Two �첥��Ƶ community members – Professor Satinder Kaur Brar and Faculty of Education PhD candidate Anna Pearson – have been recognized with a 2024 Minister’s Award of Excellence from Ontario’s Ministry of Colleges and Universities.

The annual awards celebrate the work of faculty and staff at publicly assisted colleges and universities who are making a difference in students’ lives, in their communities and in the province. This year, there were more than 170 nominations and only six recipients selected, including professors, researchers and post-secondary leaders.

Brar, a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at York’s , received the award in the category of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The category recognizes faculty and staff who work with industry and business to drive economic development in Ontario.

A globally recognized leader in green technologies for removing contaminants from drinking water and wastewater, Brar was recognized for her pioneering research in enzyme-based environmental remediation. Working in collaboration with researchers at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique and engineering consulting firm TechnoRem Inc., Brar helped develop and implement a faster, more sustainable method for cleaning petroleum-contaminated sites using enzymes rather than traditional microorganisms. The method, which is 100 times faster and achieves an 80 per cent reduction in contaminants without toxic residues, is especially effective in cold northern climates where other microorganisms are less viable.

The approach has been supported by the Federal Contaminated Sites Action Plan and is already in use at several polluted sites across Canada, addressing surface water, groundwater and soil contamination. “Once it [the method for cleaning sites] gets into the field, that is where the real magic starts,” says Brar, noting how rewarding it is for her team to see their lab work result in real-world environmental improvements.

She describs receiving the award as a “fantastic surprise” and emphasizes the recognition is a shared achievement with her research team. “It’s a great boost for them to understand that whatever we do in the lab does see light of the day at some point,” she says.

Brar also highlights the importance of collaboration with stakeholders and industry. “This kind of recognition reinforces the belief that we can transition from lab to field,” she says, “and when we see the results in the field, it can have fantastic repercussions.”

Pearson, a PhD candidate at York, received the award in the category of Future-Proofing Ontario’s Students. The category highlights individuals whose work helps students build the skills and resilience needed for success in a rapidly evolving world.

Pearson, who has taught in both elementary and secondary settings across Ontario for nearly two decades, was recognized for her contributions to program design, policy leadership and community-based learning initiatives aimed at preparing teacher candidates to meet the demands of a changing educational landscape.

Reflecting on the award, she credits those who shaped her own academic path. “It means I've had some wonderful teachers in my life,” she says. “And it also means that now I'm giving my students the same kind of mentorship that I received.”

She also sees the recognition as an opportunity for thoughtful evaluation. “It means that I have an opportunity to see what's working and what's not,” she says. “And that's the hard part.”

Brar and Pearson’s achievements exemplify �첥��Ƶ’s commitment to excellence in teaching, innovation and societal impact.

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In a new article published in the Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education, Faculty of Education Professor Dr. Molade Osibodu explores how mathematics classrooms continue to marginalize Black students in Ontario.

Titled “What’s Black Got to Do with It?”, the study investigates the experiences of eight Black secondary students in the Greater Toronto Area, uncovering how math spaces remain shaped by antiblackness, despite recent policy changes like the 2020–2021 move to destream Grade 9 math. Students described having to constantly prove their intelligence, encountering racialized assumptions about ability, rarely seeing Black math teachers, and facing silence around social issues in class.

Dr. Osibodu’s work offers critical insight into the structural barriers Black learners face and points toward more inclusive, responsive teaching practices in mathematics education.

Read the full article here:

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A study saw racialized students in Ontario French immersion programs write monologues and stories about their experiences, and also invited immersion stakeholders like teachers and parents to give feedback on race and racism in Ontario immersion programs.

continue about the successes and challenges with French immersion programs across English-speaking parts of Canada.

Programs are criticized for being elitist by some and praised for being exceptional by others.

My master’s research , finding that program locations favoured middle-class students, curricula demonstrated a Eurocentric focus and colonial lens and program entry-points favoured established residents over newcomers.

My PhD work research has relied upon a collective creation research method known to propose ways French immersion programs can be more culturally responsive and anti-racist.

Read the full article written by �첥��Ƶ Faculty of Education Phd candidate Marika Kunnas on

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The number of international students in Canada has over the last decade, contributing approximately , and an estimated in annual revenues to Canadian universities.

Pegged by the federal government as a key source of talent for the growth and sustenance of the Canadian economy, international students are sought to relieve our national demographic imbalance created by an .

�䲹�Բ��岹’s also seeks international students to address our skilled labour shortages.

The question, however, is not whether international students are needed, but rather if they are valued.

Read the full article written by PhD candidate Isaac Garcia-Sitton on .

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So, as a mature PhD student who further wanted to connect with new local communities and offer back their Arts experience, naturally the Narratives in/of Costa Rica: Individuals, Communities and their Voices course caught their eye. Taught by Professor Alejandro Zamora and offered at the Las Nubes �첥��Ƶ campus in Costa Rica, the course offered an immersive focus through narrative work into Costa Rica and its local communities.

