Our Team
Andy Hargreaves, PhD
Dr. Andy Hargreaves is Director of CHENINE (Change, Engagement and Innovation in Education) at the University of Ottawa. He is an international writer, researcher and advisor on teaching, leadership and educational change. He is Past President of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement, formerly Adviser in Education to the Premier of Ontario (2015-2018) and currently to the First Minister of Scotland. He is President and co-founder of the ARC Education Project that brings together seven educational systems, their Ministers and professional leaders, to advance humanitarian values in education. He has published more than 30 books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles.
Professor Hargreaves is a regular contributor on public media and during the COVID-19 pandemic, he has published articles and features in The Washington Post, Times Education UK, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, US Education Week, Education Canada, SchoolsWeek UK, and Education International.
Hargreaves has eight Outstanding Writing Awards that include the prestigious $100,000 Grawemeyer Award in Education for Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School - with Michael Fullan (2015). He has been honoured in the United States and United Kingdom for services to public education and is ranked by US Education Week in the top 20 scholars with most influence on US education policy debate. In 2015, he received Boston College’s Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award. His most recent book is Moving: a memoir of education and social mobility (Solution Tree, 2020).
Michelle Schira Hagerman, PhD
Dr. Michelle Hagerman is an expert on how people make sense of digital texts. Her work helps empower teachers and students to become full and critical participants in a globally networked digital world. She has received more than $350,000 in federal funding for research on maker-space and digital literacies, and on digital equity for elementary school children. Her co-designed and award-winning website - www.onlineteaching.ca - has attracted international attention on how to teach effectively in an online environment.
In 2017, Dr. Hagerman founded the Canadian Institute for Digital Literacies Learning. This initiative has connected more than 150 francophone and anglophone teachers, university researchers, and graduate students to explore innovative models for the teaching of digital literacies.
Dr. Hagerman taught French as a Second Language in Canadian public and independent schools for ten years. She has published 14 chapters and research articles, co-edited one book, and co-authored research syntheses for Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US. During to COVID-19 crisis, she featured in national news items on the challenges and opportunities of online learning. Dr. Hagerman holds a PhD in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology from the Michigan State University College of Education.
Amal Boultif, PhD
Dr. Amal Boultif’s research focuses on multi-literacies. She concentrates on how students with special needs experience reading and writing on digital platforms, and on the role of digital-based media and multiple forms of literacy in bilingual or minority settings. These include teaching and learning French and the use of slam-inspired poetry, for which she has written book chapters and presented workshops, including in Haiti. Dr Boultif has contributed to a report on reading skills, processes and strategies in relation to digital texts and platforms and to research on the teaching of reading in a digital context.
Dr Boultif was a secondary school teacher for 22 years in Algiers, where she also helped develop French programs within the Algerian Ministry of Education. In Canada, she went on to teach French didactics and special education at l'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She has delivered many lectures around the world and, during COVID-19, contributed to national press and to webinars on how parents can help children with their reading.
Megan Cotnam-Kappel, PhD
Dr. Megan Cotnam-Kappel is a Franco-Ontarian whose research programme addresses the learning experiences of francophones and how they develop in-person and online teaching practices in the context of their language, culture, and identity.
Since joining the Faculty of Education in 2016, Dr. Cotnam-Kappel has secured more than $550,000 in external funding to study digital literacies and digital citizenship skills and needs, the development of learning and literacies in Makerspaces, and the conditions for digital equity - all within French-language schools.
To date, Dr Cotnam-Kappel has co-edited two books and one special journal issue, and published 13 journal articles as well as five book chapters. In 2019, she received the University of Ottawa Faculty of Education’s New Researcher Award. Cotnam-Kappel completed a joint PhD in Education at the University of Ottawa and Université de Corse, as well as a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.
Jess Whitley, PhD
Dr. Jess Whitley’s research focuses on mental health literacy, inclusive education policy, teacher preparation for inclusive education and the wellbeing of children and youth with mental health issues. She conducts research in partnership with colleagues at universities across Canada and engages collaboratively with community organizations including Crossroads Children’s Mental Health Centre. Her current research explores experiences of parents supporting students with special educational needs during school closures related to COVID-19. Along with CHENINE members Michelle Shira Hagerman and Amal Boultif, she is also preparing an innovative guide for online and remote learning for students with special educational needs with funding from the Ontario Ministry of Education. She is also leading a three-year evaluation of the implementation of inclusive education policy in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Since joining the Faculty in 2008, Dr. Whitley she has received more than $825,000 in funding grants and government contracts and has published over 30 articles and book chapters. During the pandemic, she has featured in public and online media on CBC Radio, AMI Radio, and in The Conversation, and The Globe and Mail, on how COVID-19 has been affecting students with special needs and their families.
