The Rosa Bruno-Jofré Symposium in Education 2023 Speakers

Janelle Brady (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor of Black Studies in the School of Early Childhood Studies, Faculty of Community Services at Toronto Metropolitan University. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). Her area of research explores Black mothers’ effective resistance strategies, race and racism in early years, and Black feminisms. She is passionate about supporting children and families through engagement in various community-based research projects to enhance social and racial justice.
 
Janelle’s work has been presented in peer-reviewed research conferences such as the American Educational Research Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Canadian Sociological Association. Some of her peer-reviewed publications appear in the Canadian Journal for New Scholars in Education, The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Emerging Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan and Myers Education Press. Her two most recent articles were published in the Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood and the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative.

Professor in Curriculum Studies, University of British Columbia  

Born in Huntington, West Virginia in 1947, William Pinar took his B.S. in Education at The Ohio State University, graduating in 1969. He taught English at the Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington, Long Island, New York from 1969-1971, returning to Ohio State to finish his M.A. in 1970 and the Ph.D. in 1972. He taught at the University of Rochester from 1972 until 1985, when he moved to Louisiana State University (LSU), where he taught until 2005, when he accepted a Tier I Canada Research Chair (CRC) at the University of British Columbia. After two terms as CRC, in 2019 Pinar was named the Tetsuo Aoki Professor.

At LSU Pinar served as the St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed Professor, at the University of Virginia he served as the Frank Talbott Professor, and at Colgate University he served as the A. Lindsay O'Connor Professor of American Institutions. He has lectured widely, including at Harvard University, McGill University, the University of Wisconsin- Madison, as well as at the Universities of Chicago, Helsinki, Oslo, Tokyo, and Vienna. The former President of the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies and the founder of its U.S. affiliate, the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, in 2000 Pinar received the LSU Distinguished Faculty Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Educational Research Association; in 2004 he received an American Educational Association Outstanding Book Award for What Is Curriculum Theory?, in 2016 the Aoki Award for Distinguished Service from the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, and in 2022 the Hermes Award for his 2015 book Educational Experience as Lived from the International Hermeneutics Institute (Warsaw, Poland). He is author, most recently, of A Praxis of Presence in Curriculum Theory (Routledge, 2023).

Dr. Melody Viczko is an associate professor in critical policy studies in education at Western University. Her research examines multi-scalar governance in the study of how different levels of policy actors work together to make policy happen. One policy area she studies is refugee student access to higher education, and she led an international research partnership to consider how advocacy on this issue is taken up in different national contexts. She also currently leads a study on the impact of global and national COVID-19 policies on Canadian university governance practices.

Dalitso Ruwe holds a joint appointment as an assistant professor of Black political thought in the Philosophy and Black Studies Departments at Queen’s University. His research interests are intellectual history of Africana philosophy, anticolonial theory, Africana legal history, Black male studies, and Black philosophies of education. He is currently working on a manuscript titled Horrors of the Flesh: Black Misandric Violence and the Dehumanizing Logics of Western Sciences that traces how scientific caricatures between the 17th- 21st centuries have conscripted Black males as ontologically violent beings and serve as scientific justifications for new violent and non-lethal methods to deal with the believed violent nature of Black males. Dalitso’s recent publications appear in APA Newsletter: The Black Experience, Theory & Event, Teachers College Record and The Blackwell Companion to Public Philosophy, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry & Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy.   

David S Green, PhD, RP
 
Educator, Researcher, Psychotherapist, Entrepreneur, and Motivational/Inspirational Speaker
 
Postdoctoral Fellow, McMaster University
Research Associate, University of Toronto
Sessional Instructor, University of Guelph
Co-founding Director and Vice Chair, C2C Psychotherapy and Counselling
 
As a registered psychotherapist with the College of Registered Psychotherapist of Ontario, David is a dynamic and committed Mental Health Professional with extensive training in Counselling Psychology and Family Relations and Human Development. Also, an experienced interdisciplinary scholar with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry in Canada and Jamaica. Importantly, David is driven by a scientist-practitioner orientation in his work with a PhD focused on Family Relations and Human Development from the University of Guelph. David has received significant scholarships and awards such as the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Toronto, and the Casey Cosgrove Teaching Award of Excellence, University of Guelph.

Dr. Lee Airton is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies in Education at Queen's University. Their research explores how Ontario K-12 education and teacher education are responding to gender identity and gender expression protections in human rights legislation. In 2012, Dr. Airton founded They Is My Pronoun, the first Q+A-based blog about gender-neutral pronoun usage and user support with over 30,000 visitors in 2017 alone. In 2021, Dr. Airton and their research team launched gegi.ca [pronounced gee gee dot c a], the first bilingual self-advocacy resource for K-12 students experiencing gender expression and gender identity discrimination at school. Dr. Airton's first book, Gender: Your Guide offers practical steps for welcoming gender diversity in everyday life, and has been adopted as a key professional development text in teacher education programs, school districts, public sector and private sector organizations. With Dr. Susan Woolley, they recently edited Teaching About Gender Diversity: Teacher-Tested Lesson Plans for K-12 Classrooms. Dr. Airton has been interviewed 65 times nationally and internationally on topics related to gender diversity, and were the first early career scholar to deliver the Annual Canadian Association for Teacher Education Keynote at CSSE last year.

Dr. Thashika Pillay is an Assistant Professor in Educational Policy in the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. Thashika completed her PhD in Social Justice and International Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta.

Thashika has extensive research and teaching experience in K-12 and higher education in Canada, Australia, and Ethiopia. Thashika’s research program explores questions of social, cultural, economic, political, and epistemic justice and the possibilities for anticolonial educational policy in formal and informal contexts. In addition, Thashika is co-editor of Decolonizing Global Citizenship Education (2015) and Global Citizenship, Common Wealth and Uncommon Citizenships (2018). Her current research project with Drs. Lynette Shultz and Anna Kirova (University of Alberta) examines teaching for and learning about equity, justice, and advocacy for First Nations’ children; this project brings together grade seven to grade nine youth from across “Canada” in order to better understand the pedagogies and learnings of anti-oppressive education for educators and students.