“We held classes at York’s campus in Costa Rica, which was in the mountains in a rainforest,” says Newbigging. “There were 16 students, and we stayed with local families in home-stay for the 10 days. The course was all about storytelling, related to ideas about Costa Rica and community there.”

Following an open-ended and flexible format, the course encouraged students to learn from the local and Indigenous communities via travel logs and interviews. Students kept ongoing journals and received prompts to further immerse themselves in their new environments and cultures. The final assignment was a travel log documenting their experience.

“While we were there, we were pretty much busy all day and into the evening,” Newbigging recounts. “It was a pretty intense experience, and days started at 8:00 a.m. It gets light there early, so people tend to get up in their homes at 4:30—5:00 a.m. The family I stayed with was on a farm, and have dairy cattle... so, they’re up early.”

For Newbigging, it would be the home-stay situation and environment itself—the “container,” as they would term in their work—that would prove the most fascinating subject for their own final assignment. They said they particularly appreciated how the professor was open to different media formats, too—ranging from video form, to written stories, to documentary-style interviewing and photo essays. In Newbigging’s case, it would be a 16-page comic book about their time as a home-stay with this local more-traditional, Catholic family living in rural Costa Rica.

The family was primarily made up of a straight married couple and their granddaughter, but the farm doors would be open to the lush and vibrant rainforest all day, with grandsons, daughters and farm work friends coming and going—a scene ripe with inspiration for an artist focusing on queerness and travelling abroad. Prior to beginning the course, Newbigging had already been drawing comics and thinking about autobiography and childhood memory—particularly the childhood experiences of queerness and trauma.

“So, the course, for me, let me get out of my head for a while,” Newbigging says. “To think about other people’s stories, other people’s lives, but in a way that circles back to my work. The story I made out of being there was about a traditional family context—living there, but coming out in that situation. It relates back to my dissertation work around queerness and childhood and disclosure, so it was a nice opportunity to zone in on a particular experience to show, and to figure out how to write about it. It brought the tension into sharp focus.”

For Newbigging, it would be a project that was both immensely positive, yet challenging. As their own story was one of authenticity in the face of perceived difference, they reflected in particular about their audience, and with whom to share their work. As part of their work, they sketched and drew in the home, including pictures of one of the hosts, the wife and mother of the household, working in her kitchen. 

“She was really kind and generous and interested in what I was doing, and so I wanted to share drawings with her,” Newbigging said. “The question became: Do I share the whole book with her? This whole story? Which is a kind of another level of coming out about how I felt. It’s another form of intercultural exchange.”

They recall a special moment early in their trip in which their host showed them how she made cheese. “I could see she was really proud of this, and that she was actually sharing. She was being her authentic self. So that space made me feel more welcome to take a chance on sharing more about myself.”

Newbigging believes their story can be relevant to a Toronto audience as well, who reside in a city that already knows much about diversity of cultural backgrounds, and about diversity specifically in values and ideas around queerness. For Newbigging, the story explores the context one is in and how one perceives said space to be safe.

Beyond their final assignment, Newbigging also had the opportunity to lead a comics workshop for non-artists in the local community center library. The workshop was attended by all of their peer students from York, as well as community members.

“I’m really glad that happened. It was very well received,” Newbiggings says. "I got to see what the local people who attended were drawing, and I would be really interested in going back through the same program in a subsequent year to do more of that—perhaps a week-long workshop with the local community members to get them making comics and distributing some kind of comic books of their own creation."

“Thats’s something I would like to see if we can follow up on and continue.”

Article by Dennis Bayazitov special contributing writer

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Housing affordability and homelessness are hot topics in municipal politics these days. But ironically, unhoused citizens are left out of the civic debate that most impacts their lives.

As Ontario approaches municipal elections in October, our concept of “the public” is needed to remind us of our commitment not only to the  but to one another.

Toronto City Council has engaged in several heated debates this year ,   in the city. The same is true in many Canadian cities.

What comes up, again and again, are comments about “citizens” or “residents” of our cities. Much of the time, councillors, media pundits and journalists use these words to refer to people with adequate housing. Emergency shelter-hotels were unfair to  Encampments disrupt the lives of 

In a speech given during one of these debates in April 2022, Toronto Coun. Shelley Carroll asked the question: “Who is the public?”

Read the full article authored by �첥��Ƶ Graduate Program in Education Ph.D. candidate Timothy Martin in .

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Faculty of Education course director Dr. Lorin Schwarz is the recipient of an awarded membership presented by the . Schwarz received the award after attending a conference sponsored by the International Psychohistory Forum earlier this spring.   

While attending the conference, Schwarz asked a few questions and engaged with the speakers. Afterwards, he wrote to the organizer, Paul Elovitz, thanking him for organizing and putting on such a dynamic and informative weekend of speakers and conversation. “I usually do that when I can because organizing a conference is such a big deal, I think organizers deserve some support, but in this case, it was really a good conference and I wanted to let them know how much it meant to me,” said Schwarz.   

