Linda Radford is an associate member of A Canadian Curriculum Project. She is currently a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. Her journey within the field of teacher education began in 1991 when she studied with Ursula Kelly at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. Having just completed her Master’s thesis at Dalhousie University on the value of regionalism in Canadian literature, she found Kelly’s introduction to a critical literary pedagogy as a transformative framework that inspired her own teaching of literature with a wide range of student populations from the elementary to the college level. Curious about the dynamics of resistance in reading and learning about difficult knowledge, Radford began another adventure of insight by taking courses with Deborah Britzman and Alice Pitt at York University. Inspired to further explore readings’ inner drama, in the fall of 2000, she began he PhD in Education with Judith Robertson at the University of Ottawa. Her doctoral dissertation, which received numerous awards such as International Reading Association, Canadian Association of Teacher Education and Truda Rosenberg Scholarship for Research on Discrimination, explored questions of aesthetic provocation and beginning teacher’s reading practices and offers a model of how objects of the curriculum can be used to discuss the implications of identification within the framework of learning to teach others to learn.

Since completing her doctorate, Linda Radford has been teaching a variety of courses at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education. As co-investigator, she has been working with Nicholas Ng-A-Fook on a media studies, social action research project entitled Engaging Youth Activism, which explores the use of 2.0 technologies with ‘at risk’ learners who struggle with traditional literacies and also explores the challenges new technologies bring to our changing understanding of youth’s relation to fiction. Working with Grade 10 classroom English teachers to develop and support differentiated instruction in order to help foster open learning environments where students can engage and perform multiple literacies, Linda Radford has been working to support the aim of this curriculum project – to empower the lived experience of students at school and encourage advocacy by and for these historically marginalized youth. From this research, she plans to turn her attention to a new project on how digital storytelling is being played out in the classrooms and how teachers can explore its democratizing potential.

Additionally, as an educational consultant, she has been working with a team from the research firm Contentworks for the Qikiqitani Truth Commission to examine the impact of government decision-making on Baffin Inuit in the 1950-75 period. The findings will become part of the Qikitani Inuit Association’s archive and augment cultural sensitivity of the current issues facing the Inuit by describing their recent past and the many challenges they endured as a nation.