In Brief: Research News — Spring 2025
30 April 2025
Have You Met ... the kiskinwahamakewak (ATEP Aunties)
Meet the kiskinwahamakewak (academic learning facilitators) — also known as the ATEP Aunties — charis auger, Jessica Beamish and Kelly Ryan. This team supports primarily Indigenous students in the Aboriginal Teacher Education Program (ATEP) in achieving academic success as pre-service teachers. Reporting to the director of ATEP, the ATEP Aunties integrate Indigenous perspectives into the program, provide academic and emotional support through regular contact and referrals, identify strategies for academic growth, coordinate events to support students’ through their spiritual and cultural journeys and, overall, walk alongside students in good and intentional ways.
Education graduates need to be better equipped to teach children how to read
Canadian education graduates are leaving universities with limited knowledge of the skills required to teach children to read, according to a literacy expert at the ÒÁÈËÖ±²¥ and his collaborators across Canada.
George Georgiou, a professor in the Faculty of Education, and his collaborators surveyed 642 graduating students at 11 universities in seven provinces and discovered they had limited knowledge of the basic concepts of literacy and were ill-equipped to help children struggling to read.
“There is nothing more important than learning to read for a child’s academic success,” says Georgiou, who also led the development of Alberta’s new English Language Arts and Literature curriculum.
His results show that on average, graduates surveyed were able to correctly answer only 64 percent of questions about phonology, the ability to perceive and manipulate speech sounds, and 60 percent of questions related to phonics, the ability to map letters to sounds. And when it came to morphology, or breaking down the internal structure of words to derive their meaning, graduates averaged a correct response rate of just 34 per cent.
Georgiou has experienced this dearth of knowledge first-hand. He has been measuring the reading performance of students in Alberta since 2008, while introducing intervention programs to help students struggling to read.
New northern research based on a decade of collaboration with community
Library and information studies professor Ali Shiri has been conducting research on cultural heritage preservation and access in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR) of Canada’s north for more than a decade. With help from a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), he’s preparing to return to the region to continue the project started in 2012.
But just as important, he says, is continuing the collaboration with the residents of the ISR while continuing to grow his own knowledge of the culture and of ethical research practices with Indigenous peoples.
The foundation of the project is the , an online repository of digital information artifacts such as oral history, elders stories, early literacy materials, maps, photographs, audio and video recordings that document the traditions, language, dialects and culture of six communities in the western Arctic — Aklavik, Inuvik, Tuktoyaktuk, Paulatuk, Ulukhaktok and Sachs Harbour — that was launched in 2014 after extensive consultation and testing with community members. Based on their feedback, a subsequent project that started in 2019 and wrapped up earlier this year saw Shiri and his team work with these communities to develop a web-based platform for recording elders’ stories for preservation.
“Computers and various digital devices have been around for decades,” Shiri says. “What’s not done extensively is accommodating and digitally empowering Indigenous communities to be able to preserve culture, history, language and heritage, and make it accessible for the community and the general public.”
The newly funded project, entitled Intergenerational Digital Storytelling for Inuvialuit Cultural Heritage Preservation starting this year, will draw on community input to develop a mobile application that will promote digital literacy and will enable users to record and upload elders’ stories directly to the digital library. The intergenerational aspect of the project was prompted by input from community members, Shiri says.
Innovator spotlight: Cheryl Poth
Cheryl Poth is a professor and award-winning textbook author whose work focuses on enhancing research quality, methodological training and collaborative research teams in education and health sciences.
Innovator Spotlight: Lia Daniels
Educational psychologist Lia Daniels says by applying principles of motivation and emotion, tests, essays, labs and other classroom assessments could be redesigned to enhance student well-being.