Elovitz wrote back saying that he was glad it was meaningful and that Schwarz’s contribution to the discussion was noticed. He then asked Schwarz to write a review of what he learned from the conference for their journal . Schwarz obliged and was awarded a membership presented by the International Psychohistory Forum based on his written review. Another �첥��Ƶ scholar, Jun Lu, a Ph.D. student in the Social and Political Thought program was a co-recipient of the award.  

 “Applying Freudian ideas to the study of history offers the same insight and advantage that an attention to interiority provides for the teacher: when we remember that everyone has an unconscious, that there's always more going on than we know, that we carry invisible histories around with us --and that the emotional world is always at play in everything that happens and how we react to what we encounter, we then act in ways that hold the possibility for more thoughtful, compassionate and rational relations with the world and with ourselves,” says Schwarz on how he applies Freudian thinking towards teaching. “Psychoanalytic thinking offers a chance for us to choose complexity over superstition and an "us against them" mentality, dynamic experience overtaken-for-grantedness, and care --perhaps even love? -- over a sense of isolation and indifference.” 

The Psychohistory Forum is an international group of scholars who apply psychoanalytic thinking and the ideas of Freud to engage with and better understand, history and culture. For more information visit their website at .

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Jermaine Brown became Toronto’s 15th homicide victim of 2006. His murderers shot him five times — once in each of his legs, twice in his torso; the final bullet maliciously tunnelled through his neck and out of his side.

Jermaine Brown was my older brother.

I often imagine how he felt, as he laid on the cold concrete, motionless as the life left his body. The pain. The fear. The loneliness.

It always brings me back to the profound sadness and anger I felt when I was 15. The restless nights where my mind would do nothing but wander and cogitate revenge. That was a word I fixated on — revenge — a word that began to govern each of my breaths. I was slipping down an emotional slide from which a return could be impossible.

This emotional slide is not unique to me. It is a commonplace narrative of despondency among youth in the  of Toronto — a neighbourhood where nearly a quarter of residents are on social assistance and high school graduation rates are low.

Mental health and emotional intelligence must be a focus in communities like this — communities that are home to marginalized Black youth.

If it wasn’t for basketball, a few caring mentors and teachers, family and my brother’s constant reminder to, “focus on ball and school… be the best,” .

As a teacher with the Toronto District School Board and a Ph.D. candidate in �첥��Ƶ’s Faculty of Education, I now focus my research on mental health and its influence on the success of Black youth throughout our education system.

I am also the co-founder of a program called .

Read the full article written by Ph.D. student Dwayne Brown (Faculty of Education, �첥��Ƶ) in .

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The inspiration for this article was born of frustration and heartache. It follows the murders of four intergenerational members of the Afzaal/Salman family that left a nine-year-old child injured and orphaned in London, Ont., on June 6, 2021.

It also follows ongoing injustice related to state-sanctioned racism of Bill 21 in Québec and a rash of hate attacks in Alberta, most of them targeting Black Muslim women in hijab. This year at least nine attacks in Edmonton were reported to police, seven of which resulted in criminal charges.

There is ongoing silence and erasure when it comes to anti-Muslim hate and Islamophobia in the education systems we and our loved ones inhabit. Although there is no one static understanding or definition of Islamophobia, we recognize it as a form of racism, structural and individual, that is rooted in long histories of empire and colonization.

We should examine multiple dimensions of Islamophobia that build and shape the realities of Muslim people through policy, social and economic structures and public representations across institutions and around the world. These manifestations shape the representations of Muslims and their embodied experience of “Muslimness” in Canada. It’s important to consider Islamophobia not only in daily hate crimes but also in daily indignities, silencing and injuries to Muslims’ sense of self and well-being.

Read the full article co-authored by �첥��Ƶ Faculty of Education Ph.D. candidate Nada Aoudeh on .

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Already a month into the school year, and after two years of disrupted learning by COVID-19, students with special education needs have been deeply affected. Individual education plans (IEPs) have become a crucial part of the education system. And the number of students on IEPs is growing across Ontario public schools.

IEPs are created for students who are defined as exceptional, in order to consider their individual needs (whether behavioural, communicative, physical, intellectual) and support their optimal learning potential.

An exceptional student in education refers to a child who has been identified as gifted or as having a disability. Many children who are not identified as exceptional can still have an IEP that is “non-identitified.” This allows them to receive special supports within their educational journeys.

If an IEP is inaccurate, a child’s learning needs will not be met. IEPs are meant to be constructed by a team of professionals in collaboration with parents, as each stakeholder has different information about the child. Parents who have busy schedules may not feel as though they can make a valuable contribution to their child’s education and discussions about an IEP. Or they may lack the awareness of their parental rights when it comes to participating in the IEP process. This means they may be wrongly left out of the conversation.

Read the full article written by �첥��Ƶ Faculty of Education Ph.D. Student Tori Trajanovski on .

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