Congratulations to Chris Stewart on a Successful Oral Defence (EdD Dissertation)

Please join us in congratulating Chris Stewart who successfully defended her EdD Dissertation on February 27 of 2026, in the Sty-Wet-Tan Great Hall.

Title:
A Place of Story: Teaching, Learning, Watching and Resistance:

A TribalCrit Perspective on the Professional Lives of Aboriginal BC Public School Teachers

Abstract:
This dissertation explores the lived professional experiences of sixteen Indigenous teachers working in British Columbia’s K–12 public school system and the meanings they made of these experiences. Guided by Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) and Indigenous Storywork, the study engages with how the participants spoke their truths about belonging and exclusion, cultural and curricular struggles, resilience, and racism within schools. The study uses a qualitative methodology grounded in Storywork’s principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted online during the coronavirus pandemic with teachers from five regions in British Columbia: the North, Vancouver Island, the Interior, Fraser Valley, and Vancouver Coastal. After conducting a thematic analysis, in combination with intuitive listening, the teachers’ stories were woven into three composite counter-stories. The composites not only helped to protect confidentiality; the approach also became a form of cultural practice, by weaving many voices into shared truth. The counter-stories include two narrative orators, Raven, a sharp observer who calls out colonial contradictions, and Bear, a grounded witness who reflects on love, care, and persistence. Together, Raven and Bear guide the reader through the teachers’ experiences in the findings chapter. The findings take the form of three counter-stories. “Speaking into Silence” reveals how colonial institutions attempt to silence Indigenous presence and voice, often through neglect, tokenism, or lateral violence. “Love as Resistance” highlights the emotional labour and spiritual resilience needed to create relational and culturally safe spaces within schools, while “Holding the Door Open” addresses the teachers’ roles in Indigenous curriculum, leadership, policy advocacy, and cultural resurgence, acknowledging their efforts to reform the public education system from within. The dissertation contributes to literature on Indigenous teacher experiences in Canada by offering a narrative, relational, and theory-informed account of how Indigenous educators navigate systemic racism while creating spaces of cultural strength and community care. This study offers recommendations for school districts, teacher education programs, and provincial policymakers committed to reconciliation, equity, and Indigenous educational sovereignty.

Supervisory Committee:

Dr. Deirdre Kelly
Dr. Ahenakew Cash
Dr. Stack Michelle
Dr. Larry Kuehn

We are thankful for the Examining Committee’s contribution and expertise.

Dr. Shauneen Pete, First Nations University of Canada, External Examiner

Dr. Helen Brown, Nursing, University Examiner

Dr. Hartej Gill, Educational Studies, University Examiner

Dr. Rebecca Todd, Chair of Examination Committee

Congratulations Chris!

Congratulations to Sahib Singh Tulsi on a Successful Oral Defence (PhD Dissertation)

Please join us in congratulating Sahib Singh Tulsi who successfully defended the PhD Dissertation on February 26 of 2026.

Title:
Hostels, Hope, and Home: Belonging and Educational Journeys among Adivasi Youth in Bastar, Central India

Abstract:
In Bastar, central India, education has become a key pathway through which Adivasi youth navigate questions of identity, belonging, and aspiration. This study examines the lived experiences of youth who have moved from their home villages to urban centres, residing in hostels for Adivasi students while pursuing secondary education in government schools. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork across these spaces, I explore how schooling and hostel life shape young people’s everyday lives, relationships, and orientations in a region marked by economic strain, political conflict, and histories of marginalisation. Attending to their daily lives, I trace how youth mobilise education to cultivate practices of learning, socialisation, and care that express both continuity and recalibration within their social worlds.

Informed by critical youth and Adivasi studies, and grounded in an ethnographic approach, I foreground the perspectives, longing, and self-understandings of 12 Adivasi youths aged 14-19. Amidst a changing institutional landscape, hostels emerge as sites of community and routine, of laughter, friendship, and possibility. In hostels, youth learn to share, negotiate power dynamics, and find ways to hold on to home while living away from it. Their stories, crafted through movement between village and city, and between the familiar and the unknown, reveal the frictions between the promises of education, the desire for mobility, and the uncertainty of what education may ultimately provide. These movements illuminate how young people’s senses of self and place are entwined with the moral and affective worlds of their families.

This study situates these narratives within the broader processes of Adivasi education, youth, and the politics of schooling. It demonstrates how education in Bastar is an institutional endeavour, influenced by the State’s role, systemic inequalities, and the sociocultural meanings attached to learning. At the same time, it shows how young people live and imagine education: as hope, as struggle, and as a way of becoming. Their intimate journeys, embedded in waiting, ambivalence, and endurance, offer a portrait of how Adivasi youth inhabit and transform the unequal terrain of education and belonging in contemporary Bastar.

