Faculty Discussants
Kathleen Gallagher (OISE, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning)
Kathleen Gallagher is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto. Dr. Gallagher's books include, Why Theatre Matters: Urban Youth, Engagement, and a Pedagogy of the real (University of Toronto Press, 2014); The Theatre of Urban: Youth and Schooling in Dangerous Times (University of Toronto Press, 2007) Drama Education in the Lives of Girls: Imagining Possibilities (University of Toronto Press, 2000). Her edited collections include: In Defence of Theatre: Aesthetic Practices and Social Interventions. (with Barry Freeman, University of Toronto Press 2016); Drama and Theatre in Urban Contexts (with Jonothan Neelands, Routledge 2013); The Methodological Dilemma: Creative, Critical and Collaborative Approaches to Qualitative Research (Routledge, 2008); and How Theatre Educates: Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars, and Advocates (with David Booth, University of Toronto Press, 2003). Dr. Gallagher has published many articles on theatre, youth, pedagogy, methodology and gender and travels widely giving international addresses and workshops for practitioners. Her research continues to focus on questions of youth civic engagement and artistic practice, and the pedagogical and methodological possibilities of theatre.
Jen Gilbert is Associate Professor of Education at York University. Her research focuses on sexuality education and LGBTQ youth. Her book, Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) won the AERA Division B (Curriculum) Outstanding Book of the Year.
Jen Gilbert
(York University, Faculty of Education)
Sharon Lamb
(University of Massachusetts, Boston, Psychology)
Sharon Lamb, EdD PhD, is Professor of Counseling Psychology in the Department of Counseling and School Psychology at UMass Boston where she has also served as Chair of the department and is currently Program Director of the Mental Health Counseling program. Her work spans research on sexual development, gender, sexual abuse and victimization, moral education, and sex education. She has also developed two curricula, the SECS-C, the Sexual Ethics for a Caring Society Curriculum, in its 3rd rendition, and HABIT (Humane Acts Bystander Intervention Training), now being evaluated on college campuses to prevent sexual assault. Sharon has written, edited, and co-authored 10 books and won two awards: the Books for a Better Life Award, for Packaging Girlhood, and the Society for Sex Therapy and Research’s book award for Sex,Therapy, and Kids. Dr. Lamb was awarded a Spencer Foundation Grant for The New Civics initiative and has published several articles on the conversations of high schoolers in her sexual ethics course. She is a co-author of the American Psychological Association’sTask Force Report on the Sexualization of Girls and speaks to journalists, parents, educators, and girls and boys about sexualization and the media and marketers’ packaging of girlhood and boyhood.
Kathy Bickmore
(OISE, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning)
Kathy Bickmore (PhD Stanford University) is Professor in Curriculum Studies and Comparative International and Development Education at OISE, University of Toronto. She is Guest Editor of Peace-building (in) Education: Democratic Approaches to Conflict in Schools and Classrooms (Curriculum Inquiry 44:4, September 2014) and Co-Editor of Comparative and International Education: Issues for Teachers (revised 2nd edition 2017). Current research examines gaps (and bridges) between young people’s lived citizenship experiences in violent neighborhoods and their public school education, in Canada, Mexico, Bangladesh and Colombia. Earlier projects included UN University for Peace (Costa Rica), anti-bullying with Japan, and civic education with Tula, Russia. Recent chapters appear in Building Democracy in Education on Diversity (Sense) and Social Studies Today: Research and Practice, 2nd Edition (Routledge); 2017 articles in Research in Comparative and International Education, Curriculum Inquiry, and (in English) Revista Española de Educación Comparada.
Brenda Cossman teaches courses on family law, gender and law, and law and film. She writes extensively in the area of law and sexuality. Her most recent book, Sexual Citizens: The Legal and Cultural Regulation of Sex and Belonging, was published by Stanford University Press in 2007. Additionally, Cossman coauthored Bad Attitudes on Trial: Pornography, Feminism and the Butler Decision (University of Toronto Press) and Censorship and the Arts (published by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries).
Professor Cossman is actively involved in law reform, particularly in the area of same sex couples and definitions of family. Recently, she authored reports for the Law Commission of Canada and the Ontario Law Reform Commission on the legal regulation of adult relationships. Professor Cossman is also a frequent commentator in the media on issues relating to law and sexuality. She served as a member of the Pink Triangle Press Board of Directors for ten years, working as a frequent contributor to Xtra! She was also elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2012.
Brenda Cossman
(University of Toronto, Sexual Diversity Studies and Faculty of Law)
Indigo Esmonde
(OISE, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning)
Indigo Esmonde is an Associate Professor in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Toronto. They have just finished co-editing, with Angela Booker, the book, Power and Privilege in the Learning Sciences: Critical and Sociocultural Theories. They have not yet settled on a next academic project and are currently writing a novel (or something novel-like). Indigo is white, queer, nonbinary, Canadian, fancy, and lives with chronic illness/disability. Indigo’s most recent work is a self-published comic that can be found here: http://indigoesmonde.blogspot.ca/2017/01/artist-cv.html
Jessica Fields
(San Francisco State University, Faculty of Education)
Jessica Fields is Professor of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University and the author of Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality (Rutgers University Press), which received the 2009 ASA Race, Class, and Gender Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award. With Laura Mamo, Nancy Lesko, and Jen Gilbert, she leads The Beyond Bullying Project, a community-based storytelling project that aims to understand and interrupt ordinary hostility in high schools to LGBTQ sexualities (funded by the Ford Foundation). Fields is writing her second book, Problems We Pose: Feeling Differently about Qualitative Research (University of Minnesota Press), in which she explores emotion as an opportunity to reimagine power and knowledge production in the researcher/researched relationship and as a source of insight (not as an obstacle to understanding) into social categories of difference, including race, gender, and sexuality. Her work appears in journals including Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Sex Education, Sexualities, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, and Social Problems.
