I am all three at once. Entwined, these three ways encapsulate how I exist.

Teaching, for me is a happy place because all three ways come alive. Teaching with a growth mindset means I am always learning with students. I believe being actively engaged with current research keeps teaching alive and dynamic. As a creative learner and artist, the experimental and experiential nature of art supports the inquiry, wonder, fun and love in education.

With a career that includes developing a national youth advocacy program and provincial adolescent health programs, my research and practice has always been grounded in the agency and voice of children and youth. As an artist, creativity influences the ‘how’ of teaching, being, and living and the ways of research and learning.

To Create

I carry this question through my experimentations, materials, and footprint. Art, and its creation, is one of the ways I learn. It is a way I experiment, conceptualize, play, and dream. Creative expression is thinking, planning, discussing, gathering, and doing.

Gloved and walking through the tall grass to forage colour is a creative expression: The connection with the plants, insects, air, breeze, and more invokes and fertilizes my thinking.

Research Interests

My research interests are focused with childhood studies. Under this large umbrella I study early childhood education and primary school as part of the social institution of education. Specifically, research interests include advocacy with children; approaches to ChildhoodS; childhood literacy and multiliteracies, and; climate change with children and youth. The developing field of research methodologies in research-creation and creative modes of inquiry fascinate me as an area of research.

Living in a Material World

I work with a variety of materials, including, paint, ink, pen & ink, collage, photography, video, and encaustics. Dabbling in materials is hard, philosophical work that requires following intrigue, testing potentials, failing, and existing in the mode of trying something new. Foraged ink as a new material is the latest, not last, engagement. Without official art supplies I will use one rock to draw on another rock. I will grab charcoal from the fire pit and sketch onto driftwood.

Current Projects

My current research is focused on research creation as methodology in the development of an Uncommon Field Guide. Based on research with young children and educators, an Uncommon Field Guide is a place-based approach to climate change. The work combines research and art as ways to think with place, environment and children.

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