About Me

I've been teaching ELA at J. H. Bruns Collegiate since 2002. In 2005 I was a founding member of the school's environmental group, ESP (the Earth Stewardship Program). Students worked on various projects: banning Styrofoam from the Division, starting a school-wide composting system, banning single-use plastic water bottles from the Division, and advocating for water-bottle filling stations in schools. In an effort to reach more students (and quite frankly, to stop having meetings once a week at 7:45 in the morning), I shifted the focus from an extra-curricular group to my classroom. The question I now ask each semester is, "Where is the environment in my curriculum, in my planning?"

In the spring of 2016, I attended a town hall hosted by the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change. There, I was introduced to a representative from the Green Action Centre who explained that his organization runs waste audits in schools. J. H. Bruns signed up and in the fall, we ran the first of two audits. I ran the project with my colleague, Norm Froemel, a geography teacher here at Bruns.

Then, the opportunity to get involved with this national inquiry project through Green Learning came about and I felt it lined up with the work we'd already started in the first semester. Part of our mission is to get our students in front of policy makers. We want our students to be "advocates and allies" for change, environmentally, socially, and economically. And so, what better way to do this but to have them connect with others, research climate change, and then create and share their findings.

I'm using a variety of texts for inspiration: Zoe Weil's The World Becomes What We Teach, Joel Westheimer's What Kind of Citizen? Educating Our Children for the Common Good, and Tony Wagner's Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World. My colleague Norm and I are really looking forward to getting to know everyone and to contributing to the success of the project.

• My Interests
  Climate Change, Education, Human Rights, Indigenous Peoples, LGBT Rights

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• Countries I've visited
  France      Italy      Portugal      United Kingdom