Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor
Established in 2021, the Education for Gender Justice Collective is a research lab led by Dr. Catherine Vanner in the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor.
The lab brings together researchers studying the relationship between gender, education, and violence from a variety of perspectives, analyzing education at all levels of education and in a wide range of cultural contexts. While research projects document the existence of gender-based violence in education, they focus on the ways in which educational stakeholders, including students, teachers, and administrators, are working to achieve gender justice in and through schools. Research projects within the Collective use qualitative and participatory research, including visual and art-based methods. They prioritize collaborative partnerships with community stakeholders including school boards, teachers’ unions, civil society, non-profit, government, and intergovernmental organizations.
Collective members after the 2023 Teaching about Gender-Based Violence workshop. From back left: Catherine Vanner, Salsabel Almanssori, Alexandra Lai, and Valerie Alexander. In front: Keith Trent-Rennick.
While research from the Collective has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Gender and Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, Sex Education, and Studies in Social Justice, the team works to create knowledge products that are directly applicable by educators and other practitioners.
For example, one of the Collective’s formative projects was the Time to Teach About Gender-Based Violence, which worked with students and teachers to document best practices for teaching about gender-based violence issues. Dr. Vanner and Dr. Salsabel Almanssori, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab, led a team that channelled the project findings into a two-day professional development workshop for teachers and the Teaching about Gender-Based Violence Toolkit, a teaching resource with guidance notes, lesson plans, and assessments aligned with the Ontario curriculum.
The Collective’s current research includes initiatives studying transnational youth-led feminist activism for gender transformative education, a service learning course on sexual violence prevention in teacher education, student activists and education administrators fighting for gender justice in schools, technology-facilitated sexual violence in the ‘manosphere’ environment, and a collaborative autoethnography of feminist mentorship within the lab.
For more information
For information about these initiatives, email catherine.vanner [at] uwindsor.ca.
