What if one of childhood’s messiest experiences could deepen a child’s connection to the natural world?

That question is at the heart of 91ŃÇÉ« PhD student Ayesha Menezes’ doctoral research. Through her work, Menezes explores how mud play helps children see themselves as part of the natural world, fostering care, responsibility and belonging.

Her research comes as many children have fewer opportunities for unstructured outdoor play and engagement with nature. Risk-averse settings and busy urban lifestyles have reduced interaction with the natural world, prompting Menezes to understand how learning might look different if it emerged through children’s relationships with the land, water, weather and natural materials around them.

To explore this idea, Menezes took her research outside the University for Mud Day 2026, an event developed as part of her doctoral work. Held at Evergreen Brick Works children’s garden, the Mud Day invited children and caregivers to explore and create with mud.

Instead of planning structured activities with predetermined outcomes, the event invited children to engage in open-ended play experiences that included a mud kitchen, construction site, gardening, seed bomb making, beading and a collaborative mural. An interactive performance also encouraged participants to explore relationships between the sun, wind, rain and mud.

Read the full article on the July 13, 2026 issue of YFile

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National indigenous history Month feature

When Rick Powless learned that Health Sciences North in Sudbury launched its first Indigenous hospital menu, he felt a shift happen.

The third-year doctoral student at 91ŃÇÉ«'s Faculty of Education is a Red Seal-certified Indigenous chef, an Ontario College of Teachers-certified educator and a member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Oneida Nation of the Thames, Bear Clan.

He was also the primary consultant on an initiative led by Compass Group Canada to bring Indigenous meals into Ontario hospitals – a project that recognizes the role of traditional and cultural food in healing.

His contributions also serve as a testament to his work to advance meaningful cross-cultural engagement.

"It was emotional for me," he says of the menu’s launch in Sudbury. At 91ŃÇÉ«, his PhD research draws on Indigenous food sovereignty, food insecurity in urban centres and strategies to integrate traditional foods and land-based knowledge into Kindergarten to Grade 12 education.

Much of Powless's work focuses on how traditional foods and land-based knowledge support well-being, identity and learning for Indigenous people living in urban communities. His research explores the impact of food and cultural disconnection on mental health while also examining how Indigenous knowledge is taught – or overlooked – in Ontario’s Kindergarten to Grade 12 classrooms. For Powless, that means pushing beyond superficial, checkbox-driven approaches and creating space for stories, reciprocity and food-based learning rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing.

“If you give somebody a recipe to cook Indigenous food but don't have the stories or the history behind those recipes then the students aren't getting anything out of it,” he says. “Beyond mere sustenance, our food is also a form of cultural transmission.”

Part of what makes his work distinct is its attention to access. Indigenous ingredients – such as sun chokes, wild rice, butternut squash – have been more commercialized, driving up prices and making them less accessible.

Read the full story in the June 3, 2026 issue of Yfile

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As Ontario moves to make attendance and participation part of high school students' final marks, 91ŃÇÉ« research offers context for what rising absenteeism may signal and why there may be no simple fix.

The study, co-authored by Faculty of Education's Robert Brown, adjunct professor, and Gillian Parekh, associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Inclusion, Disability and Education, along with collaborators from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and Wilfrid Laurier University, uses the 2011-12 academic year as a baseline to track absenteeism trends in TDSB schools through 2023-24.

One of the study's key findings complicates the common assumption that rising absenteeism is mainly a post-COVID issue. While student absence rates surged dramatically during and after the pandemic, the researchers found that roughly one-third of this increase was already underway before the pandemic.

"COVID took existing trends and put them on steroids," says Brown. "This isn't something just caused by COVID."

The study finds that absenteeism roughly doubled over the 12-year period, with increases evident across grades. Brown says attendance tends to be relatively high in kindergarten, stable through much of elementary school, then rises in senior elementary grades before accelerating in high school. More recent 2023-24 data show some decline in absence rates among early and mid-elementary students, but rates continued to climb across all secondary grades.

Read the full article in the June 3, 2026 issue of Yfile

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Robert Savage, dean of the Faculty of Education at 91ŃÇÉ«, is leading research that asks a deceptively simple question: What actually helps children learn to read – and how early can schools intervene to make a lasting difference?

Years of experience as a school teacher and psychologist have framed his thinking about research, which since 2023 has focused on how children learn to read, both typically and atypically.

His research has also informed literacy policy and classroom practice in Ontario.

For instance, Savage served as a consultant to the Ontario government on its reading curriculum following a 2022 Ontario Human Rights Commission report on human rights issues affecting children with reading disabilities. Drawing on his research expertise and experience in schools, he contributed to the revised curriculum and helped develop supporting videos and scripts to make the changes easier for teachers to understand and incorporate into the classroom.

“I’m always interested in a mix of theory and practice and in how to use theory to develop better programs for developing reading,” he says. “I also like to collaborate.”

During another project, while working with colleagues at Concordia University, he co-created the web-based literacy program  that offers activities for learners and is free to the public.

More recently, with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Max Bell Foundation, Savage and a colleague at the University of Alberta have partnered with school boards in five provinces, including Ontario, to develop new screening tools, assess existing ones and share literacy resources. School boards in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, B.C. and Saskatchewan have used the tools to screen incoming Grade 2 students, assess reading skills, identify areas of concern and implement targeted reading programs to help prevent reading difficulties.

