About Kristin

I am a Registered Early Childhood Educator, researcher, and curriculum developer with over ten years of professional experience spanning direct practice, program management, student supervision, and community-based education. I hold an Honours Bachelor of Early Childhood Leadership from Sheridan College (2026) and have spent the majority of my career at the Jean Tweed Centre, a community agency in Toronto serving women and children navigating addiction, trauma, and complex family circumstances. At Jean Tweed, I have worked across roles including Registered Early Childhood Educator, Interim Supervisor of Child Development Services, Practicum Supervisor, and Educational Group Facilitator - building a practice that is simultaneously grounded in daily work with children and families and oriented toward the systemic questions that shape how the field prepares its educators. I am a co-author of the Trauma-Informed Practice Workbook (Jean Tweed Centre, 2021), a resource that has since been adopted across early childhood education programs at Ontario colleges, and a presenter at the 3rd Annual FAHCS Research Symposium. I am currently pursuing opportunities in post-secondary ECE education, where I intend to bring the full depth of my practice, research, and curriculum development experience into the preparation of the next generation of early childhood educators.

My research is driven by a question I first encountered in my own practice: what shapes early childhood educators' preparedness to implement trauma-informed care, and what stands in the way of it? My research study, Trauma-Informed Care: Perspectives of Early Childhood Educators, investigates this question through a qualitative lens, using semi-structured interviews with Registered Early Childhood Educators in Southern Ontario to explore how post-secondary education, workplace conditions, and professional learning shape, or fail to shape, educator readiness to implement trauma-informed care. My findings identify the gap between theoretical preparation and practice-based readiness as a systemic concern rooted in program design, not individual deficit. Participants consistently pointed to insufficient practicum experience in community-based settings as a critical factor in their sense of unpreparedness. I work primarily with practitioners in community-based and family support contexts, and my research reflects a sustained commitment to amplifying the voices of educators who work in under-resourced settings with highly complex populations. My work sits at the intersection of trauma-informed practice, early childhood educator preparation, and equity in post-secondary education.

My approach to teaching is distinguished by three commitments that run through everything I do: to centre relationships before content, to design for access, and to treat practice as the site where learning becomes real. My pedagogy is inquiry-based and discussion-driven, structured around the belief that adult learners arrive with substantial knowledge and that my role is to create the conditions in which that knowledge can be examined, extended, and connected to theory - not to deliver content to a passive audience. I apply Universal Design for Learning principles not as a compliance framework but as a design orientation developed through years of facilitating curriculum for women for whom traditional educational formats could not be assumed - women navigating limited literacy, language barriers, and diverse learning needs, often in the same room. My trauma-informed pedagogical approach ensures that psychological safety precedes cognitive challenge in every learning environment I create - a principle I first developed in practice and later grounded in research. I have developed and manualized two original curricula, supervised ECE students on practicum placements, delivered community education programming at community agencies, and supervised a team of RECEs as an interim program leader. What distinguishes my practice above all is the understanding - informed by Dr. Bruce Perry's work on relational trauma - that every educator entering this field is a multiplier of safe, consistent, attuned relationships for children, and that the quality of their preparation is therefore never only about one educator, but about every child and family that educator will go on to serve.