Appointment of Chair of the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning

Dear OISE Community,

I am delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Jen Gilbert as Chair of the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning for a five-year term beginning January 1, 2024. I would like to thank the members of the advisory committee for their important work in selecting a new Chair.

Professor Gilbert joined the faculty of the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning as a tenured Full Professor on September 1, 2023. She received a PhD in Education from York University in 2002, and held a tenure stream appointment in York’s Faculty of Education from 2002 to 2023. Professor Gilbert brings with her a wealth of leadership experience from York, where she held appointments as Faculty Council Chair, Director of Graduate Programs, and Chair of the Tenure and Promotions and Tenure Stream Appointments Committees.

Professor Gilbert’s research focuses on queer and trans students, teachers, and families; controversies in sex education; and gendered and racialized narratives of risk, sexuality, and youth. Her 2014 monograph, Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education (University of Minnesota Press), received the Outstanding Book Award from the AERA Division B: Curriculum. She is completing her second book, Educating Sexuality, which explores how sex education has been shaped by both the emotional worlds of teaching and learning and the social logics of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and colonization. Professor Gilbert is co-editor, with Sharon Lamb, of The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development: Childhood and Adolescence (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Curriculum Inquiry, Harvard Educational Review, Sex Education, and Sexualities. In 2022, Professor Gilbert was Hunt-Simes Visiting Chair of Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney. She is also a Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.

Professor Gilbert has collaborated on or led research projects that have attracted more than $2.5 million in funding, including The Beyond Bullying Project, an LGBTQ+ storytelling and research study in high schools (funded by the Ford Foundation); 4theRecord, a study of racialized and LGBTQ+ young women and nonbinary youth’s experiences of risk-taking during COVID (funded by the SSHRC New Frontiers in Research Fund); and Between Yes and No, a study examining discourses of consent in sex education (funded by SSHRC). These projects have been training grounds for undergraduate, graduate student, and postdoctoral researchers seeking training in adolescent development and health, sexualities and education, and qualitative research. These topics have been at the fore of her undergraduate and graduate teaching, which has also addressed 2SLGBTQ+ teachers, queer research methods, and queer of color critique. At York University, she hosted a long-standing 2SLGBTQ+ book club for queer, trans, and allied teacher candidates and graduate students and supervised numerous doctoral and masters theses in Education, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, Critical Disability Studies, and Urban Indigenous Education.

I am thrilled that Professor Gilbert will be leading the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning and joining our senior leadership team at OISE. Please join me in congratulating Jen on her appointment and in welcoming her as the next Chair of CTL!

Warm regards,

Erica

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ERICA N. WALKER

Professor and Dean