Biographies
Michael Bach
Michael Bach is Executive Vice-President of the Canadian Association for Community Living, a national federation of over 40,000 members, 400 local associations, and 13 Provincial/Territorial Associations for Community Living. For over 20 years, Michael has undertaken research and development on policies and programs in Canada and internationally on ways to advance the full inclusion and human rights of persons with intellectual disabilities. He has written numerous reports, book chapters, and books in the area, the most recent being The Journey for Inclusive Education in the Indian Sub-Continent, with co-author Mithu Alur, published by Routledge Press, New York. He holds a PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.
Phoebe Burns
Phoebe Burns is a local educator and activist who is passionate about social justice. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Phoebe graduated from Gordon Bell High School and completed a B.Ed. at the University of Winnipeg. After eight years of teaching in the public school system, Phoebe joined Canadian Mennonite University’s Institute for Community Peacebuilding as coordinator of the Youth Peacebuilding Project in 2007. Phoebe brings her enthusiasm for engaging youth in dialogue and her love of teaching to the work of building peace.
Jennifer Corriero
Named one of Canada's 100 Most Influential Women, Jennifer is co-founder of one of the world's most successful youth-oriented not-for-profits, TakingITGlobal. A website with hundreds of thousands of users in hundreds of countries, it provides a platform, a resource, and a worldwide network for today's global youth—youth who are fully wired, fully mobile. At the age of 19, Corriero was a senior consultant with Microsoft. She has since consulted with Hewlett-Packard, Nike, and McDonald's, and has spoken in India, Sweden, Malaysia, and Australia. Recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Global Leader of Tomorrow, she recently completed her Master's in Youth Engagement and Capacity-Building Across Cultures at York University.
Cameron Cross
Cameron Cross has been an educator for 18 years, is a practising artist, and is also the Visual Art Consultant for Pembina Trails School Division, where he works closely with all 33 schools. During his time with Pembina Trails, Cameron has been active in promoting Empty Bowls and Brush Out Poverty—two social justice initiatives. He maintains a studio where he paints and is active in pursuing an international public art project called The Big Easel. He is the Vice-President of the Manitoba Association of Arts Educators.
Photo Credit: Mark Thiessen
Wade Davis
One of the world’s most celebrated and distinguished anthropologists, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis has become one of the world’s leading crusaders for the protection of the ethnosphere, his term for the totality of thoughts, beliefs, myths, and institutions brought into being by the human imagination. His many books and films have provided the intellectual basis for the growing movement to celebrate traditional cultures around the world.
Recently, Davis starred in the 3-D IMAX documentary film, Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk, which follows Davis and Robert Kennedy, Jr., as they navigate the Colorado River with their daughters, raising awareness of the environmental threats facing rivers worldwide. He has also contributed to a film called In Search of One River, adapted from his book about his Harvard mentor, Amazonian plant explorer Richard Evans Schultes, who conducted pioneering studies of plant use by the native peoples of the Amazon. And in 2008, Davis wrote, co-produced, and hosted Peyote to LSD: A Psychedelic Odyssey, an award-winning, two-hour documentary on the history of psychedelics, from their traditional use by Indigenous groups to the drug culture of the 1960s and beyond.
Roland Dion
Roland Dion recently retired from teaching after 33 years in the classroom. Throughout his career, he has championed human rights causes either in his courses or on school and divisional committees. He has helped to create many human rights and social justice programs within schools. Currently he runs the Youth Leadership in Human Rights initiative at the Manitoba Association for Rights and Liberties.
Randy Fransoo
Randy Fransoo is a researcher at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP) and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba. He completed his PhD in 2007, examining how children’s early health status affects later educational outcomes. He has worked with MCHP since 1995 on a variety of health policy research reports and in recent projects involving MCHP’s newly acquired data on social and educational programs.
Frontier Fiddlers
Frontier School Division is the largest geographical school division in Manitoba and covers approximately 75 percent of the province. The communities in Frontier are largely First Nations and Métis, and primary industries include mining and tourism. The schools range in size from six students in Disbrowe School in Red Sucker Lake to 1100 students in Helen Betty Osborne Ininiw Education Resource Centre in Norway House.
