2009
My home base is Vancouver, where I teach with the University of British Columbia.
I travel often, teaching and writing and creating digital stories.
Summary of teaching experience
Fall 2008 : Institute for Ship Board Education: Semester at Sea Global Studies Program, University of Virginia
Semester at Sea Courses:
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Communications
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Literature/Writing: Sea Voyage Narratives
2005 - 2009: University of British Columbia, English Department and the Co-ordinated Arts Program.
UBC Courses:
English:
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•222 Stories, Spaces, Places:
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•470 Crossing Over, a course in transformation
Co-ordinated Arts Program:
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•ASTU 100: Individual & Society
2004: Vancouver Island University, Arts & First Nations Department.
VIU English Courses:
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•115 Collage Composition
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•116 Introduction to Literature
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•111 Drama & Poetry
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•225 Technical Writing
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•203 Public Speaking
2002 - 2003: Bay Islands University, Roatan, Honduras. Chair of the English Language and Literature department.
2000 - 2002: Cayman Island Maritime Heritage Foundation, Georgetown, Grand Cayman Island. Skills training and program development.
Academic Biography
Graduate Studies 1992 - 1998: Through my years of graduate studies I worked as a teaching assistant for a variety of professors in the Theatre and the History in Art departments at the University of Victoria. My central concerns at the time included introducing Canadian playwrights into the curriculum and examining the politics of identity in context with cultural policies of the day. During my years of graduate studies I also toured across Canada several times with my own independent theatre company as well as conducting workshops in performance improvisation and collaborative theatre production. If you are interested in my early research, you can upload a PDF file of my manuscript: Ordering Chaos, The Canadian Fringe Theatre Phenomenon
Upon completing my Ph.D. in 1998, I left Canada to teach in Chiapas, Mexico. I was interested in observing the performative strategies of the Zapatista movement. In particular, I wanted to research how the ‘poet leader’ of the Zapatistas, Marcos, was utilizing the then youthful internet as a medium to gather international public support. In Chiapas, I taught advanced ESL for a school associated with the University of Ottawa. My students included local residents, university students, and United Nations workers (who were in the area to help re-settle Guatemalan refugees).
After teaching in Mexico, in 2000 I travelled to Grand Cayman island where I worked with an organization concerned with the maritime heritage of the Caribbean: The Cayman Islands Maritime Heritage Foundation. This work included the initiation and administration of a skills development program as well as proposal writing and events planning.
In 2002, I studied in Cuba with the University of Havana. After a semester of advanced Spanish, I was living and volunteering with the Casa Guatemala organization in Rio Dulce. From Guatemala I traveled to Honduras to work with the Foundation for Higher Education on the Bay Islands. Here, I assisted with curriculum development and recruitment for a new university; the Bay Islands University. I was head of the English Language and Literature department and designed and taught a number of courses as well.
After six remarkable years of teaching in the tropics, I returned to Canada in 2004 to teach with the University of Vancouver Island. This was a transitional year back into the resourceful luxuries of a Canadian university. While my years teaching in Latin America and the Caribbean provided wonderful teaching challenges and opportunities to develop curriculum, I returned home to discover the world of internet communications and a wide range of new media tools for teaching.
When I began teaching for the University of British Columbia in 2005, I attended a number of workshops on teaching with technology and began to design my courses to include collaborative digital environments. In my Academic Writing course I included a section on ‘digital literacy’ and in my Canadian Literature class we presented a conference and produced a video on ‘Digital Literature’. In my 4th year Canadian Studies course I seriously challenged students to embrace a digital pedagogy that involved a project called ‘Creating Knowledge through Social Relationships’. If you are interested, you can take a look at some of the spaces that students created, and their evaluations of the course. You might also be interested in watching this five minute video of a presentation I gave on teaching with technology (just click on the photo of me).
Teaching for the Semester at Sea Global Studies Program (2008) has certainly been a highlight of my academic career. This international education program offers the opportunity to design field work in ten different countries. This short video, ‘With Respect’, is a story about our first field practicum in Brazil. I designed a course in digital storytelling and students also worked in production teams to create a nightly broadcast for the close circuit TV on board the ship which they called SEA TV. I am extremely proud of my Student Evaluations for SAS, and thankful for the experience.
El Camino de Santiago, Spain. 2006
South Africa. 2008
Belize, 2009
Brazil, 2008