Joe Flessa, Associate Professor in OISE’s Educational Leadership and Policy program, is a former Grade 5 and Grade 6 teacher and school principal. Much of Flessa's work focuses on the ways that school site principals and other leaders in urban schools and districts describe and seek to address social and educational inequalities. His current research focuses on school site leadership in comparative contexts.
Joe Flessa
(OISE, Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education)
Sarah Flicker
(York University, Faculty of Environmental Studies)
Sarah Flicker is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. She is engaged in an exciting and innovative program of research that focuses on youth HIV prevention and support, as well as, environmental, sexual and reproductive justice. More broadly, she is interested in community-based participatory methodologies and is active on a variety of research teams that focus on adolescent sexual health and wellbeing with youth in Canada and South Africa. Recently, she has published in the areas of Indigenous youth health, health promotion, ethics, the social determinants of health, decolonizing methodologies and community-based participatory research methods. Her research has informed policy at the municipal, provincial and federal levels. Sarah and her teams have won a number of prestigious awards for youth engagement in health research.
June Larkin
(University of Toronto, Women and Gender Studies and Equity Studies)
June Larkin is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Women and Gender Studies Institute and the Equity Studies Program, University of Toronto. She is coordinator of the Gendering Adolescent AIDS Prevention (GAAP) Project, New College, UofT. GAAP brings together youth, community based service providers, policy makers, students and researchers on projects that use participatory approaches to working with young people on issues related to sexual health and HIV/AIDS education and awareness. Larkin is the author/co-author of publications in the Canadian Journal of Education, the International Journal of Indigenous Health and the Health Education Journal among others.
Lance T. McCready, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher & Adult Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (OISE/UT). Dr. McCready uses a community-based research approach to study the education, health and well-being of Black men and boys, and LGBTQ youth of color. He is interested in the ways racialized and marginalized youth and adults navigate the social ecology of urban environments, and how these experiences can serve as a window to better understand lifelong learning, barriers and opportunities for postsecondary access, healthcare utilization, work and mental health. Dr. McCready is Principal Investigator of the Educational Trajectories of Black Male Youth and Adapting HIV Prevention Resources for Newcomer & Refugee African, Caribbean, Black Men Who Have Sex With Men and Co-Investigator on Project #Queery and WeSpeak: Heterosexual Black Men & HIV. All projects are sites for collaborative action research with programs and services for young Black men and/or LGBTQ youth.
Lance McCready (OISE, Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education)
Jonathan Silin
(University of Toronto, Sexual Diversity Studies and Bank Street College of Education)
Jonathan Silin is editor of the Bank Street College of Education Occasional Paper Series and a Fellow at the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto. He is the author editor of 3 books including Sex Death and the Education of Children: Our Passion for Ignorance in the Age of AIDS. His occasional essays have appeared in the NewYork Times, Education Week, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His newest memoir Early Childhood, Aging and the Life Cycle: Mapping Common Ground will appear this winter from Palgrave Macmillan.
Tanya Titchkosky
(OISE, Department of Social Justice Education)
Tanya Titchkosky, Professor, OISE U of T, is author of Disability, Self, and Society, as well as, Reading and Writing Disability Differently and The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. With Dr. Rod Michalko she is co-editor of Rethinking Normalcy: A Disability Studies Reader and co-founder of “Unsettling Normalcy: A Disability Studies Working Group” with Dr. Anne McGuire at the University of Toronto. Tanya works from the position that whatever else disability is, it is tied up with oppressive forms of imagination and needs to be studied as such. Using critical approaches that question the grounds of Western ways of knowing, such as, phenomenologically informed Black and Queer Studies, Tanya hopes to reveal the restricted imaginaries that constitute our embodied lives, especially in University settings. Her work is currently supported by SSHRC Insight grant, “Reimagining the (Dis)Appearance of Disability in the Academy.”
Marvin Zuker was appointed a Judge of the Ontario Court of Justice in 1978. He retired in December 2016. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto, Osgoode Hall Law School, and The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. He holds the rank of Associate Professor at OISE/UT where he has taught Education law since 1981. He is the author and co-author of numerous books and publications, including Canadian Women and the Law and The Law is Not for Women, co-authored with June Callwood; Ontario Small Claims Court Practice (published since 1981); Education Law, co-authored with Anthony Brown (4th ed., 2007); Consulting Editor, Sexual Misconduct in Education: Prevention, Reporting and Discipline, with Grant Bowers and Rena Knox (2d. ed., 2006), Children’s Law Handbook, with Lynn Kerwin (3rd. ed. 2015), An Educator’s Guide to the Law and the Ontario College of Teachers (2013) and Inspiring the Future: The New Teacher’s Guide to the Law, Scarfo and Zuker, (2d. ed., 2017). He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Bloorview School Authority as well as a member of several Education and Law Journals.
Marvin Zuker
(OISE, Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education )