Supervisory Committee:

Dr. Handel Wright, Supervisor
Dr. Lisa Loutzenheiser
Dr. Sara Shneiderman

We are thankful for the Examining Committee’s contribution and expertise.

Dr. Uma Pradhan, University College London, External Examiner

Dr. Sunera Thobani, Department of Asian Studies, University Examiner

Dr. Bathseba Opini, Department of Educational Studies, University Examiner

Dr. Judith Lynam, Chair of Examination Committee

As supervisor of his doctoral studies, I wish to convey the information that on February 26, 2026, Sahib Singh Tulsi successfully defended his PhD dissertation. This factual statement is also quite an understatement, given that Sahib was exceptional in his summary of the dissertation and his discussion of his work at the oral defence. The combination of a particularly well written and insightful dissertation and a confident, engaging defence made for praise for both and the uncommon result of a “pass with no revisions.” I invite you to join me in expressing hearty congratulations to Sahib and sincere thanks to the committee members, Drs. Lisa Loutzenheiser (EDCP) and Sara Shneiderman (Anthropology) who helped Sahib shape the dissertation, the external examiner, Dr. Uma Pradhan (University College London) and UBC examiners, Drs. Sunera Thobani (Asian Studies) and Bathseba Opini (EDST) for their rigorous engagement with Sahib’s dissertation at the defence, and Dr. Judith Lynam (Nursing) for chairing and ensuring the defence ran smoothly.

Handel Wright.

Congratulations Sahib!

Public Presentation of Graduate Research on Leadership Practices 2026

https://edst.educ.ubc.ca/events/event/public-presentation-of-graduate-research-on-leadership-practices-2026/

Yang, Aine Yanyan

Aine Yanyan Yang is a PhD student in EDST with a focus on Philosophy and Education. Her research interests lie in philosophy of education, focusing on democracy, conflict, and freedom, with particular attention to how neoliberalism reshapes freedom and absorbs forms of resistance in higher education. She is currently developing a research question that will guide her doctoral work. Before joining UBC, she completed her master’s degree in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2025.

Supervisor: Dr. Claudia Ruitenberg

Cheng, Siyi

I am a PhD candidate in Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. My work lives at the intersection of student development, higher education internationalization, and global migration.

My doctoral research investigates the identity transformation of Chinese International Doctoral Students in Social Sciences and Humanities in Western academy. My dissertation employs narrative inquiry to explore how these students navigate the discourse dissonance and troublesome knowledge encountered in Western academia. I am particularly interested in “identity as becoming”, a framework that views this as an iterative process of self-making influenced by personal biography, migration, and academic self-formation.

My professional practice is deeply informed by my doctoral research on academic/professional socialization, adult learning theories, and SSHRC project experience with immigrant engineers in BC. Currently, I serve as an cooperative education faculty at Northeastern University Vancouver, where I support the engineering students through industry partnerships and co-op curriculum.

I am full of curiosity and seeks to understand the world through new perspectives. Previously, I studied across multiple disciplines, including M.A. in Pacific & Asian Studies from University of Victoria and dual Bachelor’s degrees in English Education and Sociology from East China Normal University. Recently, I have discovered dancing and embodied movement as a new way of seeing and relating to myself and the world.

New Article: Mona Gleason and Tamara Gene Myers, “Settler Stalling: Integrated Schooling and the “Native Conferences” of the Royal Commission on Family and Children’s Law in British Columbia”

Mona Gleason and Tamara Gene Myers, “Settler Stalling: Integrated Schooling and the “Native Conferences” of the Royal Commission on Family and Children’s Law in British Columbia,” Historical Studies in Education/ Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 37, 2 (Fall, 2025): 161-181.

ABSTRACT:

In this article, we examine Indigenous responses to educational integration in British Columbia through the 1974 “Native Conferences” held by the Royal Commission on Family and Children’s Law. In the 1950s, Canadian policy on Indigenous education shifted from segregation to integration and by the late 1960s organizations such as Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs and the Native Indian Brotherhood rejected both approaches, demanding Indigenous control over schooling. The royal commission, chaired by Justice Thomas Berger, provided Indigenous communities across BC a platform to articulate how public schooling harmed their youth and families. Although the commission’s findings have received scant attention from historians of education, its consultations with Indigenous people through Native Conferences held in the spring and summer of 1974 reveal valuable insights into Indigenous demands for better educational support. These demands aligned with those made by the Native Indian Brotherhood in Indian Control of Indian Education, yet colonial governments largely ignored them for decades. We introduce the concept of “settler stalling” to describe colonial governance that promises reform while deferring meaningful, Indigenous-defined change. Though integration promised equality following the 1951 Indian Act amendments, it failed to address colonial structures, curriculum, and racism within schools, points clearly articulated by Indigenous participants of the conferences.

