Marlene Atleo

Dr. Atleo coordinates the Adult and Post Secondary Education Program in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and teaches Aboriginal and Cross Cultural Education to teacher candidates in the B.Ed Program. She is also known as ?eh ?eh naa tuu kwiss of the House of Klaaqishpeetl of the Ahousaht First Nation Nuu‐chah‐nulth, Vancouver Island, B.C.

Dr. Atleo returned to higher education as a grandmother, a refugee from the declining West Coast Fishing Industry. As a member of the Ahousaht First Nation, she had already conducted adult education programming in her community; thus, formalizing her skills and bringing them home for community and institutional development was the first step on her academic journey. Using those skills to develop programming for infrastructure development was the next step. The opportunity to conduct research with diverse and non-traditional community needs in the academy (especially through adult education) is her current application of a passion for lifelong learning as a philosophy. Areas of specialization include diversity; non-traditional education; adult education; and institutional and community development. Dr. Atleo is currently working in the area of documentation of Aboriginal lineage and the development of archival studies and public education for Aboriginal students, as well as conducting work on human rights to sociohistorical integrity in education.

Joanna Black

Dr. Black is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education and adjunct professor in the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. Black teaches visual arts and new media education, including video art. Her research interests and published works are about the human right issues in visual arts education, the virtual visual arts classroom, new media in education, contemporary art, and digital visual arts pedagogy.

Along with Dr. Miriam Cooley, Black was a curator of an international student new media art exhibition called Eksperimenta!, which was held in Tallinn, Estonia, April to June 2011. Prior to working at the University of Manitoba, she worked as an art director, curator, museum art educator, art consultant, and K-12 teacher for close to twenty years in public and alternative school settings. During her time in the school system, Black served as art director for Inner City Angels, a private artists-in-the-schools program where she was responsible for overseeing 150 artists placed in 250 elementary schools in the Metropolitan Toronto area.

Orest Cap

Dr. Cap is a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Manitoba and director of the Imperial Oil Academy for the Learning of Mathematics, Science and Technology.

Cap's current research interests are teacher education, digital technology and human rights. His mother is a Holodomor survivor and both of his parents are survivors of Nazi labour camps. His passion for human rights is not limited to his research. For example, Cap helped to establish a successful social services network that aids a physically and mentally challenged population in Chernihiv affected by the Chernobyl disaster. 

Cap is an acknowledged leader, distinguished educator and respected researcher in vocational-technical and international education. In 2010, he was the first foreigner selected to receive a Humanitarian Award from the Chernihiv Oblasna Rada and the Oblasna Derzavna Adminstratsia (Chernihiv provincial council and provincial government) in Ukraine. Cap was also honoured for his instrumental work in establishing the Chernihiv State Teacher Innovation Award Project at Hohol State University in Nizhen, Ukraine and then at Chernihiv State Pedagogical University in Chernihiv, Ukraine.

Jerome Cranston

Dr. Jerome Cranston is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education. He researches and teaches as part of an interdisciplinary, international “community of inquiry” on topics of education and social justice. His work uses critical perspectives to explore organizational structures and behaviours that act as blinders to social injustice in the education system.

Cranston’s research interests include human resource management in schools, and organizational behaviour and structure in schools. His forthcoming article in the McGill Journal of Education, “What Do You Mean Your Staff Is Like Family”? uses critical discourse analysis to challenge the kind of marketing metaphors sometimes employed in the name of staff development that actually obscure the important discourse of education by reinforcing unnecessary models of power and status. Much of his work focuses on the lived experience of the ethical dimensions of school leadership, and in particular how personnel hiring and management can transform from a set of random acts to a just enterprise.

Cranston is also involved with various partners from across Manitoba’s kindergarten to grade 12 spectrum as part of the province-wide Social Justice Coalition. His professional experience spans the range from elementary school teacher, principal and superintendent to researcher and writer. He is a member of the Centre for Human Rights Research Initiative’s advisory board.

Frank Deer

Dr. Deer is originally from Kahnawake, Que. In addition to his instructional duties in the B.Ed. program, he has conducted research on citizenship education for Aboriginal students in Manitoba.

Dr. Deer is editor of First Nations Perspectives: The Journal of the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre. His doctoral dissertation is titled Citizenship Development for Aboriginal High School Students in the Province of Manitoba: An Exploratory Study. In 2005, he was research assistant for RESOLVE (Research & Education for Solutions to Violence & Abuse) Saskatchewan.

Laara Fitznor

Dr. Fitznor co-chairs a committee of Aboriginal faculty and staff and their allies who have been working since 2009 on a proposal to house the archives of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools once the commission wraps up its work in 2013.

