The Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarships and SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships aim to develop research skills and assist in the training of highly qualified personnel by supporting students who demonstrate a high standard of scholarly achievement in undergraduate and graduate studies in the social sciences and humanities.
2020-21 Recipients
Congratulations to our 2020-21 CGS and SSHRC Recipients: Aakriti Kapoor, Lindsay Mainhood, and Peiyu Wang, recipients of the CGS Doctoral Scholarship; Jenny Ge and Michael Holden, recipients of the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship; Elena Favret, Kel Martin, Sofia Melendez, and Nathan Rickey, recipients of the CGS - Master's Program.
Aakriti Kapoor (CGS Doctoral Scholarship)
My research looks at how we can dismantle colonial, capitalist, racist, and other oppressive systems both locally and globally. I am interested in questions like: How can we drive system change at the institutional level in places such as school boards? How can we drive large scale change at the grassroots level that mobilizes individuals from all walks of life in an inclusive and accessible way? How can we build solidarities in both local and global movements to fight issues such as anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, global capitalism, caste apartheid, etc.? My methodological interests center on action research and activism that works towards the liberation of oppressed people everywhere.
Lindsay Mainhood (CGS Doctoral Scholarship)
My research focuses on the issue of gender inequity in physics education. Specifically, my study explores how the physics education research field in Canada may be guided and supported to increase gender equity in physics education. Data collected from international and Canadian physics education researchers inform the study’s main purposes: to determine if and how Canada’s physics education researchers are working to solve the problem of women’s underrepresentation in physics education, and develop a consensus-based model for addressing the gender inequity problem.
Peiyu Wang (CGS Doctoral Scholarship)
Peiyu's research interests center on English language education, assessment, and testing. She recognizes that the increased use of test scores for immigration, admission, and employment has significantly shaped education and what's happening in the classroom. Her Ph.D. research investigates one of the most widely accepted English-language assessment TOEFL iBT and examines the impacts of TOEFL iBT on students' learning integrated English skills for academic purposes. The findings will (a) provide us an in-depth understanding of the nature of integrated English skills, (b) add to the validity evidence for the interpretation and use of TOEFL iBT, and (c) contribute to the ongoing language difficulties international students experience in Canadian academic contexts.
Jenny Ge (SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship)
My research focuses on how teachers learn about and adopt contemporary (e.g., formative, growth-oriented) assessment values and practices. Specifically, my doctoral research examines, through narrative inquiry and arts-informed research methods, the ways in which teacher candidates develop their identities as teachers and assessors over their time in a teacher education program. Ultimately, I hope my research will support teachers in leveraging assessment to enhance student learning and outcomes.
Michael Holden (SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship)
My research examines how educators in exemplary contexts provoke and assess emergent learning. Specifically, my doctoral research investigates how educators align their assessment practices with teaching and learning for global competencies, including critical thinking, innovation, self-awareness, collaboration, communication, and global citizenship. Fundamentally reframing K-12 curriculum toward these global competencies shifts teaching from the transmission of static disciplinary facts to iterative cycles of emergent learning, where students co-create knowledge and create unexpected solutions to ‘real world’ problems. I am particularly interested in how teachers successfully navigate the challenges of current assessment practices and policies when using approaches to assessment for emergent learning in their classrooms.
Elena Favret (CGS - Master's Program)
The purpose of my research is to investigate the experiences of individuals with specific language impairment (SLI) and their communication challenges within collaborative learning contexts. The main objective of the study is to gain insights about the experiences, challenges, and barriers facing students with SLI from the perspectives of children, their families, as well as from teachers and speech-language pathologists.
Kel Martin (CGS - Master's Program)
I am a second year Master’s student at Queen’s University. I have a background in the arts and volunteering and working with the queer (LGBTQIA2s+) community. My research examines the unbecoming of cis/heternormative roles that occured during the collaborative art making of mural during the planning of a Queer Prom for youth that I previously coordinated. This study plans to explore youth (student) and adult (teacher) experiences of gender and expectations/subversions of roles. In sharing the complex experiences of trans youth and trans adults I hope to contribute to research that combats the damage centred research often involved in sharing trans and gender non-conforming narratives.
Sofia Melendez (CGS - Master's Program)
Sofia Melendez’s overarching aim is to help build better health supports for transgender and gender diverse people by better educating and training mental health professionals. By collaborating with transgender people and mental health professionals, Sofia is working to develop and validate an instrument that measures mental health professional’s knowledge, skills, and awareness (KSA) about transgender health. This research is an essential starting point for the design of better educational practices that will improve mental health trainees’ KSA towards transgender healthcare. Ultimately, by improving transgender health education, mental health professionals may be better positioned to alleviate some major barriers that the transgender community faces to accessing and receiving adequate healthcare.
Nathan Rickey (CGS - Master's Program)
The capacity to assess and adjust one’s own products and processes in pursuit of their goals is fundamental to lifelong, agentic learning. While researchers recognize that self-assessment is a critical skill that students must develop before leaving school, there is presently little understanding of the ways in which students think and feel during self-assessment tasks. Without a model of these internal processes, supporting students in learning to productively assess themselves is implausible. My research therefore examines the cognitive and affective processes of high school students engaged in self-assessment, and draws on the fields of self-regulated learning, self-assessment perceptions, self-assessment actions, and learning analytics.