Heather Phipps joins us from the Department of Educational Studies at McGill University, where she is nearing the completion of her Ph.D. She holds a Masters of Arts in Second Language Education from McGill University, a TESL certificate from Lethbridge College, and a B.A./B.Ed. from the University of Lethbridge. While a doctoral student at McGill, Ms. Phipps has been the recipient of numerous graduate scholarships, including the prestigious Doctoral Fellowship award and the Provost doctoral fellowship.

Phipp’s dissertation, Children Speaking to Children: Multimodal Engagements with Contemporary Canadian Picture Books in French Classrooms, is an ethnographic study situated in a public primary school in urban Montreal. It documents young children’s responses to Canadian children’s literature in Grades 1 & 2 French classrooms. Her study highlights the ways in which children engage and respond to both the words and images in diverse Canadian literature, and how they reflect on their own lived experiences in relation to the picture books. Her future research interests include inquiry related to issues of belonging, identity, and community for children and teachers in the context of minority language education in francophone and French immersion schools in the Saskatchewan context and in diverse multilingual contexts across Canada.

Phipps is a published scholar who has presented her work at numerous national and international conferences, serves as a reviewer for several scholarly journals and for the Language and Literacy SIG of CSSE. She has extensive experience as a classroom teacher in a French immersion context, and has also taught education classes at the post-secondary level. She is past president of the McGill University Education Graduate Students’ Society.

Jöel Thibeault is currently a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. He holds a Masters of Arts in Education from the University of Ottawa, and an undergraduate degree in French language and literature from McGill University. Mr. Thibeault is the 2015 recipient of the Michael Smith Award for research abroad from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and is a holder of the prestigious SSHRC Joseph-Bombardier scholarship, 2014-2017. He received a Graduate Studies Scholarship from the University of Ottawa, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship.

Thibeault’s doctoral research focuses on the teaching and learning of French grammar in socio-linguistic minority contexts. His dissertation aims to understand the development of grammatical competence among elementary students in southwestern Ontario, a population of significant Anglophone dominance. Mr. Thibeault’s work lies at the crossroads the didactics of French first language and second language research and will undoubtedly make many contributions to the body of scholarship in French minority language education. In addition, he has been involved in several research teams at the University of Ottawa and the University of Quebec at Montreal that have required significant and sustained work in educational and school contexts.

Thibeault is a published scholar and has presented his scholarly work at numerous national and international conferences. He has several professional publications, and is involved in a number of important local, national, and international associations.