Teaching Philosophy

I believe adults learn best when learning feels grounded, relevant, and personally connected to who they already are. With over ten years of experience spanning community-based agencies, family support programs, student supervision, and licensed child care centre management, my approach to adult learning centers hands-on experiences, real-world case studies, and the deliberate bridging of theory and practice. What transforms understanding into action is the moment a student can locate abstract ideas inside their own lived experience. This conviction was deepened through my research, Trauma-Informed Care: Perspectives of Early Childhood Educators, in which RECEs consistently pointed to the gap between their post-secondary preparation and what the work actually required of them. When I design learning for adult learners, I draw on their own histories - including their experiences as children - as legitimate and valuable sources of knowledge, and I build environments where every learner's background is treated as an asset rather than a variable to be managed. Equity in the classroom is not a supplemental concern; it is the foundation.

I do not see my role as delivering content into students. If learning is not visible, I am not confident it is happening - and the clearest window into student understanding is participation. My approach is heavily discussion-based and inquiry-driven, because dialogue surfaces assumptions, challenges thinking, and makes comprehension visible in ways that passive delivery simply cannot. This approach was shaped significantly through my work manualizing and delivering curriculum for parenting groups on topics including attachment theory, social and emotional development in the early years, and food and nutrition. This experience required me to translate complex research into accessible, participatory learning for adult audiences with vastly different backgrounds and starting points. Alongside discussion, I design activities and brainstorming exercises that ask students to apply new concepts in real time, in the classroom, before they are expected to apply them on the floor with children. When students work through a concept together, debate it, and sit with the discomfort of not having a clean answer, they leave the room with something they actually own.

Equity and anti-bias work cannot live in a unit, a learning objective, or a dedicated lesson. They have to function as the lens through which everything is taught and learned. In practice, this means I do not wait for a formal conversation about bias to model equitable thinking - I make it present in how I frame a case study, whose voices I center in a discussion, and which examples I reach for when explaining a concept. My time working at the Jean Tweed Centre, supporting women and children who have experienced complex adversity, sharpened my understanding of how systems shape individual outcomes in ways that are rarely visible to those they do not affect. I carry that understanding into course and assessment design, consistently asking who this content is accessible to, whose experience it reflects, and whether the format of an evaluation is a fair measure of what a student actually knows. Equity is not something I teach about - it is something I teach through.

Reflective documentation is one of the most powerful tools I bring into my teaching practice. In ECE, documentation is not simply record-keeping, it is a way of making learning visible so that it can be examined, built upon, and shared. In my work supervising ECE students on practicum placement, I consistently used documentation as the primary site of learning rather than a secondary record of it. Rather than offering direct feedback after a difficult moment with a child, I asked students to document the moment first: what they observed, what they were thinking, and what the child's response revealed. That process of structured reflection produced more genuine insight than any evaluation form could capture, because the student arrived at the understanding themselves. I bring that same orientation into every adult learning context I enter: I ask learners to observe before they conclude, to record before they judge, and to use what they notice as the starting point for what comes next. Learning that cannot be articulated cannot yet be fully owned.

My passion for adult learning is inseparable from the work of Dr. Bruce Perry, whose research on relational trauma has profoundly shaped how I understand both children's healing and educator preparation. Perry's insight that the most effective interventions for traumatized children are those that increase the number and quality of relationships in their lives, and that the most important healing experiences do not occur in therapy but in consistent, patient, and loving care, sits at the center of everything I do. In my work delivering parenting programs, I felt the weight and the privilege of that idea directly: supporting caregivers to become more attuned, more informed, and more present is itself one of the most powerful interventions a child can receive. That same logic extends to ECE education. Every student entering this field is a multiplier of safe relationships, of attunement, of connection for every child and family they will go on to serve. Co-authoring the Trauma-Informed Practice Workbook, now adopted across Ontario college ECE programs, made that multiplier effect tangible for me in a new way. Contributing to the preparation of educators who will go on to be that consistent, safe presence for children is not something I take lightly. It is a privilege I do not take for granted, and it is why I teach.