Frontier School Division introduced fiddling music into a few schools by starting with one part-time travelling instructor. The program has now expanded to include eight travelling and three school-based instructors working with 2000 students in 30 of the division’s 41 schools.
Frontier Fiddlers are selected from schools across the division, and group membership is always changing from event to event. This group of Frontier Fiddlers performing at the Social Justice: Educating for ACTion conference will include approximately 20 students from a number of Frontier schools across Manitoba.
Al Gardiner
Al Gardiner is Dean of Education at University College of the North. Al has responsibility for the teacher education, early childhood education, educational assistant, applied counselling, and recreation leadership programs at University College of the North. Al has over 30 years of experience in public education as a teacher, counsellor, school administrator, and school superintendent.
Gimli High School Students
In 2006, the Gimli High School Social Justice Committee surveyed its student population about the most prominent social justice issues within the school. What resulted was a long journey, sometimes filled with road blocks, to address the presence of homophobia within their school walls. Since that time committee members, under the guidance of their teacher advisor, Rob Jantz, have taken on initiatives to address the issue, the most significant of which was to create a documentary. In the Locker, a film created by and for students, explores the various student viewpoints on sexuality and the impact of homophobia on the climate of their school. They included a discussion guide with the DVD that can help teachers lead students through an exploration of how our schools can provide a safe climate for homosexual students and staff, whether out of the locker or not. The documentary can serve as a starting point for discussion about a subject that is often hard to broach. Ultimately, the documentary encourages schools to create safe places for all people.
Kathleen Gould Lundy
Kathleen Gould Lundy is Coordinator of Destination Arts at York
University—a joint venture of the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Fine Arts that fosters partnerships amongst artists, educators, and the community. She has been a teacher, consultant, and district-wide Coordinator of Drama and Dance, working for over 30 years in the Toronto District School Board. Kathy has extensive experience working in literacy, equity, and arts education in urban, rural, and suburban schools, and she is very interested in teaching those hard-to-reach students who keep parents and teachers awake at night. She has championed several innovative projects in Canada including Architecture of the Imagination, Looking at the Overlooked, and Imagine a School . . . (in collaboration with the Canadian Education Association).
Erin Gruwell
In January 2007, Paramount Pictures released Freedom Writers, based on the book that chronicled Gruwell's extraordinary journey with 150 high school students who had been written off by the education system. By fostering an educational philosophy that valued and promoted diversity, she transformed her students' lives. With Gruwell's support, they chose to forgo teenage pregnancy, drugs, and violence to become aspiring college students, published writers, and citizens for change—and published The Freedom Writers Diary.
Since then, Gruwell has published a memoir Teach with Your Heart: Lessons I Learned from the Freedom Writers (2007) and founded the Freedom Writers Foundation, where she currently teaches teachers around the country how to implement her innovative lesson plans in their own classrooms.
Gruwell is a graduate of the University of California, Irvine, and her Master’s Degree and teaching credentials are from California State University, Long Beach, where she was honoured as Distinguished Alumna by the School of Education.
Scott Hill
Scott Hill is a consultant with the Manitoba School Improvement Program. Scott has worked with many youth and educators throughout Manitoba. Some of Scott’s work has focused on student voice and supporting youth in creating declarations that assist them in taking action to create a socially just school environment.
Paul Kambaja
Paul Kambaja is a co-founder of the Fondation Charité Congo-Canada, which helps new immigrants improve their literacy and social skills. He was born and raised in the Democratic Republic of Congo and came to Vancouver in 1997. He moved to Brandon to pursue a B.Ed. at Brandon University and has been teaching Grades 7 and 8 science and math, and regular and advanced French (Grades 9 to 12). He is married with three children.
Shawn Kettner
Shawn has been designing and building puppets, as well as teaching puppet making, for over 25 years. Through her company, Patient Puppets, she has designed, manufactured, and distributed over 1800 puppets to medical professionals, social workers, and counsellors around the world. Shawn spent many years working through Manitoba’s Artists in the Schools Program with storyteller Jamie Oliviero. Shawn is now the artistic coordinator for The Peace Banner Project.
Kevin Lamoureux
Kevin Lamoureux is an instructor at the University of Winnipeg’s Faculty of Education and local colleges. He is a PhD candidate in Gifted and Talented Education through the University of New England (UNE), Armidale, Australia.
