21 Mar Sherman Lecture 2025
March 30, 2025 | ACDE is pleased to announce the Sherman Lecture 2025
Terrible rights of passage: Teacher education’s role in ending transphobia and sexual harassment on practicum
Join ACDE for a thought-provoking exploration of teacher education programs’ responsibilities to trans, gender non-conforming and cis women students as they navigate their practicum experience.
2025 Sherman Lecture, featuring Dr. Lee Airton
Sunday, June 1, 2025 | 3:00 to 4:15 pm
Room 351, Waterfront Daniels Building
George Brown College, 130 Queens Quay East, Toronto, ON
Abstract
For the first time in Canadian history, many transgender and/or gender non-conforming (TGNC) young people have a K-12 school experience that leaves them whole enough to want to go back there as teachers. However, teacher education is not yet ready for them. Central to our unreadiness, Dr. Lee Airton argues, is practicum – namely, the complex web of laws, policies and sedimented customs that structure how teacher candidates are prepared for, placed and evaluated in K-12 schools – particularly when it goes wrong.
While practicum routinely goes wrong for TGNC teacher candidates, whether due to everyday discrimination or outright transphobia, it also routinely goes wrong for teacher candidates who make up the majority in our programs: young cisgender women, many of whom experience—but seldom report—sexual harassment during a school placement. When either situation is reported, programs can struggle to centre the teacher candidate’s wellbeing in the ensuing process and prevent the exact same thing befalling others in the future.
In this year’s Sherman Lecture, Dr. Airton will show how the interests of both cisgender women and transgender people who seek to join the teaching profession can be served by teacher education programs taking a brave look at our own structures and customs, and speaking up with governments, school authorities and other partners. At a time when growing anti-transgender backlash in education and elsewhere styles itself as “protecting girls and women,” teacher education can model a path of solidarity instead of driving further division in Canadian society.
Session chair: Dr. Lace Marie Brogden, StFX
Introduction to the speaker: Dr. Rebecca Luce-Kapler, Queen’s
Moderator: Dr. Miles Turnbull, UPEI
