About

Authentic student experience is determined by the mutual efforts of students, fellow students, faculty members, administrators, family members, allies and practitioners of inclusive post-secondary education. This Centre was founded in 2018 to improve the practice of inclusive post-secondary education by providing a resource and information centre which promotes a better understanding on how to support an inclusive and equitable post-secondary education.

The work of the Centre is coordinated and carried out by:

Dr. Teresa Swan (VIU)

Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences and Human Services, Vancouver Island University (VIU).
Prior to joining VIU, Teresa worked directly with students with intellectual and developmental disabilities in post-secondary education. Her research interests include interpretive methods and disability issues with a focus on inclusive post-secondary education. Currently she is working on a VIU funded research partnership with STEPS Forward exploring inclusive trades training.

Dr. Charles Bingham (SFU)

Professor, Faculty of Education , SFU
​Bing has been involved with equitable education for 49 years. He attended the first reverse-integrated elementary school in the USA during the Civil Rights Era. He taught against racism as a high-school teacher in Apartheid South Africa. He has published on the inequities deriving from a narrow focus on learning outcomes. He has published too on the affective injustice of merit ideology. At present, his research and thinking are focused on the social justice possibilities for Inclusion in higher education. Linked to his focus on social justice are all four of his published books: 'Schools of Recognition,' 'No Education.  (webpage)

Teresa Dawson (UVIC)

Full Teaching Professor in Geography at the University of Victoria. 
​Teresa's current areas of focus are Geographies of Gender and Social Justice including the complex geographies of space and power. She is particularly interested in the concept of Personal Space and understanding how power relations intersect with identity at the scale of the body. Teresa teaches Geography classes from first to fourth year as well as Honours in the Geography undergraduate program and she loves working with her students on projects that further their own interests in spatial inclusivity, such as the map by Sam Mason. (www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=10Kp7yToJMDnY0OFwAZGYuERFCqXzM94&usp=sharing)

Teresa has been a long-time advocate for inclusive education and began advocating for the STEPS Initiative in 2006 when she moved to BC. In 2006 she won both the University of Toronto (Scarborough) Faculty Teaching Award and the UTSC Recognition Award from Students. In 2012 she received the Educator of the Year Award “for outstanding commitment to accessibility in the academy” from Access UVic (the then UVic Association of Disabled Students).

Teresa has written practical books on Universal Instructional Design for both the University of Toronto and the University of Victoria (2009) aiming to increase access and inclusion in college classrooms. She was also the lead author for the 2009 Teaching College Geography: A Practical Guide for Graduate Students and Early Career Faculty from Prentice Hall and a co-editor of Teaching and Learning Community Based Research: From Pedagogy to Practice published in 2014 by the University of Toronto Press. She is currently working on a collaborative project that seeks to imagine the full possibilities of inclusive university and college education.

Previously Teresa served two terms as the Director of the UVic Learning at Teaching Centre (2006-16). Regionally, Teresa was co-founder of the Vancouver Educational Developers Alliance (VIEDA). Nationally, she is Past Chair of the Educational Developers Caucus and served for ten years as a member of the Board for the Canadian Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE).
(webpage)

Arden Duncan Bonokoski (STEPS Forward)

(MSc-CRDS), Executive Director STEPS Forward
Arden started her career in inclusive post-secondary education at Bow Valley College in Alberta. She moved to the University of Victoria in 2009 to work with STEPS Forward, the BC Initiative for Inclusive Post-secondary Education.  She has since worked as a inclusion facilitator at ECUAD and SFU and as the Provincial Coordinator.  In 2011 she completed her MSc in the Faculty of Medicine, Community Health Science Department, with a specialization in Community Rehabilitation and Disability studies.  Her thesis described the comprehensive system of support that has been developed around intellectual disability and how this system works to encapsulate and marginalize people with labels.  Arden was a collaborator on the SFU Teaching and Learning Development Project “Inclusive Post-secondary Education as a practice of Social Justice”.