She began her academic career with the University of Manitoba access program in 1982, where she was first an academic counselor, then director. From 1992 to 1998, she joined the Faculty of Education teaching cross-cultural/Aboriginal education. She then joined the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in the fall of 1998 in a newly established position of Aboriginal Education to develop that focus. She returned to the University of Manitoba in 2003 to teach Aboriginal education. Her areas of specialization include: Aboriginal and indigenous education; access and equity issues in education; anti-racism in education; Aboriginal and diversity perspectives in program/curriculum/institutional planning; and adult education and community development.

In 2010, Dr. Fitznor and fellow U of M education professor Dr. Marlene Atleo spoke at the Centre for Human Rights Research round table Unfinished Business about human rights to socio-historical integrity in education -- grafted onto indigenous history and territory.

Glen McCabe

Metis pyschologist Dr. Glen McCabe teaches pre-service counsellors in the Guidance and Counselling Program in the Faculty of Education. Dr. McCabe is engaged at the local, regional, national and international levels in research, presentations and program development. His research and writing on Aboriginal traditional healing is internationally recognized through honorable mention in the Amercian Psychological Association's Jeffrey S. Tanaka Memorial Award and publication in Psychotherapy: Theory, Practice, research and Training. He has also been invited to summit meetings on Prevention of Youth Suicide in Indigenous Communities in North America in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Vancouver, B.C.

Dr. McCabe's dissertation research was a qualitative study of the therapeutic conditions of Aboriginal traditional healing psychosocial interventions.

His research interests include: worldwide Indigenous healing methodologies and the relationship between them and current conventional psychological approaches; and the role of community and psychosocial factors in levels of academic succces and rate of academic program completion in the Native North American population.

Denis Hlynka

Dr. Hlynka is a professor of instructional technology and curriculum theory at the University of Manitoba. 

Hlynka is widely published, most notably as co-editor of Paradigms Regained: The uses of illuminative, semiotic and postmodern criticism in instructional technology. This text has been used in many instructional technology graduate courses throughout the U. S. and Canada. His most recent research is on the musicalization of Chornobyl, analyzing North American popular songs to examine how meanings are constructed in trans-national and technological discourses.

From 2000 to 2007, Hlynka served as acting director of the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies at the University of Manitoba. His popular culture study A day in Hollywood, a night in Ukraine... was an invited presentation in Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Calgary, and Regina. Dr. Hlynka has been a long-time member of the board of directors of St. Andrew's College, University of Manitoba. He serves on numerous other boards and is listed in Who's Who in Canada.

Melanie Janzen

Dr. Melanie Janzen joined the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba in 2011 in a dual role as director of school experiences and assistant professor in the department of curriculum, teaching, and learning. 

She is responsible for co-ordinating the practicum placement of more than 500 teacher candidates in schools each year. Her research considers issues of teacher identities and teachers' responsibilities to students, to ethical and socially-just curricula, and to the greater project of education.

Before pursuing her post-graduate work, Janzen taught in early years classrooms and served as a learning support teacher. She is passionate about supporting the art community and sustainability. She was co-founder of ArtsJunktion mb, a community-based charitable organization committed to redistributing reusable materials and still serves as co-chair of the board.

Janzen graduated with a PhD (2011) from the University of British Columbia. For her dissertation, Teacher Becoming: Reading the Phantasies and Interruptions of Becoming, she was awarded the Canadian Association Recognition Award for Theses and Dissertations in Teacher Education and the American Educational Research Association Qualitative Research SIG Outstanding Dissertation Award. She earned both her MA (2005) and BEd (1994) from the University of Manitoba. 

Nathalie Piquemal

Nathalie Piquemal's research and teaching examine education from a human rights perspective. Her specialty is intercultural and international education, with a focus to issues of cultural discontinuities as experiences by minority students. In applying this practically, Dr. Piquemal works with both teachers and immigrants on the cultural and linguistic barriers that minority students face in educational contexts. This work draws upon human rights issues in the realm of education, as is demonstrated by Dr. Piquemal's current work, which explores the experiences of immigrants with special attention to issues of marginalization, race and privilege. In this line of investigation, Dr. Piquemal uses phenomenological inquiry to better address issues of marginalized voices, particularly in her more recent work with refugees and war-affected families. Dr. Piquemal's areas of interest also include research ethics; immigration, language and culture; cultural and linguistic discontinuities; and aboriginal education. Dr. Piquemal is originally from France where she completed her Master’s degree in Education and Anthropology. She received her PhD from the University of Alberta in 1999 in both Departments of Education and Anthropology. Her research focused on ethical protocols for research practices that are inclusive of Aboriginal perspectives.

Dr. Piquemal is a member of the Centre for Human Rights Research Initiative’s advisory board.