Convocation 2014 grads to watch: education leaders making an impact at home and around the world

“My dream job in my dream city”: That’s how Sandra Campeanu describes her new position as a lecturer at the City University of New York’s Lehman College.

Teaching, she says, is her passion; a passion she developed while completing her PhD in cognitive psychology at U of T.

“I always enjoyed teaching and being a teaching assistant,” she says. “Toward the end of my graduate studies, I realized that I wanted to pursue a career as a lecturer, and that I wanted teaching to be my primary focus.”

Courses offered through U of T’s Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation helped her hone her teaching skills, which she then shared with other grad students through workshops.

“I think TA training and pedagogical guidance in general are paramount to graduate studies. Many of us apply to careers in academia after graduation, and teaching is often a major component of that work. None of the course work or required training in graduate school prepares you to actually become a teacher. Thankfully, U of T has many options for graduate students looking to improve their pedagogical skills. You just have to look for them!”

Her current plans are to develop as a lecturer. “I'm currently developing classes and participating in workshops designed to improve my pedagogical skills. I've always been very interested in how people learn and remember – my PhD research was about the role of voice as a memory cue, in different situations and for multiple types of memory.

"I hope to come up with new ways to stimulate undergraduate learning. I also plan to continue with some collaborative research in memory and/or education.”

Campeanu is originally from Toronto and she’ll be returning to her hometown to receive her doctoral degree on November 21 with her family in attendance. Then it’s back to the Bronx to teach statistics and perception at Lehman College.

“I love New York City. I always have. Interestingly, in my many visits to NYC over the years, I had never been to the Bronx until I came for my interview at Lehman. It's an interesting place and so far, so good.”

At age 31, Rumeet Billan (formerly Rumeet Toor) already has an impressive resume. The founder and president of Jobs in Education, she has worked for Youth Net Peel promoting youth wellness for over 10 years, teaches courses on leadership and social entrepreneurship at the Humber Institute of Technology & Advanced Learning – and established the Toor Centre for Teacher Education in Nzeveni, Kenya. (Read more about the centre.)

Billan (pictured at left) has twice been named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women by the Women’s Executive Network and has been honoured at the Sikh Centennial Foundation for her work in education. She has served on U of T’s President’s Advisory Committee and on University of Toronto Mississauga’s Academic Planning, Teaching Excellence Awards and Research Excellence Awards Committees.

She also: represented Canada at the 6th Annual UNESCO International Leadership Programme; was a facilitator for the European Regional Forum in Italy; was the Canadian Ambassador for the 1GOAL: Education for All campaign; and was the closing speaker at TEDx in Halifax in 2013.

Now Billan has added a collaborative PhD from U of T’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and Munk School of Global Affairs to that long list of accomplishments.

During fall convocation, besides attending her own ceremony November 18, Billan also participated in the November 17 UTM ceremony where she served as an honourary esquire, carrying one of the University Beadles’ staves.

Having received her undergraduate degree from UTM, Billan says she was honoured to participate in the ceremony.

“I am a proud alumna, and feel fortunate that I studied at U of T. It is a large part of my life and has shaped who I am today,” she says. “U of T has an outstanding reputation both nationally and globally. The faculty, programs and support that U of T provides for its students is remarkable.

“After completing my undergraduate degree at UTM, there was no question in my mind that I would complete my graduate work at OISE, which is the number one faculty of education in the world.”

As for the future, Billan says she loves her work as a teacher, facilitator and entrepreneur. “It’s something that is important to me. I’m really excited about our new initiative, Viewpoint Leadership, which focuses on research and the development of global competence and emotional intelligence specifically in the education sector. It’s about shaping and developing our point of view – and that, to me, is an amazing thing.”

Christine Portier left a fulfilling career teaching elementary school in Toronto to undertake doctoral studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in language and education. Portier received her PhD on November 18 and is already back at work, travelling through northern Ontario and Alberta for the cross-Canada Northern Oral Language and Writing through Play (Now-Play) Project, directed by OISE Professor Shelley Stagg Peterson.

“U of T is a highly-ranked university and OISE stands out as a leader in educational research and curriculum studies,” says Portier. “I was a classroom elementary teacher for many years in Toronto and so I had always heard about research coming out of OISE and had met many teachers who graduated from OISE. I also attended U of T for my undergraduate degree so I felt right at home when I began the PhD program.”

The project Portier is now working on brings together researchers, organizations concerned with children’s health and education, and educators (from parents to daycare workers to teachers) who work in rural and First Nations communities across four provinces. The goal: to investigate the relationship between oral language development, writing and play-based learning as well as to develop practical and culturally responsive ways for educators to understand, assess and develop students’ oral language development.

“This comes out of research showing that oral language development is foundational to literacy, and in part from research where classroom teachers had identified a need for their students to be engaged in more talk that extended beyond the questions and answers directed by the teachers,” says Portier (pictured at right). “We are only in the second year of this seven-year project and right now part of my work involves visiting and planning with kindergarten and grade one teachers in Northern Ontario and Northern Alberta.” 

Of particular interest to Portier was the chance to work closely with teachers, parents and daycare workers in communities where the students’ first language is often not English.

“I am interested in how language works at the universal or structural level and the particular forms these structures take across various languages and cultural traditions.”

World-leading researchers in linguistics and semiotics were part of what attracted Portier to U of T in the first place.

“I began working with a colleague who suggested that if we could so easily speak with and understand the kindergarten children in our classrooms, there must be something in common between what they know about language and what we know at our higher levels of language studies,” she says. “I thought that if I better understood how language worked, I might better help children across all areas of the curriculum, including math and science.

“I began reading many texts on linguistics, literary criticism, semiotics and narratology, and looked into universal patterns in language, their forms or variations across languages and stories, and the relationship between language and cognition. Through my research, I began connecting language structures and patterns to the relational thinking processes that students can transfer across the various disciplines.”

Along with her work on the Now-Play Project, Portier has also started a company through which she develops and offers presentations and workshops to educators about her innovative approach to language instruction.

“I work with an artist and musician to develop literacy lessons and activities that can be delivered through various classroom interactive technologies,” she says. “The professors who guided me through my dissertation have continued their support into this new endeavor and I have developed partnerships with administrators, consultants and teachers in several Ontario school boards, as well as with companies and agencies interested in educational technology and literacy innovations.”