Enid Lee
Enid Lee began her career as a classroom teacher over 40 years ago. Today she is an accomplished "front-line teacher," teacher educator, researcher, writer, consultant, facilitator, and speaker. She has taught in the Caribbean, in Canada, and in the USA and has been involved in the professional learning of teachers and administrators for two decades. She is the author of over 30 publications. Her current research interest is professional learning and
Photo Credit: Gordon Griffiths
Stephen Lewis
Stephen Lewis is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. He is Chair of the board of the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which is dedicated to turning the tide of HIV/AIDS in Africa. And he is Co-Director of AIDS-Free World in the United States.
Mr. Lewis is a member of the Board of Directors of the Clinton Health Access Initiative and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. He also serves as a Commissioner on the newly formed Global Commission on HIV and the Law, created by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with the support of the Joint United Nations Programme of HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
Stephen Lewis’s work with the United Nations spanned more than two decades. He was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa from June 2001 until the end of 2006. From 1995 to 1999, Mr. Lewis was Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF at the organization’s global headquarters in New York. From 1984 through 1988, Stephen Lewis was Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations.
Mr. Lewis is the author of the best-selling book, Race Against Time. He holds 32 honorary degrees from Canadian universities and is a Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest honour for lifetime achievement.
Dr. Wilton Littlechild
Dr. Littlechild was appointed Commissioner for the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission in July 2009 and has been serving as a Trustee for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights since August 2008.
He is from Maskawacis Cree Territory of Treaty No. 6. An accomplished lawyer, he is the first Indigenous person appointed to Queen’s Council by the Alberta Law Society. He brought Native issues to public attention while serving as one of the first Aboriginal Members of Parliament. Dr. Littlechild has been honoured with several awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award as an Aboriginal Role Model and the Order of Canada. He graduated from the University of Alberta with a Master's degree in Physical Education, a Bachelor of Law degree, and a Doctorate of Law.
Shauna MacKinnon
Shauna MacKinnon is the director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives—Manitoba (CCPA-MB). Shauna has worked as a front-line social worker, community developer, and policy analyst and advocate. For the past six years she has conducted research on poverty and related issues with an emphasis on Aboriginal and inner-city poverty. Shauna is the co-editor of the 2010 book Social Determinants of Health in Manitoba and coordinator of the annual State of the Inner City Report. While she uses multiple research methods, Shauna is particularly interested in community-based participatory research using qualitative methods, as she believes in the importance of putting faces and stories to statistics and numbers.
Ted Longbottom
Ted Longbottom has singing and storytelling in his blood. Growing up in Stony Point, Manitoba, Longbottom was surrounded by the colourful traditional music and legends of his Métis ancestors. He has performed coast to coast in Canada as well as in the USA, appearing at major folk and music festivals and in classrooms across Manitoba and Saskatchewan. His music is featured in a number of films including Frantic Films’ television mini-series, Quest for the Bay (2002). Ted plays Beaver on APTN’s children’s series, Tipi Tales.
Nadine McCaughan
Nadine McCaughan has worked in a variety of environments, throughout Canada and the world. Within Manitoba, she has volunteered and worked with various non-governmental organizations including Amnesty International, the Canadian Red Cross, and currently the Manitoba Association for Rights and Liberties (MARL). She is enjoying working with MARL to create human rights educational resources for teachers in Manitoba.
Bob McGahey
Bob McGahey completed his undergraduate degrees at Queen’s University in Kingston. He holds a certificate of Leadership in Catholic Education from Saint Paul University in Ottawa and a Master’s degree in Education from the University of Ottawa. He began his career in education as a Grades 7 and 8 classroom teacher but spent most of his career as a high school mathematics and computer science teacher.
Since 2008, Bob has worked as the researcher in the Research and Information Department for the Canadian Teachers’ Federation. His work for CTF currently focuses on the development and implementation of the Imagineaction program. Imagineaction is a Kindergarten to Grade 12 teacher platform that offers opportunities for school-community social action projects tied to the Imagineaction themes of Connect, Engage, Thrive, Lead, Live, and Care. It fosters the capacity for critical and creative thinking and prepares students to be active responsible citizens in a democracy and to meet the formidable societal challenges ahead.
