Interdisciplinary Pedagogies And Social Transformation

Let's start with some background. Where did you grow up and how did your early experiences set the stage for your later work? 

I grew up in the Riverdale neighborhood near downtown Toronto. In high school, as part of an International Baccalaureate, I conducted an independent research project on the Don River watershed near my home. It was defined as a biology project, but I actually took an integrated approach, seeking to understand the watershed ecologically, socially, and historically. I learned about the groups active in environmental restoration by participating in community meetings and cleanup efforts, read literature on the Indigenous history of the area, and I spent a lot of time walking up and down the lower part of the Don River, taking photographs. The project set me on a path that I have been walking ever since, combining different ways of knowing in a practice of creating more options for an ecologically and socially just society. 

Through an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology at McGill University, a Master’s in Canadian and Native Studies at Trent University, onto my PhD in communication and culture from TMU, I have continued to develop an interdisciplinary approach to ethnographic and action research methods, making sense of the world by learning with others how to intervene in it.  

Looking back, I also recognize that cities themselves have played a key role in forming my experiences. Toronto and Montreal are both culturally diverse cities, with many venues for art, music, and a publicly engaged intellectual life, and throughout my studies I have approached learning about cities through a range of Indigenous, critical, and systems-based approaches.  

Tell us more about your interest in Indigenous histories. 

As I got more deeply into the cultural aspects of anthropology, I was shocked by the absence of Indigenous studies in my earlier education. Here we are, on stolen land, ignoring so many traditional ways of understanding the world and the very places we’re standing on, yet none of this was part of the standard curriculum. I felt I couldn’t really know what it meant to be Canadian without unpacking the real histories behind that label – Canada – this was important for how I engage with truth and reconciliation.   

What came next?  

Upon graduation, I decided I wanted to work at the community level because it seemed to offer opportunities to address real social issues. I had taken courses in medical anthropology and the sociology of health, and I found a job as a coordinator for a non-profit organization in Montreal’s Centre-Sud neighborhood, working on a project using a harm-reduction approach to injection drug use, youth and people lacking stable housing.  

One key part of the project was working alongside another qualitative researcher conducting interviews with a wide variety of stakeholders in the neighborhood – from City representatives, to shop owners, to daycares, to health workers, and the police – to find coordinated solutions that would respect people’s autonomy and provide them the supports needed to build self-reliance. But after only a year in this job, my grandmother became ill, and I moved back to Toronto to be close to her before she passed. 

And then? 

Responding to an ad in the newspaper offering international development work in Canada, and I joined a program called Frontier College. It is designed to provide literacy training for the farm laborers who do most of the work on our produce farms. These workers are typically flown in from Mexico and the Caribbean, picked up in a bus at the airport, housed in very basic dormitories or trailers for up to six months at a time, and paid a minimum wage. As migrants, they have very little say on their work conditions: it is a very inequitable situation.  

So, for four months, I lived and worked alongside thirty-five Mexican migrant workers offering them English language lessons, which was very hard because we typically worked twelve-hour days, six days a week. Where possible, I intervened to improve communication between the workers, the farm manager and owner, and the surrounding community. One week, many of us were getting sick, and we figured out it was probably from the water – the farmer had not maintained the filtering system but was willing to ignore this so long as enough workers were able to keep working. As more of us got sick, we drew attention to the inadequate filtering system; my being white and Canadian may have added pressure on the farmer to address this issue more quickly, as I noticed how on other occasions I was treated differently from the rest of the workers.  I also noticed how when I drove the workers to town to get groceries. they were often met with racist remarks walking down the street or in the stores. The experience revealed to me how, yet again, there are so many different realities that make up this one big complex world, and only through intervention and critical reflection does it become possible to really understand how it all connects. 

Why did you pursue advanced degrees? 

I was really seeking work that would be fulfilling and socially meaningful, and there were not many jobs that I could access that offered this. So, I turned back to the university as a place where I could develop research and teaching skills and explore the issues that mattered.  

My Masters in Canadian and Native Studies from Trent University allowed me to continue learning about Indigenous and Canadian histories. My thesis dealt with the history of urban green space in southern Ontario, as I wanted to understand the intersection between cities and natural processes. How have we defined 'city,' how has the purpose and meaning of urban parks changed over time, whose histories, plants, and place names are embedded in public memory through parks, and what are the prospects for designing a more ethical and ecological city? I spent a summer volunteering at a naturalization project in Peterborough, Ontario, where I tackled my first major qualitative research project.  

