Last month, the Queen's Gazette highlighted the recipients of the federal Insight and Partnership Grants, awarded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). These grants are part of a larger $1.3 billion federal investment in Canadian research, with over $240 million allocated to the social sciences and humanities. As reported by the Gazette, “Close to 50 researchers at Queen’s have secured $11.5 million across four SSHRC programs.”
Among these researchers are five scholars from the Faculty of Education, who have secured funding to support projects that promise to advance equity, innovation, and impact within the education sector. We spoke with each of them to learn how their projects will take shape over the coming years—and how their work is poised to influence educational research and practice at regional, national, and global levels.
The Insight Grants fund research excellence in the social sciences and humanities, enabling scholars to address complex issues about individuals and society and advance their research programs. Funding of up to $500,000 is available for up to five years.
Dr. Lee Airton: Just Getting Through It? How School Practicum Impacts Under-Represented Teacher Candidates
Public understanding is increasingly catching up to what many educators have long known: school is not the great equalizer it’s often claimed to be. Across Canada, teacher education programs and certifying bodies operate under the assumption that most, if not all, teacher candidates will thrive in any practicum setting. But this simply isn’t true. There are currently around 45,000 certified teachers in Ontario who are not working in classrooms. Meanwhile, the diversity gap between student populations and the teaching workforce remains wide—and in some places, it’s growing. As Dr. Lee Airton notes, “The notion of ‘professionalization’ that we use in teacher education has come to mean surviving harm, for many teacher candidates—and we need to reject that.”
That’s why Dr. Airton and their colleagues are launching a national study to examine how practicum experiences uniquely affect under-represented teacher candidates. Over the past eight years teaching at Queen’s University, Lee has repeatedly taught in the Social Justice concentration, which consistently draws one of the most diverse cohorts in the program. While honoured to mentor these students, Lee is also familiar with the fear and anxiety many express—particularly before their first practicum, where they take on full teaching responsibilities. Unfortunately, those concerns are often well-founded. As part of an expansive network of scholars focused on equity, diversity, inclusion, Indigenization, and accessibility (EDIIA), Lee emphasizes that practicum often magnifies existing inequities. Their recent PhD graduate Dr. Mandeep Gabhi’s doctoral research highlighted that while marginalized candidates experience similar forms of alienation, their program experiences diverge significantly from those of dominant-group candidates. This reflects the fact that teacher education programs continue to be built for a “prototypical” candidate—typically white, straight, English-speaking, and middle class.
In response, Lee’s team will begin their research with a pre-practicum survey distributed across teacher education programs nationwide. It will include validated psychological inventories (e.g., distress, self-efficacy, etc.) and a detailed demographic questionnaire developed in collaboration with Dr. Eun-Young Lee (School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s). After practicum, participants will complete a follow-up survey to document their placement’s logistics (e.g., timing, teaching load, location, perceived demographics of students and associate teachers) and repeat the psychological inventories. The data will then be used to group candidates by experience and identity, revealing systemic patterns of discrimination and differential impact.
The ultimate goal is to design a national, web-based tool that predicts the likelihood that an underrepresented candidate will experience discrimination in various practicum contexts. Candidates could use the tool’s output to advocate for safer placements, backed by predictive data. This interface, to be developed starting in September 2025, will be a focus of the Insight Grant funds, along with the hiring of graduate researchers to assist with data collection across the country.
In a system where survivability often masquerades as success, this research demands better. It aims to shift practicum rules and structures across Canada away from passive universality toward intentional equity. By centering the lived realities of under-represented teacher candidates, this work holds the potential to change not only where future teachers are placed—but whether they remain in the profession at all.
Read about the other major SSHRC-funded projects at the Faculty of Education