Hi—I’m the social studies teacher at SCIDES, and I also supervise a variety of other courses, including Foods and Nutrition, Family Studies, and sometimes even Physical Education.
I have been an educator for twenty-four years in Alberta and British Columbia. I’ve been at university for over a period of nine years. During that time, I have studied psychology, education (secondary social studies as a specialty), and finally educational psychology at graduate school (special education and assessment as specialties).
My career in education has spanned from being a classroom teacher, a resource teacher, a counsellor for student support, a district school psychologist, a special education program coordinator, and finally now as classroom teacher. It is very satisfying to me that I have travelled full circle, coming back to where I started as I near the end of in my educational career.
For the first 18 years of my teacher career I worked in a variety of Aboriginal education organizations including, band schools, an urban cultural survival school, a post-secondary Aboriginal college, a tribal council operated alternative program, and a First Nations program within public education.
During this past eight years, I’ve explored the weird and wonderful world of distributed education. I’m committed to the philosophy of distributed learning, which I believe, can really give students power to control many areas of their own education. Technology can certainly level the playing field, while self-paced learning opportunities supports students who ‘walk or run’ to a different drum beat. I’m excited about increasing the opportunities for students to create their own learning experiences. This is a professional goal for me, and I am learning to use Moodle as a tool to actualize that goal.
And my favorite thing about this work is the opportunity to work one-on-one with many of my students!