As a scholar and teacher, I am deeply committed to building strong relationships with people and setting people up to build strong relationships with others. While working in the academic landscape, my colleague and I noticed that education spaces advocate for collaboration in theory but favour competition and singularity in practice. This inspired our pursuit of critical friendship. After publishing our research about critical friendship in academic contexts, we developed a workshop programme that we presented to the WCDSB’s “Developing the Leader Within: Leadership Part 1” leadership series. This experience showed helped me see all that goes into developing people in an organization and how to adapt research for a teaching audience rather than an academic audience.
From here, I co-authored a book entitled “The Critical Friendship Revolution: Leading Ethical Practice Through Authentic Relationships” (2023) that moved our work beyond academia and into leadership and educational spaces. This book explores how critical friendship can be used to promote accountability in ethical dilemmas and how critical friendship can promote equity and inclusion in professional settings including schools and received a foreword by Dr. Maria Cantalini-Williams, a former WCDSB employee and the Dean of the Faculty of Education at Wilfrid Laurier University.
CourtneyAnnePhD 