And you started teaching at this time, right? 

Yes. While working on my Masters, I became a teaching assistant. I was in part shocked that I was suddenly responsible – with no special training – for grading student work and running tutorials! Still, I also really enjoyed this work and sought out a position with the teaching center on campus, where I helped other graduate students build their teaching skills. 

How about your PhD? 

After completing my Masters, I found a job in Toronto as Teaching Assistant Development Coordinator at what was then known as Ryerson University. There I met the person who would become my PhD supervisor. He recommended that I pursue a doctorate in the Communication and Culture program. It was an incredibly gratifying experience in which I developed my dissertation entitled, Ecological Consciousness and the Limits of the Academy. It was an investigation into a global network of scholars working on ecosystem approaches to health. I was particularly interested in how such networks offered early-career scholars opportunities to develop participatory and transdisciplinary approaches, and so I conducted interviews with graduate students and young professionals affiliated with the network in Canada, Central and West Africa, and in Central America. 

Can you define ecological consciousness for us?

Ecological Consciousness provides multiple lenses through which we can understand the world. It is essentially about how we learn to work across different ways of knowing to respond to complex problems in the real-world. For my interests in social and ecological justice, this meant working across systems science, critical theory, and Indigenous ways of knowing.  

These layers of intellectual engagement seem quite formidable--yet your teaching persona is very approachable. For example, in the Creative Thinking course, your interest in student ideas is striking. You listen intently and clearly value each comment, no matter how tentative. 

I think this is an essential aspect of teaching in Knowledge Integration: I want students interests to help guide each course as it unfolds. I want students to use the courses as venues for their own action and learning, where my role is to provide them with structured activities and guidance along the way. How the course is taught can be as important as the content I deliver. Do we want students to become active, independent thinkers, or do we want them to simply repeat back our own ideas? 

This is your first full term teaching on campus. What have you found most challenging? 

Each student brings a unique mix of interests and strengths: they are not one big homogenous group, and especially in KI there is a great diversity of interests and career path options for students – this is a source of richness, but it poses practical challenges in terms of organizing a course that actually supports that range of needs/interests. Furthermore, though we’re back in person, the pandemic continues to position different students differently: some have given up their rental apartments and moved back home, and finding a new rental is too expensive; others are missing class because they are sick and it’s hard for them to stay on top of course work. Again, building a sense of community among students under these conditions is challenging.  

What have you found most gratifying about your work in Knowledge Integration? 

It is the most dignified job I have ever had. I get to flex every intellectual, emotional and creative muscle I have and am encouraged to pursue my research interests wherever they take me. Getting to know the KI students (having only joined the faculty in January 2022) has been absolutely thrilling and inspiring. 

Well-intended "interdisciplinary programs" have become developed with mixed success by many universities in the USA. What distinguishes Knowledge Integration from most such programs?  

Because interdisciplinary programs typically exist in the institutional cracks, they often lack their own physical gathering spaces and often are expected to perform according to the same standards (for better or worse) as more traditional disciplinary programs.  

What really distinguishes KI is that it truly owns its interdisciplinarity. It does not pretend to straddle two disciplines but rather aims to help any student learn how to make sense of a complex and dynamic world through collaboration and community building, design and critical thinking. It clearly supports each student’s own capacity for self-directed inquiry.  

KI shows that you don’t have to be in a PhD program to take learning seriously. Through a carefully supported design-your-own-education, undergraduates can build critical transferrable skills that are in high demand in the workplace. These are the kinds of skills that apply to many different sectors of society and that are needed in times of uncertainty and transformation.  

What do you think is its impact on students and faculty? 

The impact of KI is immediate: from the very beginning, students, are encouraged to take on leadership roles while supporting each other’s projects, and when students graduate, they are ready to let their passions and special skills drive their contributions to a wide variety of employment roles in society.

This interview is part of a project conducted by Dr. Mary Stewart during her two-month fellowship at the University of Waterloo in the fall of 2022. Thank you to Dr. Stewart for her work in highlighting the transdisciplinary nature of the KI program and its community members, and to Fulbright Canada for making this opportunity possible.