Welcome to the Okanagan School of Education

At the heart of the Okanagan School of Education is a shared commitment to growing and supporting educators as scholar-practitioners — an educator identity understood as students of learning. Educators are continually discerning how best to incite and further students’ learning, given the particulars of context, content, and individuals involved. We bring educators together from across diverse settings, multiple disciplines, and varied interests, to embrace this formative nature of professional knowledge.

Our undergraduate, professional development and graduate education programs aim to build and sustain communities of scholar-practitioners, invigorated through prospective and practicing educators’ participatory investment in professional development and continuing studies. We are committed to strengthening these journeys of professional growth, intertwining philosophical, theoretical, content, and pedagogical knowledge, placing primacy on ethical, experiential, relational and wholistic educative traditions, approaches, and research.

Situated on the unceded territory of the Syilx (Okanagan) Peoples, we acknowledge that the particulars of place form the necessary learning ground for explicating the needed attention to contexts and participants that facilitate learners and learning. Thus, we seek ways that honour local Indigenous histories with pedagogies responsive to the relational connections to land, culture, and understandings of self in the world. Indigenization is understood as a shared constitutional, historical, and ethical responsibility of all of our programs and will be evident through inclusion of Indigenous knowledges, voices, critiques, scholars, students and materials for all students, staff and faculty.

We are fully committed to inclusive pedagogies and practices. Sexual orientation, gender identity, and mental health, shape individual and collective well-being. We foster learning contexts that invite all learners to grow their potential — learning with, from, and through each other.

  • Support All Students: With the addition of gender identity and expression to the BC Human Rights Code and the Canadian Charter of Human Rights in 2017, the BC Minister of Education directed all schools, both public and private to ensure that all students are safe and included regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression (SOGI). Not only is this inclusion now legally necessary, but it is imperative to create a society where people can accept themselves and others. Educational leaders across BC and Canada are recognizing that SOGI-inclusive policies and practices benefit all students by creating a more positive and accepting school climate from Kindergarten through university and beyond.
  • Support Mental Health Literacy: One in five young people suffer from a mental illness issue and a significant portion of those inflicted are a part of the student population at many universities. It often presents during adolescence and, if left unrecognized and untreated, can lead to considerable negative outcomes in physical and mental health, academic and vocational achievement, interpersonal relationships and other important life domains. Find out more at Teach Mental Health.

What happens in classrooms really matters. The needed educator and student critical and creative thinking, insists on learning conditions and supports that value inclusion, collaboration, experimentation, observation, multiple paces, strengths, and challenges, varied paths, and assessment as an ongoing accompaniment of all learning. The artistry and science of such teaching is awesome. And, I hope that OSE graduates across all phases of professional growth, gain a heightened sense of the importance and commitments of being an educator, and embody the necessary pedagogical reasoning and adaptive expertise.

Do you need more Information about our programs? Please contact any of our staff or faculty. We look forward to hearing from you!

Please take time to explore our website.

Sincerely,

Professor and Director, Okanagan School of Education

The University of British Columbia | Okanagan Campus | Syilx Okanagan Nation Territory

3139 EME Building, 3333 University Way| Kelowna BC | V1V 1V7 Canada

Pronouns: she/her/hers