Congratulations to Chieh Lü for the PESA Doctoral Award

Awarded to: Chieh Lü
Supervisor: Taylor Webb
Award: PESA Doctoral Award
Issuing authority: Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Award amount: $20,000 Australian Dollars ($AUD)
About the award: The Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA) Doctoral Award offers a $20,000 annual scholarship to support a PhD student advancing educational philosophy and theory. More information here.
Research title submitted in the application: Unsettling The Governance of Language: Higher Education, Subjectivity, and Power in Control Societies
Summary of the research: This manuscript-based dissertation theoretically investigates how control societies govern human capital through academic language education in higher education, examining the ways such language education shapes learners’ subjectivization and objectification as measurable resources. It further explores how individuals may confront these discourses of control by rethinking language and language learning through the idea of the polyglot. By doing so, the dissertation aims to highlight alternative possibilities for living and subjectivity that resist homogenizing regimes of assessment and governance of language education in higher education.

Painting Workshop

https://edst.educ.ubc.ca/events/event/painting-workshop/

Head’s Statement on Current Military Operations in West Asia: Implications for EDST

February 28, 2026

Dear EDST Members and Friends:

West Asia (so called “Middle East”) is taken in the midst of flames, yet again. Amidst wider global contexts of geopolitical, military, and economic hegemonies, and struggles for domination, the search for peace, and the path to justice, continue to be elusive, cadenced by waves of violence, suffering, destruction, and casualties.

As a community composed of people hailing from diverse nations and societies, in these painful moments we are called upon to uphold our care for each other, all particularly towards those directly touched, affected, and captured by the unfolding violence and its effects.

Let us be clear: Geographic boundaries and distances do not delimit, nor do they contain wars to any specific site or land. North America is “there”, in as much as West Asia and the world are “here”. The “there” and “here” have largely become fictional temporal-spatial constructions of no utility for understanding our civic and human responsibilities. The “here” and “there”, the “us” versus “them”, the “I don’t knows”, are all irremediably entangled and implicated in what is going on, in so many and different ways. We are all borrowing the Earth, as the only boat available to all of us, in order to continue floating in the infinite ether of the cosmos. To make Earth sustainable means therefore caring for the politics that bring us together in as much as caring for natural resources and the ecology.

Let us each recall what we are after in EDST; let’s maintain and consolidate our trust in the capacities of resilience, pursuit of justice, and care that we so often claim we teach, preach, research, and profess. The violence and destruction unfolding in West Asia (and elsewhere, too) represent contexts that place our very teachings – and engagements with EDI, Indigeneity, and justice – to the most practical, existential, and reliable tests regarding their worth. Silence and abdication are therefore not an option. Neither is avoidance or surrender to inherited “truths” or catch-phrases. Rather, care and reaching out to all those affected are the way, if we are committed to what we claim we teach and learn in EDST. In the midst of war, destruction and loss of life, as a protagonist in one of Paolo Sorrentino’s TV scripts states, suffering and pain have no ranking; sorrow is not a competitive sport; there is no final hierarchy of pain, nor any medals to display on our chests. There is only our capacity to strive, engage, and commit to offering “learning opportunities that are transformative and that support their life goals” (cited from EDST Mission & Values).

At this point in time, we can start by reaching out to all members of the EDST community, and beyond, particularly those directly affected by the unfolding violence – as we all are. From wherever you are, do reach out to students, peers, friends, neighbours and alumni. Keep in touch with UBC student services, your professors and the administrative staff. Do not hesitate to inquire about available resources and support.

Education is among the very first institutions to bear the direct burnt of violence, destruction, and wars, as are hospitals. This has been the case – endemically – of all military operations, including in the current context in West Asia: news reports already indicate that educational facilities and school aged children are significantly represented among destroyed facilities and casualties of military operations. What do we make of these realities in our courses, classrooms, research papers, teaching and student activities? How do we mobilize our exposure to accumulated knowledge to discern how we can best bring EDST’s work and ethos to bear on the ways in which we would like to be in and for the world, despite its chaotic and violent attributes, perhaps because of them?

From within that lens, seize the spaces available to you in order to engage the unfolding realities with courage and determination. Be guided by a spirit of community solidarity, care, justice and compassion, and by EDST’s mission and values. Through the spaces you can each and all create and build on, let there be light that emerges; a light that would help us grow in wisdom, commitment, and care for justice, equity and the building of a worth-wanting world and a vibrant home.

Thank you.

André Mazawi

What Kind of University Do We Want? A Symposium

Event details and registration: https://publichumanities.ubc.ca/events/event/what-kind-of-university-do-we-want/