Read the full article in the May 22, 2026 issue of Yfile

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91ŃÇÉ« Faculty of Education Professor Lisa Farley and her research colleagues have developed a reflection guide for museum educators to support their efforts to discuss challenging topics and ideas with children.

The guide builds on the team’s 2025 study of programming and practices at children’s museums in Canada and the United States.

Farley says museum educators are navigating increasingly constrained environments when addressing equity, diversity, accessibility and inclusion with young audiences. Often, the idea of “childhood innocence” is cited as a reason to censor or downplay controversial and challenging ideas.

At the same time, Farley says, "children live within the social and political world, and are themselves subjects of and/or witnesses to injustices, violences and inequities."

She adds that the question then becomes "not how to protect them from difficult knowledge, but what it can mean to facilitate meaningful engagements.”

Farley and her colleagues, including 91ŃÇɫ’s Gillian Parekh, associate professor of education and doctoral candidate Suad Ahmed, conducted the original study in partnership with the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM). Their research found that while many children’s museums focus on exploration, play or self-expression, addressing social and historical issues with young audiences were secondary.

Read the full article in the Friday, March 27, 2026 issue of Yfile

Article written by Elaine Smith, special contributing writer

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Featuring:

• Karen Pheasant-Neganigwane PhD (c), Anishinaabe, Wikwemikoong, Mount Royal University, Calgary
• Neegawnee Oshkawbaywis, Raymond Deleary, Anishinabe
• John Hupfield, Assistant Professor, Anishinaabe, Wasauksing First Nation, 91ŃÇÉ« Faculty of Education

Miigwech to the Centre for Indigenous Knowledges and Languages (CIKL) for their gracious support and the Faculty of Education @ 91ŃÇÉ« for financial support

Co-presented by Miikaans: Mobile Movement Lab and ISAY – Indigenous Students Association at 91ŃÇÉ« as part of the Indigenous Week @ 91ŃÇÉ« Series

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Panelists:

• Angele Alook, Associate Professor, School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies & Director, Centre for Indigenous Knowledges and Languages
• Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education
• Jennifer Foster, Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change
• Carl James, Professor & Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community & Diaspora, Faculty of Education
• Byron Gray, Manager, TD Community Engagement Centre

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

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Carl E. James, the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora in 91ŃÇɫ’s Faculty of Education, brings his expertise to a four-year Genome Canada research project focused on Canada’s Black population.

Genomic Evidence for Precision Medicine for Selected Chronic Diseases Among Black Peoples in Canada – developed through collaboration with the Centre for Applied Genomics, at SickKids Hospital and McGill Genome Centre – is an effort to sequence the genomes of 10,000 Black Canadians to ensure equitable health care for an often-understudied population.

By sequencing the nucleotides that make up the participants’ DNA and RNA, researchers will gain a better understanding of how diseases affect Canada’s Black population and develop better precision medicines to target their conditions.

“We need to encourage these approaches for research, since medical studies often miss the racial diversity of health care recipients,” says James, a renowned sociologist with a research focus on race and ethnic relations. “In fact, we need to understand differences in all populations.”

The study is led by four prominent medical researchers: Upton Allen, division head at SickKids Hospital’s Infectious Diseases and professor at the University of Toronto; Loydie Jerome-Majewska, McGill University Department of Pediatrics professor and co-founder/program lead for the Canadian Black Scientists’ Network (CSBN); Juliet Daniel, McMaster University cell biologist and cancer researcher; and OmiSoore Dryden, professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University.

Read the full article in the February 25, 2026 issue of Yfile

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A  led by 91ŃÇÉ« follows Class of '73 high school graduates over the span of five decades in The Story of a Generation, a book that offers powerful insights on the baby boomer generation.

Culminating in a new book titled , the research marks the longest-running Canadian generational study of its kind, following nearly 50 years in the lives of a cohort of high school students who graduated in 1973. 

The project originated with Paul Anisef, professor emeritus at 91ŃÇɫ’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies who began with a survey of high school students to help the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities understand and project post-secondary enrolment.

“I didn’t have in my mind at all that this would become a long-standing longitudinal study,” says Anisef. “It started as a ministry-sponsored survey of high school students, and one thing led to another.” 

Encouraged by colleagues after the initial survey, Anisef returned repeatedly to the same group of students â€“ just under 2,500 members of the class of 1973 â€“ surveying and interviewing them in seven waves, from adolescence through midlife and into their early to mid-'60s. 

The final phase, conducted between 2019 and 2021, captured their reflections as many approached retirement, offering a rare, lifespan perspective on Canadians. 

The newly released book is co-authored along with 91ŃÇÉ« Faculty of Education professors Paul Axelrod and Carl James, as well as 91ŃÇÉ« PhD student Erika McDonald, and includes contributions from Wolfgang Lehmann, Karen Robson and Erica Fae Thomson. It’s a follow-up to an earlier volume, Opportunity and Uncertainty: Life Course Experiences of the Class of ’73 (2000). 

Read the full story in the January 16, 2026 issue of Yfile

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