My interest in literacy and equity started out as a spark, long before I was even aware of these terms as concepts in the context of education. I attended secondary school in British Columbia the mid to late 1980s, and I have some pretty vivid memories from that time. As a peer tutor during my high school years, I remember awkwardly trying to support my peers who struggled with reading and writing. It wasn’t just awkward because of the typical teenage state-of-being. It was awkward because we were placed in the hallway where everyone could see who needed extra help. As if adolescence wasn’t agonizing enough. Working as peer tutor, I was struck by how many of my peers could understand the grade-level textbooks and novels that I read to them, and I recall wondering why they struggled so much to read the words themselves. And I wondered why they could tell me what they understood, but they couldn’t write the words that they spoke. I realized that many of the peers I supported were also the ones who struggled to stay engaged in the classroom. These were the kids who skipped class or who were often asked to leave class.
Later, after graduating from university, I worked as a facilitator in a community pre-employment program with young adults who faced multiple barriers (e.g. housing, food, and employment security; mental and physical health concerns; etc.), and then as a high school career advisor. Again, I noticed that sub-literacy (i.e. difficulty functioning in school and society due to challenges with reading and/or writing), was a common factor for the majority of the young people who struggled with school and other aspects of life. Some dropped out of school, some were placed in courses that did not prepare them for post-secondary training options, and many presented with challenging internalizing and/or externalizing behaviours that added to their academic challenges. I just couldn’t understand how these young people, who so often had many strengths, were unable to develop the foundational academic skills they needed. The questions I had about literacy and equity grew from a spark, into a flame.
When I made the decision to become a teacher, I knew I wanted to help make school a place where all students could thrive and belong. I was especially interested in learning about literacy, as I already had a sense that this was a key contributor to success at school, and in life. I specialized in learning disabilities during my teacher education program in the late 1990s, and then completed a two year post-baccalaureate diploma in special education soon after I started teaching. I learned a lot, but I didn’t really get the answers I was seeking about the literacy challenges so many of my students presented with. For over a decade, I worked hard, often collaborating with colleagues and parents, to try to address the barriers that many of my students faced. It was very apparent to me that the students who struggled to acquire and demonstrate foundational academic skills (i.e. reading, writing and mathematics), also often struggled with social-emotional skills. Indeed, these factors seemed to reinforce each other. I continued my learning, taking every professional development opportunity I could to better support diverse learners and I learned even more from doing the actual work with students, fanning the flames of the fire that started out as a spark.
Almost all of my time as a classroom and special education teacher occurred when public education in British Columbia saw deep cuts stemming from the 2002 changes to the teachers’ union contract language, which would eventually be deemed unlawful by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2016. It wasn’t perfect before January 2002, but what was already a difficult job, became even more difficult with the changes and cuts that were made. During my 13 years as a teacher, I learned how hard it is to engage, teach, and assess a diverse learners who have cognitive, academic and social-emotional abilities ranging from a primary level to university level, often in one classroom. I learned about the countless hours, often outside of the regular work day, that are involved in creating Individual Education Plans for students who have designated special needs, and informal plans for many more who clearly needed support, but didn’t meet the criteria for designation in our school system. I learned how to get by with unmanageably high case loads of students who needed additional support, and how to live with the tremendous guilt that came from knowing the plans I created and co-created with my colleagues often did not fully address students’ needs, particularly when it came to actually improving the foundational literacy and numeracy skills that they so often lacked. I learned how overwhelming and impossible it is to create education assistant schedules to meet several students’ complex needs with too few staff, while recognizing that some of those staff have no training or experience. I learned how it feels to lie awake at night, wondering what more could be done to support the students who try to cope with their repeated academic failures in increasingly challenging (and often harmful) ways. Ultimately, I learned what it feels like to know that your best efforts just aren’t enough sometimes, but this didn’t dampen the fire I had to keep learning, and to persist.
Refusing to walk away from public education or to give in to the waves of hopelessness that came over me at times, I started working toward a masters degree in school psychology, while continuing to teach. Working directly with students while doing my coursework allowed me to keep my focus on making improvements for the students who struggled to have success at school, and slowly, I began to see how I could affect systemic change through a new lens. It was the individual and collective stories of the students I worked with that pushed me to learn about the cognitive processes involved in learning and engagement, the impact of academic skills on mental health and student outcomes, the science of learning and literacy development, and the role of executive function on student success at school. The amazing children and youth I worked with over the course of my career to this point remained central to my drive to explore and embrace culturally responsive, evidence-based, science-informed and trauma-informed practices, which I think of as the “logs” that added to my growing fire.