Faisal Moola
Dr. Moola is the Program Director of Terrestrial Conservation and Science at the David Suzuki Foundation and an adjunct professor of Forest Conservation at the University of Toronto. He has published widely in scientific journals on ecology, conservation biology, and environmental policy. At the foundation, he leads a team of scientists, policy analysts, and public outreach experts on a number of campaigns to educate the public and reform environmental policy in Canada, including legal protection of endangered wildlife, valuation of ecosystem services, protection of urban agri-belts, and mitigating and adapting to climate change through nature conservation. Through his efforts, he has had the honour of contributing to some of the most significant conservation achievements in recent Canadian history. He has a growing interest in renewable energy.
Cynthia C. Nambo
Cynthia Nambo’s work has spanned different realms in education such as alternative schools, charter schools, traditional Chicago public schools, universities, and community organizations. She has also worked with
Harold Neufeld
Harold has taught for 35 years in elementary, junior, and senior high schools in Winnipeg and Newfoundland, and for two years in the Winnipeg Education Centre Teacher Certification Program. He has served on the board of Project Peacemakers and was one of the writers of the Creating a Culture of Peace curricular materials. He currently teaches adult English as an Additional Language at Winnipeg Technical College.
Jamie Oliviero
Jamie is a teaching artist with 35 years’ experience, working in various arts-in-education programs. His art form is storytelling. He has performed most recently at festivals in Canada, Brazil, and Kenya.
Greg Pruden
Greg Pruden is a member of the Métis Nation, born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He has worked as a visual artist, illustrator, writer, storyteller, and educator. In the course of a 17-year teaching career, Greg taught English language arts, social studies, history, French, art, and drama at all grades except Kindergarten. Along with his nephew and collaborator, Ted Longbottom, he has written (and performed in) four radio plays broadcast nationally on CBC radio. He has co-written two CDs with Ted and produces and sometimes performs with Ted in multimedia stage productions around Manitoba and abroad. Greg is the Aboriginal Perspectives consultant in the Instruction, Curriculum and Assessment Branch of Manitoba Education.
River on the Run
River on the Run is an artist collective made up of Sam Baardman (songwriter and photographer), Rhian Brynjolson (art educator and visual artist), Bob Haverluck (artist and animateur), and Deborah Schnitzer (writer and educator). Informed by the relationship between art and science, they have been focusing on Lake Winnipeg and the Red River, creating multimedia work based on their shared experience of living within this unique watershed. Integrating a variety of art forms and disciplines, they investigate the bonds between humans and nature, and the historical, mythical, political, and economic relationship we have with water.
Wendy Rutherford
Wendy Rutherford is the teaching principal of Rosser Elementary School where small people make an enormous difference. Ms. Rutherford has over 30 years of teaching experience and has taught all grades from Kindergarten to Grade 8. The enthusiasm and commitment of the children make her job easy. Raising these great children is also a result of the amazing collaboration and support of the parents and community.
Brian D. Schultz
Dr. Schultz is Associate Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership & Development at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Brian's research focuses on democratic classrooms, curriculum as social action, and public pedagogy. His book, Spectacular Things Happen along the Way: Lessons from an Urban Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2008), received the AESA Critics’ Choice Award and the AERA Outstanding Book Award in Curriculum Studies. He has received Excellence Awards in both Teaching and Research from his university, and was recognized with AERA Early Career Awards. He holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from University of Illinois at Chicago.
Alysha Sloane
Alysha Sloane is a consultant with the Manitoba School Improvement Program and the coordinator of The Peaceful Village Program. Her work is based on the assumption that public schools share much of the responsibility for the continuous renewal of the communities in which they are situated. Community members invest their hopes for a better world in schools because the primary aim of public education is to help young people actualize a collective vision of what it means to live together peacefully in a democratic society. Over the last 12 years, Alysha has worked with students, families, and educators all over Manitoba as a public school teacher and consultant.
