Program Director of Masters of Counselling (Calgary)
As the Program Director of the MC Calgary, I aim to develop a leading vision of psychology and counselling for increasingly complex, fragmented and challenging issues of today’s world. I have been working for City University since January 2024, and have an established background in teaching and research. A former international athlete, my first professional career was in every aspect of education, from children with learning and behavior difficulties to high school, but I transitioned to an academic psychology career to (attempt to) make bigger changes.
Research
I am a post-structural (fifth wave) psychologist, and have published numerous articles and book chapters in leading journals, presented t conferences, but more importantly, been invited to speak at universities around the world. As a post-structural scholar, my research aims to adopt a deeper understanding of power to reveal society’s unseen problems and unintended consequences and in so doing, enable people to live more effective and ethical lives.
Teaching
I prefer the word “learning” to “teaching”, and believe the strongest teachers are those professionals able to create an environment that enables students to use the most progressive and critical knowledge as often as possible, in order to produce strong critical learners able to successfully navigate the complexities in everyday real-life. I therefore aim to equip students with not just a broader framework of knowledge but as importantly, a way of using that knowledge in order to move them to become someone at the end of the learning process that they weren’t at the beginning. Rather than blindly accepting knowledge claims, I aim to help my students generate curiosity and wonder by supporting them to politely challenge knowledge claims or employ a healthy skepticism. I believe in upholding high standards and being challenging but at the same time and most importantly being able to actively support students to feel comfortable meeting those high standards. Therefore, I aim to communicate security and confidence in the eyes of the students, so that they feel able to explore knowledge and not be bound to the insecurities associated with “having to be right”.