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Margaret Dumas
Curriculum Team
Margaret Dumas is a woman of Cree and Austrian ancestry. She is a mother to four children and a grandmother to thirteen grandchildren. Margaret was born in Churchill, Manitoba but was mostly raised in a little Cree and Métis town along the Hudson Bay line called Pikwitonei. Margaret has lived in the North most of her life and has been an educator in both the North and South for over 30 years.
Margaret has a 5-year Bachelor of education degree from Brandon University. She received her grade 12 from Frontier Collegiate at Cranberry Portage and later received her TESL (Teaching English Second Language) certificate from KCC which is now UCN. Margaret was and is still very involved in the revitalization of the Cree language and with the development of the Cree language curriculum and community school in Thompson and throughout other parts of Manitoba. Her interests have always been with Indigenous education, with the reform, and in the revitalization of the Cree language and culture. Margaret is a Cree Bilingual teacher at Wapanohk Community School with Mystery Lake School Division. She hopes to pass the importance of the language and culture to all the youth she teaches and hopes that her children and grandchildren will carry on her work in the future.
In her free time, she also enjoys working on committees and facilitating workshops on Cree culture and worldview. In addition, she loves to play her guitar and sing in both Cree and English, often performs at local coffee houses, and as well enjoys cooking, baking, writing and camping.
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Jason Lewis
Production Team
Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media poet, artist, and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he leads research/creation projects exploring computation as a creative and cultural material. He co-directs the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network, and the Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design. He is a Trudeau Fellow, and University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well as Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montreal.
Before joining academia, Lewis spent a decade in Silicon Valley exploring early digital and networked media at the Institute for Research on Learning, Fitch Design, and Interval Research. In 2009 he founded Arts Alliance Laboratory, the research and development arm of London-based venture capital firm Arts Alliance
Lewis' creative work has been featured at Ars Electronica, Mobilefest, Urban Screens, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and FILE, among other venues, and has been recognized with the inaugural Robert Coover Award for Best Work of Electronic Literature, a Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mention, several imagineNATIVE Best New Media awards and five solo exhibitions. He's the author of chapters in collected editions covering mobile media, video game design, machinima and experimental pedagogy with Indigenous communities. He is Cherokee, Hawaiian, and Samoan, born and raised in northern California.
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Eric Meyers
Production Team
Eric M. Meyers is Associate Professor and past Chair of the uniquely interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Children’s Literature program at the University of British Columbia. Eric’s research, at the intersection of information science and the learning sciences, explores how young people engage socially with digital information systems as they work, learn, and play. This research has included work on collaborative search, social reading environments, digital literacies in YouTube, and the affordances of tablet-based learning. Recent work has focused on how crafting and prototyping activities in informal learning settings, specifically Maker Camps and library-based coding and crafting programs, support the development of design literacies and computational thinking, the skills and attitudes that facilitate understanding of today's complex information and communication technologies. He also has a complementary research stream in children’s digital media and textual cultures, which explores how human values (e.g., privacy, autonomy, agency, and sustainability) are reflected and instantiated in children’s immersive technologies and their related textual ecosystems.
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Erin Spring
Research Evaluation and Policy Development Team
Erin Spring is an Assistant Professor in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary. She holds a BA (Honours) in English from Trent University and a B.Ed from Queen’s University. Erin was a classroom teacher in London, UK, before returning to graduate studies. She earned an MPhil and PhD from the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Between 2014-2017 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge. Broadly speaking, Erin’s interdisciplinary research focuses on young people’s literacies, texts, and cultures. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches, including reading discussion groups, photo-elicitation, and map-making, Erin’s research seeks to understand the ways in which young people make sense of their identities through reading, writing, and art. Her research projects are united thematically by a shared investment in stories and storytelling as a way of articulating identity development, with a particular focus on the influence of place. Her ongoing objective as a settler scholar is to collaborate with communities to ask and answer questions that matter to them, facilitating social change, building capacity, and promoting student wellbeing. For the past three years she has been working with the Blackfoot community in southern Alberta.
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Dawn Sutherland
Curriculum Team
Dawn Sutherland is currently a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Winnipeg. She was the Canada Research Chair in Science Education in Cultural Contexts from 2006-2016. Her research covers areas related to the influence of culture while learning science, self-efficacy of First Nations youth in science related career development and educators’ perceptions of culturally relevant science teaching. She has worked with First Nations communities to develop science education programming that incorporates Indigenous Knowledge and currently works with the Boys and Girls Club of Winnipeg to create after school learning experiences in engineering and science.
