Heather Lash has been involved in access/transitional education for most of her adult life, both in community-based programs and at Ontario colleges. For the past 9 years she has been a faculty member at George Brown College in Toronto, mainly with the Academic Upgrading program, where she has developed a course aimed at all the non-academic aspects of returning to school after periods of struggle. Her most recent focus is on working with all-Indigenous cohorts and on enriching the engagement of Indigenous students in all programming.

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Her graduate studies of Narrative Ethics focused on the philosophical and political dimensions involved in receiving people’s stories of their tough experiences. Those themes continue to motivate her as she researches and writes on the impacts of violence and trauma on learning. She creates spaces where both faculty and students feel safe enough to engage in teaching and learning at their most transformational. She has a breadth of experience designing curriculum and supporting others to create curricula and classroom practices that deeply honour the strengths of diverse students.

Her central preoccupation is bringing love into the classroom, which she believes is integral to our developing ideas of what it means to “Indigenize” the curriculum. She has seen the ways this approach helps the transformations that education badly needs to actually happen!

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She has a passion for teaching and facilitating: upgrading and post-secondary students, teachers, and trainers. She has ease and fascination with the metacognitive and can make rich and complex analysis accessible to people with all levels of education. She likes talking about how we talk, and thinking about how we think! She also has intensive and extensive experience tailoring content to specific sectors and specific moments in people’s/organizations’ development.

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She would love to have a conversation with you about how she could create a workshop, seminar, or lecture presentation that would meet you, your institution, or your organization, exactly where you are right now.

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Check out her website www.heatherlash.space