Dr. Whitley is part of the Canadian Research Centre on Inclusive Education and an associate of Inclusive Education Canada as well as the Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services. Her work in teacher preparation concentrates on preparing future teachers of inclusive classrooms. Dr. Whitley is co-founder of the Comprehensive School Health B.Ed. cohort at the University of Ottawa.
Phyllis Dalley, PhD
Dr Phyllis Dalley is the founding director of the Anti-Black Racism Action Group in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa where she has created a space for developing an inclusive Francophonies, free from all forms of oppression.
Professor Dalley brings to her work a rich and diverse background as a white, Acadian and Anglo-Canadian woman by birth, a Franco-Albertan and Franco-Ontarian by adoption, and now a researcher and advocate for equity and inclusion in the French-language school context. Dr. Dalley was the first student to write her doctoral thesis at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in French; one of many ways she strives to legitimize bilingual, French/English identity in academic and professional writing, and in French-language education more generally.
Dr Dalley’s research focuses on issues of developing and expressing confidence in language acquisition and expression, and on questions of inclusion and identity in Francophone culture and French-language contexts. She is one of the first researchers from the Francophone minority who addressed how schools can, do and should welcome immigrants and refugees from Africa. Drawing on her research expertise, Professor Dalley works with teachers, leaders, schools, school boards and Ministries of Education to improve policy and practice in her field.
Dr. Dalley has received over $1 million in funding for her work. In 2016, she received the Faculty of Education's Teaching Excellence Award. She has published 31 articles and book chapters, co-edited two books and produced 13 research reports. Professor Dalley has supervised the theses of 7 PhD students and 9 Masters candidates. She regularly appears in public media and is invited to speak at conferences and events in the French-language school system. Her lecture, Training Confident Speakers, is the most visited on the Canadian Association for French Language Education website.
Joel Westheimer, PhD
Dr. Joel Westheimer is an education columnist for CBC Radio and University Research Chair in Democracy and Education at the University of Ottawa. Author, speaker, and education advocate, he also co-directs (with John Rogers, UCLA) The Inequality Project, investigating what North American schools are teaching about economic inequality.
Westheimer grew up in New York City and began his education career as a summer camp director and then middle school teacher in the New York City Public Schools before obtaining his Ph.D. from Stanford University. His books include the critically acclaimed What Kind of Citizen: Educating Our Children for the Common Good, the award winning Pledging Allegiance: The Politics of Patriotism in America's Schools (foreword by Howard Zinn) and Among Schoolteachers: Community, Autonomy and Ideology in Teachers’ Work.
He is the author of more than 150 academic and professional journal articles, book chapters, and books. He addresses radio and television audiences and has delivered more than 300 keynote speeches, nationally and internationally.
Professor Westheimer is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines including The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, the Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, The Progressive Review, Education Week, Education Canada, School Magazine, Education Leadership, Our Schools/Our Selves, Independent School, Teacher Magazine, This, and The Parents League Review.
He lives with his wife and two children in Ottawa where, in Winter, he ice-skates to and from work.
Trista Hollweck, PhD
Trista Hollweck is a pracademic who straddles the world of research, policy, and practice. She is a former teacher, vice-principal, and school district consultant for the Western Quebec School Board.
Trista’s doctoral research project was a qualitative case study examining mentoring, coaching ad teacher induction, with a specific focus on how the mentor–coach role influences experienced teachers’ professional learning, practice and well-being. In 2019 Trista won the TLSS award for Teaching Excellence and her dissertation won the Outstanding Dissertation Award for the Canadian Association for Teacher Education (CATE) and AERA Teacher Induction SIG. Trista is actively involved with the international mentoring and coaching community as a researcher, writer and collaborator. She is a Growth Coaching International (GCI) advocate (Australia) and a CollectivED fellow for the Centre for Mentoring, Coaching and Professional Learning at Leeds Beckett University in England. To date, Trista has co-edited one special journal issue, published 9 journal articles and four book chapters and has contributed to SchoolsWeek, International Education News, CollectivED, Principal Connections and various podcasts. Trista has presented her research in a number of international conferences and is a board director (2017-present) of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) as well as the co-founder and co-chair of its Generational Renewal, Inclusion and Diversity (GRID) standing committee.
Trista leads the Accompaniment Project: Practice and Research for the Leadership Committee for English Education in Quebec (LCEEQ), developing teacher mentoring, coaching, and professional development for all English school boards in Quebec.
Trista is also a Part-Time Professor at the University of Ottawa where she is also Director for the global ARC Education Project. ARC brings together policymakers, system leaders, professional association leaders (unions, inspectorates, etc) from its seven-member systems and global members to learn with and from one another and international thought leaders in deliberately designed processes to advance equity, broad excellence, inclusion, wellbeing, democracy, sustainability, and human rights in high quality, professionally run systems. Trista researches and writes about pracademia, systemic change, restorative justice, professional learning and development, teacher education, mentoring and coaching, and teacher induction.