Personal Interests

I love to travel. The banner photo above is a shot taken in the summer of 2016 in the Chelsea Physic Garden while enjoying the English sun (shameless Beatles reference). On that note, music is another major interest. I grew up on The Beatles; just before my tenth birthday I bought my first tape with my own money: Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band. I played in concert band and jazz band at St. Gerard and E.D. Feehan, and with the Saskatoon Jazz Society's Junior Jazz Band. While I never took to music theory with as much vigor as I did playing by ear with friends, I am now looking to continue my journey as a lifelong learner by tackling music theory in my spare time. I have a deep abiding interest in native-newcomer relations and history in Canada, and, of course, I love to read.

Background

I grew up in Saskatoon and have lived here all my life. As a kid at family gatherings I loved listening to the grown ups talk about politics and what was happening in the news. I grew up resisting temptations to prejudice and fear, and I have developed a social consciousness that utterly rejects oppressive and racist notions. After graduating high school in 2002 I joined the family business moving homes, and traveled northwestern Canada extensively. Seeing firsthand many of the economic, infrastructural, and societal issues in different communities was a shock, and made me want to understand how to reconcile the wondrous nation I was taught to celebrate with the harsh reality.

Although I considered becoming a teacher fresh out of high school, I was not ready for more education at the time. I came back to school in 2010, unsure of which direction to focus my energies. I considered journalism, law, history, political studies, and of course, education. During this time, I started working as a day-support for people with disabilities at Saskatchewan Alternative Initiatives, where I am currently employed. I feel my experiences working with people with disabilities has already been a huge asset in my everyday life in terms of developing and modeling empathy. As much as this has made me a better person, I'm sure it will help me build inclusive classrooms. Over 2014-15, I decided to go back to work full-time, and took a gap year to well and truly figure out which way to go in school.

I would like to briefly highlight some of the work in my undergraduate degree that I think will be particularly helpful to me as a teacher in regards to content, research skills, and use of technologies. In pursuit of my degree in history I had the honour of performing oral history research with elders on the Okanese and Peepeekisis First Nations for Okanese Chief Marie-Anne Daywalker-Pelletier in the spring of 2014. This research was supervised by professors Jim Miller and Bill Waiser. I have also studied early modern Europe, working as a research assistant for professor Lisa Smith on the University of Saskatchewan's Digital Research Centre project on Sir Hans Sloane's Correspondence. While studying with professor Smith, I was invited to publish my research on the The Recipes Project, a blog about food, science, magic, and medicine in the early modern period. Finally, I completed a course with professor Jim Clifford called Digital History, where I created a Blogger site documenting my work, and took a first shot at constructing a Wordpress site on Saskatoon's early architecture, utilizing Historypin and TimeLine.

Before making this page I hadn't used Google Sites. I have been thinking about using Google Classroom so I figured I'd give the new blog platform a shot to see how it might be used. I like the approachability. I'm not really great at making the internet look good (as you'll see if you look at my Wordpress page), but this new Google Sites is really easy to navigate and arrive at an aesthetically pleasing product. On the other hand, it's kinda limiting in its simplicity - which makes it a great starting point!

As I move into the second term of my third year in education, much of the course work is focusing on the development of computer skills. I plan to continue to develop with digital technologies to foster in students a literacy and competency with computers so that their use of devices and presence online as digital citizens in their communities can be productive, responsible and reflective.