Siva has been with our team since 2023, helping to direct our communication team. He is an educator and community organizer, and his work largely focuses on building community relationships and accountability through storytelling as a form of collective care and knowledge production. Siva's community work comes from a strong belief in self and community healing through storytelling to commit to accessing our ancestral memory. He is an Eelam Tamil refugee currently settled on the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of New Credit, where he pursues a Ph.D. at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Curriculum and Pedagogy, with a focus on Indigenous Education and Decolonization. 

Christine has been with our team since 2023, helping to direct our communication team. She is a second-year MEd Curriculum & Pedagogy student passionate about psychology and education. Xiran graduated with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from UBC in 2019, where she learned about the “blank state” theory, which provoked her interest in education. Since then, she has worked as an educational consultant with international students and new immigrants, supporting them to navigate emotional, social, and familial challenges related to academic planning. Christine is passionate about culturally-responsive approaches to teaching and learning and is interested in developing more skills as a novice researcher. 

Qiongli (Lisa) has been with the care collective since 2022, helping to write our past newsletter, host monthly socials, and volunteer at our 2023 What Next? career event. She is a second-year flex-time PhD student in Curriculum & Pedagogy in CTL. She is an Associate Professor at Hainan University in China and had been teaching and doing research at the university for 16 years prior to furthering her studies at OISE. Her research interests center on teacher professional development, student learning experience, and career planning. As an international student committed to enhancing students’ learning experiences, Qiongli has been engaged in various initiatives at UofT. For instance, she played multiple roles, such as initiating and co-designing several events aimed at supporting graduate students during and post the COVID-19 pandemic. She also served as the Co-Chair of the OISE Library Student Advisory Committee (2020-2021) and the Financial Coordinator at CTLSA (2020-2022). Currently, Lisa is taking on a leadership role within the student-led care collective, where she is actively contributing to fostering a supportive and inclusive learning community. She is a mentor in the mentorship program in the OISE Alumni Association.

Thacze (pronounced Tha-xi) is a first year M.Ed. candidate in the Higher Education program (specializing in Student Development and Student Services). She is a GA for the LHAE department. In her free time, she enjoys crafting and gardening (when it’s warm enough to do so 😅)! 

David has been with our team since 2023, helping to direct our event planning team. He is beginning his fourth year as a flex-time doctoral student in the Languages and Literacies Education program in CTL. David's research interests focus on English-language teacher education, emotions, and professional identity. In addition to his studies at OISE, he teaches EAP and TESL full-time at Humber College. With course work completed, he aims to stay connected with OISE peers through this collective and its academic and social support activities. Outside of school and work, David loves to run, enjoy the arts, and share laughs with others.

Danielle Denichaud is part of the events team. She is honoured to walk, play and work in Tkarón:to, the original Lands of the Anishinaabe, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas of the Credit River Peoples. In support of cultivating compassionate caring in our suffering world, Danielle stewards languages of movement, social justice, deep-ecology, herbalism and peace. When she is not writing sentences for her doctoral research, she is privileged to dance with youth at the Pia Bouman School and work as a Conscious Bodies facilitator/knowledge mobilizer for Dreamwalker Dance Company. A devoted community member of The Living Centre: Eco-Spiritual Education Sanctuary, Danielle celebrates Solstices, Equinoxes and Moon Cycles as practices of re-membering herself as a daughter of the Earth. She finds joy in blending and drinking herbal tea; eating raw chocolate; watching period films, nature and space documentaries; wandering in forests and swimming in Lakes.

Syd is part of the event planning team. They are a first-year PhD student in the Social Justice Education program. They are still figuring out their PhD research, but in the meantime, they have been reading and thinking a lot about sex education, masculinities, and queerness. Syd loves to make things, whether it is knitting, sewing, cooking, baking, or generally just being creative with their hands. They are so excited to build a caring, supportive, and inclusive academic community at OISE.

Lindsay founded this care collective in 2020 and has coordinated events and resource development since then. She is an educator and a full-time 5th Year PhD candidate in Curriculum & Pedagogy in CTL, who researches softness and femme educational futurities through dream-mapping. Since starting her PhD, she has worked as a sessional course instructor at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), an Assistant Editor with Curriculum Inquiry, a co-coordinator for queer/trans@OISE, and a Teaching Assistant at OISE and New College. Prior to doing research, she worked in private and public schools in BC as well as taught in a fly-in Oji-Cree community in northern Ontario. She’s passionate about fostering critical and compassionate learning communities and loves to write poetry, watch terrible tv, go for nature walks, dance in her kitchen with her partner, and hang with friends in her spare time. 

Claudio worked as a core member with the care collective from 2020-2023, and still supports in anyway he can. He coordinated our first speaker series in 2021-22 and our 2023 career exploration event. He is a Ph.D. candidate at OISE, University of Toronto, in the Languages & Literacies Education (LLE) program. Claudio has been a teacher educator at the university level for 18 years. He holds an MA in TEFL and has also participated in the Curriculum and Assessment unit of the Ministry of Education in Chile, where he designed the English language curriculum for Grade-11 and 12 of the national curriculum. His research interests focus on understanding in educational settings how neoliberal inequity, specifically in the English language hidden curriculum, relates to students' learning experiences and their teachers' teaching experiences. In other words, how additional language education reproduces and expands those neoliberalism-oriented narratives that make inequity invisible within the curriculum and how school members justify and resist them. Other interests pivot around critical applied linguistics and pedagogy, Freirian approaches to language learning, anti/decolonial approaches to education and curriculum, critical action research, narrative inquiry and critical ethnography in school settings.

Chun helped out with the care collective from 2022-2023 and still supports us in anyway they can. Chun works full time and is a MEd part-time student in Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning. Chun’s vision and joy revolve around helping graduate students on their journeys of “remembering who they are.” Chun is deeply passionate about helping others develop a sense of belonging at OISE. As an organizational learning and development specialist, Chun brings the experience and expertise to support the OISE Care Collective’s mission of building a supportive graduate community.