From 2012 through 2023, I worked as a certified school psychologist, employed under teacher’s contract. In this role, I had the privilege of working on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Haida, Tsimshian, Haisla, Gitxsan, Dakelh, Tsilhqot’in, and Secwepemc peoples, in several public schools on the islands of Haida Gwaii, and in the communities of the Coast Mountains and Cariboo-Chilcotin regions. Since becoming a school psychologist, it has become clear to me that positive relationships and trust are key to the practice of school psychology and there is far more to this work than administering and interpreting standardized tests. Accurate diagnoses, conclusions and recommendations depend on taking the time to consider a variety of biological, social and ecological factors of the students who are referred. Culture and language differences, socio-economic status, immediate and generational trauma, poverty, ineffective instruction and/or health issues are just some of the factors that can significantly impact learning and progress. This work takes patience and time, and when working in communities that also have drastic, chronic shortages in education, and every social service and health related sector, the challenges are vast.
After reviewing hundreds of students’ files and working with many students and educators in K-12 schools across British Columbia for over a decade, I noticed that the problems many students, teachers and school communities faced weren’t actually that unique or distinct from each other. The kids, families, schools, cultures and communities were unique and distinct, but many of the factors that made learning difficult for so many students, were systemic. I realized that decades of scientific understandings and evidence about literacy development and learning were not reaching educators through their formal training and professional development – there was a disconnect between research and practice. I already knew that had to step out of traditional teacher education and professional development to access the information I desperately sought and needed as a teacher, and it became strikingly apparent that I was not the only one who was not provided with this essential information during my formal teacher education and professional development opportunities. This realization was the catalyst that prompted me to begin providing professional development about science and trauma informed literacy education (STILE) to my educator colleagues.
Before long, it became clear that providing professional development in my own district and through psycho-educational assessment recommendations was not enough. I knew I needed to do more, which is why I made the move into teacher education at the post-secondary level in 2021. As a Senior Instructor in the School of Education at the University of Northern British Columbia, and more recently, as a temporary instructor in the Literacy, Language and Learning Graduate Diploma Program at Vancouver Island University, I have the honour of working with dedicated practicing teachers and pre-service teachers from across British Columbia, and beyond. I have the utmost respect for teachers and the work that they do, as I know first hand, how challenging and important it is – education is critical to a thriving, equitable and just society. For these reasons, it is paramount that I provide current, scientifically-sound, culturally-responsive, trauma-informed and evidence-based information, resources and practices through the courses I teach.
Contrary to the opinion of some in the education sector, being science-informed and grounded in evidence does not mean that teachers should not have autonomy in their classrooms, or that instructional practices and policies aligned with the scientifically-sound evidence are rigid, one-size-fits-all, clinical, colonial and devoid of play and joy. In fact, I would argue that educators cannot truly have autonomy or be culturally-responsive so that they may move toward truly equitable practices unless they understand how human learning happens and how literacy develops from a science-informed perspective. Ample evidence and work in this space to support this notion has already been done and is ongoing. (To name a few, see some of the work from Zaretta Hammond, Julie Washington and Mark Seidenberg, Noel Pearson, Elsa Cardenas-Hagen, Julia O’Sullivan and Kareem Weaver.) There is no room for swinging pedagogical pendulums, politics, ideology, or beliefs and opinions that are not evidence-based.
After four decades of being involved in public education in British Columbia, in some capacity, it is clear that we have come a long way toward making schools work better for more students, and it is also clear that we still have a lot of work to do. Far too many students are struggling to acquire and demonstrate foundational academic skills. The achievement gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners is not closing (see the latest How Are We Doing Report? from the First Nations Education Steering Committee), and students who are already marginalized due to factors such as neuro-diversity and developmental exceptionalities (including dyslexia), language and cultural differences and low socio-economic status, suffer most. Yes, we lack control over many of the factors that contribute to the challenges students, teachers and school communities face, which is precisely why we need to focus on what we can control. We must consider how we might change our educational and instructional policies and practices to align with what the scientifically-sound evidence about literacy, and learning in general, is telling us. There is just too much at stake not to. It is going to take a concerted, coordinated effort from government, university faculties, administrators, teachers, specialists and other colleagues in various positions in our schools to make the needed systemic changes happen. Thankfully, there is room around the fire for all of us.
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. – William Butler Yeats
Psyched Up North 
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