Upcoming Event
DARE Seminar 8
Mastery’s Paradox: Making Friends with Strangeness in a More-Than-Human World
Book launch, reading, art exhibit & conversation with Tanya Behrisch
What might be possible if we changed our understanding of mastery? We often understand mastery as expertise, control, certainty and the ability to make the world bend to human intention.
What if mastery also requires something quite different: humility, receptivity and the capacity to live well with what we cannot fully know or control?
Join SFU Adjunct Professor, artist and author Tanya Behrisch for the launch of her new book, Mastery’s Paradox: Making Friends with Strangeness in a More-Than-Human World (Peter Lang Publishing). Bringing together philosophy, education, ecology and art, Mastery’s Paradox explores our encounters with otherness: the strangeness of ourselves, of other people, and of the more-than-human world.
Showing original oil paintings in various stages of progress, Tanya asks what older understandings of mastery might teach us about living and learning in a time marked by powerful pressures toward efficiency, certainty and control, but also by deep uncertainty fueled in part by the very technologies supposed to equip us for such control.
The afternoon will include a short reading and reflections from Tanya, followed by dialogue with audience members.
The gathering invites us to stay with some generative questions: What do we gain, and lose, through our desire for certainty and control? What can art, education and the living world teach us about not knowing? And how might becoming more comfortable with strangeness change the ways we learn, lead and live together?
Faculty, staff, students, friends and curious minds are warmly invited.
Presenter Bio:
Tanya Behrisch is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Education and the Director of Co-operative Education at SFU. A scholar, educational leader, writer and visual artist, her work explores questions of mastery, otherness, uncertainty and our relationship with the more-than-human world. Her scholarship draws on hermeneutics, philosophy of education, arts-based inquiry and ecological thought, alongside her experience in educational and organizational leadership. Tanya completed her PhD in Philosophy of Education at SFU in 2022. Mastery’s Paradox is her first book and features 80 of her original oil paintings.
Date/Time
Monday, November 16, 2026
4:00–5:30 p.m.
Place
SFU Harbour Centre
2200 RBC Dominion Securities Executive Meeting Room
Vancouver
DARE Seminar 9
Teacher Narratives and Narrative Approaches to Research in Teacher Education
Co-hosted by the Centre for Research and Practice in Teacher Education
This research seminar will explore different dimensions of narrative inquiry in teacher education, examining how teachers’ narratives contribute to reconstructing individual and collective memories and histories. It highlights the dialogue among diverse perspectives, cultures, identities, and experiences as a way of understanding teaching and teacher development.
Presenter Bio
Dr. Luciana Haddad Ferreira is a full professor and researcher in the Graduate Program in Education at PUC-Campinas, Brazil, and currently a Visiting Scholar at Simon Fraser University. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP, Brazil). Her research focuses on teacher education, narrative inquiry, life histories, and the relationships between educational practices, memory, and professional development.
Amrit Cojocaru is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) and a Program Coordinator for the Friends of Simon Project at Simon Fraser University (SFU). She is a PhD Candidate in the Equity Studies stream of the Educational Theory and Practice PhD program at SFU. Prior to and alongside working at SFU and UFV, she was a K-12 teacher in the Surrey School District. Her research interests focus on teacher education, strength centred pedagogies and critical refugee studies.
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