities (webinars, online chats, the Dialogue series) on a range of imagination-focused topics including Imaginative Museum Education, Imaginative Assessment, and Imaginative Leadership. Please contact her if you want to connect your scholarship with the CIRCE network.

Dr. Paula MacDowell

Paula enjoyed co-presenting with her research team at CSSE/SCÉÉ: 1) Creating augmented reality experiences with students to enrich curriculum and build community, 2) Co-creating curriculum with students: An exploration in designing interactive, multi-touch course eBooks. At the International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability, Paula presented her research on “Pedagogies for sustainability: Greening making with pre-service teachers and youth changemakers.” She contributed a chapter in the new book series Transnational Girlhoods, “The Girl in the Text” and submitted a chapter for another book, “Design Principles for Teaching Sustainability within Makerspaces.” Paula is counting down the days until the InSEA World Congress; she will present two of her community-engaged art projects and attend a diverse array of inspiring sessions on the theory and practice of meaningful making in art education.

Dr. Celeste Snowber

Celeste recently gave a plenary in the conference, Spirituality in Society in the Professions: Annual European SPES Conference on May 16-18 at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Waterford, Ireland. Her plenary was entitled, “Body, spirituality and passion: Embodied ways of inquiry in vocation.” She also had a chapter come out on “Dance and spirituality” in The Routledge International Handbook of Spirituality in Society and the Professions which came out in March, 2019 and launched at the conference in Waterford. Celeste also has an article coming out in June 2019 called, “Incarnatas: An artist in residence practice in the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden” in Artisein: Arts and Teaching Journal.

Dr. Zuzana Vasko

Dr. Vasko published a chapter titled "Drawing Meaning from Nature:  Observation, Symbols and Stories" with co-author Robi Smith in Culture and Environment: Weaving New Connections.  Edited by David Zandvliet, this volume is part of Brill Publishers' Researching Environmental Learning series.  

Dr. Vasko's installation artwork Murmuration, co-created with Erica Grimm, addresses inter-species connections and was selected for the 2019 Fraser Valley Regional Biennale; it was shown at the Ranger Station Art Gallery in Harrison Hot Springs.   

Dr. Phil Winne

Dr. Phil Winne's work continues on designing and coding the Sciences Practices Innovation Notebook(SPIN) part of a large, multi-year research project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation researching how to promote students’ computational thinking in high school sciences (earth science, biology, chemistry, physics). SPIN will provide tools for studying and annotating online content (text, images, graphs and videos), gathering and quantitatively analyzing data, drafting and polishing lab reports, and collaborating, Two other features set SPIN apart. Students will be able to discuss learning strategies with SPIN’s chatbot, and they and their teacher will be able to access learning analytics in real time. Early prototypes of several of SPIN’s tools are scheduled for mid-Fall delivery to participating schools Loudoun County, Virginia.

Several recent publications are or will soon appear online:

Winne, P. H. (in press). Self-regulated learning in research with gifted learners. High Ability Studies.

Winne, P. H., Teng, K., Chang, D., Lin, M. P-C., Marzouk, Z., Nesbit, J. C., Patzak, A., Raković, M., Samadi, D., & Vytasek, J. (in press). nStudy: Software for learning analytics about processes for self-regulated learning. Journal of Learning Analytics.

Winne, P. H. (2019). Paradigmatic dimensions of instrumentation and analytic methods in research on self-regulated learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 96, 285-289.

Dr. David Zandvliet

Dr. David Zandvliet's most recent publications include the following: Hi authored Ecological education via "islands of discourse": teacher education at the intersection of culture and environment. A peer reviewed article published (June) in the Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education. He edited Culture and Environment: Weaving New Connections. A peer reviewed book with 24 chapters published (june) by Brill/Sense Publishers. The book explores this connection with diverse author teams selected from around the world. The project stemmed out of the recent work he conducted with the World Environmental Education Network and Congress (WEEC). David's most recent work is focusing on Ocean Literacy as part of a MITACs funded postdoctoral cluster involving the Canadian Ocean Literacy Coalition for which he just received funding. This will complement other work conducted in collaboration with Oceanwise (Vancouver Aquarium) and at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre.