It is often said the world's future rests with our children and youth. In the Faculty of Education at Western University, we collectively seek truth, justice, equity, and peace in that future world.
We believe that we have a moral imperative to nurture our children so that they may thrive. As such, with our research, teaching, and service, we seek to strengthen education and schools, which are powerful forces in counteracting the social inequities that threaten the well-being of children, families, and communities.
We invite you to support us as active collaborators in imagining and achieving a just society in which the needs of all people are more fully met.
To learn more about Western Education, please visit their website.
Key Initiatives:
The Child Youth & Development Clinic is not only an interdisciplinary training facility for graduate students in School and Applied Child Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Applied Behaviour Analysis and Speech and Language Pathology at Western, it also provides greatly needed assessments and interventions to children and youth in the community from three to 18 years of age.
The Mary J. Wright Research and Education Centre will drive state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research that examines factors impacting early childhood development, with the goal of fostering the health and wellbeing of society’s most vulnerable children.
The Centre is housed at the Merrymount Family Support and Crisis Centre, allowing our researchers to test their theories and gauge the results of their interventions immediately. Overseen by Western’s Faculty of Education, the Centre is fostering the development of evidence-based prevention, promotion, and treatment programs for children and families, bringing evidence-based practices directly to the community.
The Centre is committed to the development and application of knowledge for the prevention of violence against women and children through promoting innovation, collaboration and equality. CREVAWC facilitates the collaboration of individuals, groups and institutions representing the diversity of the community to pursue research questions and training opportunities to understand and prevent violence and abuse.
We serve local, national and international communities by producing useful information and tools to assist in the daily work to prevent and stop violence towards women and children and vulnerable adults. The program “Make It Our Business” provides information and education to help employers and other workplace stakeholders meet their obligations under the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act. According to the Act, employers must prevent and respond to domestic violence in the workplace and the program provides well-designed information and workplace plans to implement responsive HR solutions. See website: www.learningtoendabuse.ca
Within school settings, there is both the opportunity and obligation to promote mental health for all children. The vision of effective School Mental Health (SMH) is one where a multidisciplinary group of professionals can offer services ranging from prevention to intervention, effectively removing barriers to learning and promoting mental wellbeing.
Unfortunately, the reality of SMH has not yet caught up to the promise. Evidence-based practices are not implemented routinely, a comprehensive approach is lacking in most jurisdictions, and data-informed decision-making is virtually non-existent. The Centre for School Mental Health at Western University addresses those gaps between research, practice and policy. The Centre seeks to promote an expanded concept of SMH through innovative research partnerships, high quality training opportunities, and a commitment to knowledge mobilization.
www.csmh.uwo.ca
We believe that we have a moral imperative to nurture our children so that they may thrive.
As such, with our research, teaching, and service we seek to strengthen education and schools, which are powerful forces in counteracting the social inequities that threaten the well-being of children, families, and communities.
This fund will be used within the Faculty of Education, at the Dean’s discretion, to help us pursue this work.
Interested in becoming a TransformED Buddy? “Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique: good teaching comes from the identity and the integrity of the teacher.” ~Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach
Transforming Education. Transforming Lives.
As we work together to build the professional community that is needed to construct the kinds of knowledge the future teachers in our profession will need, we have considered how we might best open up spaces to best capture and communicate collective professional knowledge.
Individual teacher candidates initially form decisions based upon their own educational experiences. The myths born of their individual de-contextualized experiences can create problems when they face the complexities of contemporary classroom demands.
On the other hand, vast professional knowledge and experiences held by our retired teacher colleagues remains largely unshared. We would like to change that. We invite you to re-engage in the preparation of the teaching profession. We have considered a couple of avenues here that respect your status as active educators or retirees, who may very well wish to remain flexible.
1. TransformED Buddies
We envision the TransformED Buddies as a means for Teacher Candidates to tell you a little about themselves, their division and/or subject specialty and to have you pair up with one or two students that you believe to be a good match. Beyond that, when and when you meet and chat will be up to the two of you. Conversations can be by phone, email, skype or in person – as it suits your needs and availability.
2. Mentor Cohort Groups
In the mentor cohort group, approximately 12 students will gather two times per month to work on a variety of professional goals including: goal setting; practice documentation and reflection; communication with different audiences; synthesizing knowledge across courses/content areas. Each mentor group will be run by a ‘Master Teacher’ who will be responsible for overseeing the progress of their group and liaising with the course instructors.TransformED Mentors would be welcome to join these mentor groups as their time and schedules permit.
