Casey

Casey Burkholder became invested in the notion of citizenship and belonging from an early age, growing up in Canada’s North. Because her family moved frequently (from Edmonton to Red Deer to St. Albert to Fort Smith to Calgary to Winnipeg), and because as an adult she has lived in Wolfville, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Calgary, Charlottetown and Montreal, she has often struggled to answer the question, “Where are you from?” At Casey’s first teaching job at a public school in Hong Kong, she taught ‘non-Chinese’ ethnic minority youth. During her two years as a classroom teacher, she saw her students systematically excluded from school activities and language instruction, and watched as many students were pushed out of the school. She wondered about the difference between the Hong Kong government’s policy to include ethnic minority youth in schools, and their lived experiences. This question served as the foundation for Casey’s Master of Arts work, which she undertook in Educational Studies at Concordia University. In her doctoral work at McGill University’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education, Casey is embarking on a study that includes an analysis of the representations of ethnic minorities’ histories and cultures in Social Studies textbooks, and an action-oriented project of creating youth-led responses to these representations with cellphone videos (cellphilms). In her teaching practice at the post-secondary level at Concordia, McGill and the University of PEI, Casey infuses her teaching practices with the need to include, explore and represent multiple perspectives of history, belonging, and  citizenship.