Shauna Sylvester
Shauna Sylvester is a Fellow at the Simon Fraser University Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and the Director of Canada’s World—a national citizens’ dialogue on Canadian international policy. Prior to developing Canada’s World, Shauna co-founded and served as the first Executive Director of IMPACS (the Institute for Media Policy and Civil Society), a charitable organization devoted to strengthening democracy by increasing the voice and profile of civil society and advancing media freedom internationally. Shauna has provided policy advice to governments and foundations on subjects as varied as peace building, human rights, media, forestry, and AIDS. In 2003, Shauna was also recognized as one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 in the Globe and Mail after receiving a similar award in 2000 from Business in Vancouver. Shauna lives in Vancouver with her husband, daughter, and stepson.
Catherine Taylor
Catherine Taylor is Associate Professor at the University of Winnipeg where she is cross-appointed to the Faculty of Education and the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications. She did her PhD in Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogy at the University of Toronto. She has published widely on issues of social justice, such as research ethics, refusals of empathy, and anti-homophobia education. She is a member of the PREVNet national research team on bullying and the SVR (Sexualités et Genres : Vulnérabilité Résilience) national research team on issues of vulnerability and resilience among sexual and gender minority people. She also serves on Egale Canada's Education Committee and conducted the "First National Climate Survey of Homophobia in Canadian Schools.”
Rita Tenorio
A long-time resident of Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighbourhood, Rita has been involved in the development of La Escuela Fratney since its inception in 1988 and has served as its Principal for the past four years. She was a founder and editor of Rethinking Schools publications, a founder and member of the National Coalition of Education Advocates, and a member of the Wisconsin Governor’s Task Force on Educational Excellence. In 1990, Rita was named Wisconsin Elementary Teacher of the Year.
Elliot Washor
Dr. Washor is the co-founder and co-director of Big Picture Learning in Providence, Rhode Island. He is also the co-founder of The Met Center in Providence. Elliot has been involved in school reform for more than 30 years as a teacher, principal, administrator, video producer, and writer. He has taught and is interested in all levels of school from Kindergarten through college, in urban and rural settings, across all disciplines. His work has spanned across school design, pedagogy, learning environments, and education reform. Elliot’s interests lie in the field of how schools can connect with communities to understand tacit and disciplinary learning both in and outside of school. Elliot lives in sunny San Diego with his wife and five dogs.
West Kildonan Drummers
Music is a universal language and a common thread among people all over the world. Its unique capacity to bring diverse people together is inspiring and motivating to us all. The West Kildonan Collegiate Choral Program has long since had a desire to celebrate various musical styles from around the world, and last June our final concert was a multicultural festival of sorts with taiko drumming from Japan, salsa dancing from Latin America, gumboot dancing from South Africa, African drumming, and of course several choral music selections also from various cultures. The group performing here, under the direction of teacher Susan Simcoe and Artists in the Schools drum instructor Jay Stoller, is only a small selection of the seven different vocal performance ensembles at WKC, and they are honoured to be a part of this conference.
Joel Westheimer
Dr. Westheimer is University Research Chair in the Sociology of Education and Professor of Education at the University of Ottawa. He is co-founder and executive director of Democratic Dialogue. Westheimer teaches, researches, and writes on democratic engagement, social justice, service learning, and community in education. He has published Pledging Allegiance: The Politics of Patriotism in America's Schools (2007), which Teacher Magazine called “this year's most important education book,” What Kind of Citizen? Schools, Civic Education, and the Promise of Democracy (forthcoming, 2010), and Among Schoolteachers: Community, Autonomy, and Ideology in Teachers’ Work (1998). Westheimer has received numerous awards including the Daniel E. Griffiths Award for Excellence in Education Research, Outstanding Research of the Year Award from the American Political Science Association’s Division on Teaching and Learning, the John Glenn Service-Learning Scholar for Social Justice,and in 2009 the Canadian Education Association gave Westheimer the prestigious Whitworth Award for education research that makes a difference. Westheimer now lives with his wife and two children in Ottawa, Ontario, where, in winter, he ice-skates to and from work.
Olga Wyshnowsky
Olga Wyshnowsky is the Pupil Services Consultant for the Winnipeg School Division. She has extensive knowledge of best practices in relation to guidance/counselling, child abuse, violence prevention, and human rights/anti-homophobia. She is a “trainer of trainers” for several programs in these areas, and has provided extensive professional learning for both teachers and parents. She was instrumental in developing the human rights/anti-homophobia initiative in the Winnipeg School Division, which included designing and facilitating the mandatory employee half-day workshop for all staff.