New appointment for early childhood education position

Ms. Christine Massing will be joining us July 1, 2015 to take up her tenure-track position.

Christine is nearing completion of her dissertation in Early Childhood Education in the Department of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta. Her doctoral dissertation is an ethnographic study of the experiences of immigrant and refugee women enrolled in an early childhood education program. Her work explores how these women experience the discontinuity between the authoritative discourse of early childhood education, bolstered by Western developmental theories and normative practise, and their personal and cultural beliefs, values, and knowledge. Christine’s research will make important contributions to the current faculty scholarship in early childhood education.

Christine is the recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC), an Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship, a President’s Doctoral Prize of Distinction and numerous other grants and awards during her graduate work. She has authored or co-authored numerous peer reviewed articles and book chapters, and has presented her research nationally and internationally.

Christine brings extensive experience in K-12 classroom teaching locally and internationally to this position, in addition to her university teaching in early childhood education at the University of Alberta and Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton. Further, she has been a curriculum developer for NorQuest College and Grant MacEwan University in their early learning and child care programs. She has participated in several research studies and been the Project Coordinator for an international SSHRC study on early childhood teacher education in Canada, Colombia and Namibia.