If I had to describe my teaching journey, I’d say it has always been about translation. Not in the linguistic sense, but in the sense of helping people understand across boundaries: across disciplines, across professions, and across modes of expression. 

I started out, like many of us, as a teacher who cared deeply about how learners make meaning. In those early classrooms, I learned that learning is messy. Students didn’t just absorb knowledge; they wrestled with it, reshaped it, made it their own. I carried that lesson into higher education where my guiding question became: How do we honour the complexity of meaning-making, instead of flattening it into neat rubrics and checkboxes? 

Graduate school gave me new lenses and new language, but it also reminded me of an old truth: institutions love order. And order has a way of silencing the very disruptions that generate new knowledge. My teaching has, in many ways, been about protecting space for disruption, whether by experimenting with multimodal assessment, or by insisting that professional programs reckon with their duty to the public. 

The most formative experiences came when I stepped outside the familiar boundaries of education. Collaborating with colleagues in medicine, or engaging with communities in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, showed me that knowledge is never just academic. It is ethical, embodied, and deeply consequential. These projects stretched me: they required me to navigate uncertainty, to listen hard, and to recognize that who I am as a researcher and teacher is inseparable from the responsibilities I hold to others. 

If there is a thread that ties it all together, it is my fascination with multimodality. I’ve always been convinced that people don’t just “think in words.” They think in images, in sounds, in gestures, in networks of association. My work has tried, imperfectly, to take that seriously and to design research and teaching that open the door to different ways of knowing. 

Courses

Advanced Topics in Curriculum for Practitioners (ED 9734) 
Doctoral Seminar (ED 9715)  (UWO) 
Multiliteracies: Texts and contexts (ED 9536) 

Narrative Inquiry: Teachers, stories, and critical pedagogy (UWO)

Introduction to Curriculum (ED 9580) (UWO)

Introduction to Curriculum (ED 6101) (UNB) 

Talking About Teaching: Forms of Pedagogic Discourse 574 (UWO) 

Teaching in a Virtual World 520 (UWO) 

Introduction to Research Methods 6902 (UNB) 

I have had the priviledge and the pleasure to serve as a supervisor, supervisory committee member, and mentor for over 100 students. The joy of leraning and growing together is what inspires me.