Collaborative Professional Communities
This facility is the fulfillment of my desire to do something different in my community. After working in other centres, in multiple roles for nearly 20 years I decided to create a new space, I spent over a year researching, writing a funding proposal, securing a location, and a builder to renovate only to have my funding fall through. It was then that I turned to Community Futures and borrow money to complete this project. I suppose it’s fair to say, when I sink my teeth into something, I see it through. As this organization is in place to support young entrepreneurs and grow local business, I was now a business owner, much to my dismay. However, after 10 successful years, I feel very proud of the social enterprise I have co-constructed with many talented, vibrant, and passionate early childhood educators.
I had the absolute please to attend, volunteer and co-host a plenary session at this conference. It was such a privilege to meet so many wonderful, intelligent and passionate individuals who continent to come together, working collaboratively towards reimagining and transforming space in ECED.
Thompson University ECE Mentorship Project
I first signed up to participate in this project in the fall of 2019, prior to covid. During covid, the meaning and intention of mentorship took on new meaning, purpose and a greater sense of agency for change. I have continued to support and spend as much time as I am able, participating and contributing to this project. Offering articles, placed-based projects as well as working to disrupt old thinking, practices and theories in ECED. Provoking otherwise thinking is something I will continue to do in all my projects, as I am ill-contented to participate in conversations that are idle or disreputable to particular members of our community, and/or work to reify status quo practices in early childhood.
POTENTIA: UBC's ECED Student Journal
The UBC first, ECED student journal began as an idea in the summer of 2022. It was a ‘what if’ that what ‘picked up’ by Iris Berger and is currently transforming into a reality. At present our editorial committee consist of, Iris Berger, Lorrie Huston, Golda Lewin, Veronica Maclean, Simryn Mann, Nina Monahan.
It is our intention for POTENTIA to be ready for calls for publication as of May 2023! To read more about the values, goals and intentions of this journal click on the link below.
My Next Project...
Will require me to pay attention and think deeply about a future- as an unknowable space of promise. However, even as I work to ‘live in the moment’ the future lurks. I must, therefore not ignore my own agency or my position as an agent being, and the power my privilege affords me in narrating my own stories, for charting new paths, whilst attending, attuning and caring for and about how it all unravels –what it does, what it makes possible, and conversely, impossible.
It is here I make explicit my desire to instruct/teach ECE to share my knowledge and experience in a college and/or University in British Columbia.
Looking beyond BC, I am interested in ECE research projects, short-term contracts, sites where I can contribute meaningfully, and nurture my pedagogical interests and commitments.
I will continue to explore autoethnographic writing, as an academic scholar and feminist activist.
I have this idea that I might want to deep dive into a PHD in leadership. It occurs to me that this may be a way for me explore the ideas of what I have referred to as a new pedagogy of hope with/in ECE (As inspired by the multiple works of the esteemed feminist and post humanist professor and philosopher Rosie Braidotti).
