People

Shamiga (Shamy) Arumuhathas

Shamiga (Shamy) Arumuhathas is a Ph.D. candidate at Western University Faculty of Education within the department of Critical Policy, Equity, and Leadership Studies (CPELS), under the dissertational supervision of Dr. Paul Tarc. Shamy completed her undergraduate degree in English Literature and Natural Science History at York University and proceeded to pursue her B.Ed. as both an intermediate and senior-level international, and Ontario Certified Teacher (OCT). Shamy's M.Ed. research concentrated on racialized international post-secondary students’ experience in East Asia, specifically in South Korea context and how students navigate higher education institutions (HEIs) that have increasingly become neo-colonial sites through their policies and practises.

Shamy's doctoral study titled: Is there adversity in diversity? Racialized international students’ experiences at Ontario universities furthers her M.Ed. research by investigating racialized international students’ experiences in Ontario HEIs. She aims to both interrogate and examine to what degree HEI's use of inclusive rhetoric adopted from Indigenous, decolonial, and diversity discourses is enacted on Ontario campuses while identifying the dissonance and discrepancies in settler-colonial universities’ policies and practices that create systemic barriers for international student’s academic success.

Shamy’s research interests also include the decolonization of higher education and its sustainable practices and the equitable inclusion of traditional disenfranchised peoples in post-secondary education. As a research-practitioner, educator, and a recipient of the Inclusive Education Research Award 2022 Competition awarded by the Canadian Research Centre on Inclusive Education, Shamy continues to provide effective anti-racist, cultural relevant, and intercultural interventions for international and secondary and post-secondary students of colour during student and academic crises.

Hasan Bayraktar

Hasan Bayraktar is currently in his first year of PhD studies in Critical Policy, Equity and Leadership studies (CPELS). He completed his MA and Ph.D. in English Language Teaching at the Department of Foreign Language Education, at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey, where he worked as a research/teaching assistant for ten years. During his graduate studies, he also worked as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) and Writing Center Tutor (as an ESL specialist) at the University of Richmond, VA, USA, during the 2003-2004 academic year. After working as an assistant professor of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) at Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey, for 5 years, he decided to pursue another doctoral degree in Educational Sciences in the CPELS program at Western University. He is now working with Dr. Paul Tarc. His research interests include international and contemporary forms of education in a globalizing world, flexible citizenship, transnational mobility, youth migration and individual migratory trajectories, how the cultural logics of globalization is reflected in education, immigration and study abroad trajectories of Turkish students in Canada, and the intersections of individual circumstances, and heightened mobilities and social/cultural/political orders and forces behind Turkish student mobility, phenomenological analysis of lived experiences of Turkish students at Canadian universities.

Ying Huang (Alyssa)

Alyssa is currently a PhD student of Faculty of Education, Western University. She did her master’s program in Education Studies in Western University years ago. She is now working with Dr. Jun Li and she has great passion in research of international education and online education. After she completed her master’s studies at Western, Alyssa joined China Scholarship Council Dongfang International Center for Educational Exchange (CSC Dongfang), under the Ministry of Education of China. As the Deputy Chief of Canadian Division of CSC Dongfang, Alyssa devoted more than ten years in international education and educational exchange. Her passion and her work experience in international education brought her back to Western to pursue PhD studies in this area.

Garima Jha

Garima Jha is a Ph.D. candidate at Western University, Faculty of Education within the Department of Critical Policy, Equity, and Leadership Studies (CPELS), under the dissertational supervision of Dr. Jun Li and Dr. Prachi Srivastava. She holds a Master of Education degree (M.Ed) from the National Taipei University of Education (NTUE), Taiwan and a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree from the University of Delhi, India. Her previous and ongoing research endeavors revolve around educational policy, non-state actors of education, teacher professionalism, students' adaptability, and enhancements in education. She is a licensed and certified educator in India and Taiwan, accumulating more than five years of teaching experience across various K-12 curricula in Low-fee private and public educational institutions. Before relocating to Canada to pursue her Ph.D., she had the privilege of contributing to the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, particularly within the ambit of the 'Bilingual 2030' initiative. Her professional interests are centred on the welfare and requirements of learners, international student dynamics, and the shaping of educational policies.

Garima’s doctoral study titled: A Comparative Analysis of Low-Fee Private Schools and Elite Schools Teachers’ Working Conditions, Teaching Contracts, and Recruitment Policies. Her academic pursuits center on an in-depth examination of low-fee private schools, particularly emphasizing the intricacies of teacher recruitment policies and the prevailing working conditions within these educational institutions. Her academic focus on low-fee private schools and related policy areas seeks to enrich the scholarly discourse surrounding education, policy formulation, and teacher professionalism, ultimately aiming to improve the educational landscape for teachers and students in these unique educational setting

Atiqa Marium

Atiqa is currently in her first year of PhD studies in Critical Policy, Equity and Leadership studies. She did her master’s in public administration from Pakistan in 2013, with focus on policy issues faced by Public and Private sector Higher Education Institutions. She had an experience of around 6 years, of working in a Public Sector Higher Education Institution of Pakistan, 2 years initially as an Assistant Registrar and then later on as a Lecturer in Public Administration Department. She got 3 Gold medals, merit scholarships and Roll of Honours during her student life in recognition of her academic excellence. She has always been interested to work on issues that can underscore the problems of Higher Education sector, with her aim to make improvement of any kind in this sector.

Haoming Tang

Haoming is a PhD candidate of the Faculty of Education at Western University. He holds a MA in Education and Society from McGill University, and a master’s degree in International Development from University of Jyvaskyla in Finland. Currently, he is working with Dr. Paul Tarc on a variety of research project. He has teaching experience in diverse cultural contexts in Finland, Peru, China, and Canada. His current research interests include policy of global education, global mindedness, study abroad, and international experience in higher education. The topic of his PhD thesis is Re-grounding processes of (trans)formative learning for global mindedness: Empirical and meta inquiries.

Dr. Lynn Mario de Souza

Professor Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza is Professor of Language Education at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Besides Language Education his research interests lie in language and educational policy and politics, literacy and interculturality. One of his recent publications is 'Glocal Languages and Critical Intercultural Awareness: The South Answers Back' (Routledge 2019).

Social critique is often assumed to be critique that aims at social transformation. However, Latin American decolonial theory and Southern theories have shown that the colonial origin of much of Modernity and Science relegates non-dominant knowledges to invisibility and non-existence such that social critique within a Modernist mode may maintain these invisibilized exclusions rather than transforming them. This presentation looks at these issues and discussed how they pertain to language and education.

Lilian Pascoal

Lilian Pascoal is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics from Brazil. Currently a visiting scholar at Western University Faculty of Education, she has been honored with the Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program award, an initiative backed by Global Affairs Canada.

Lilian's journey in academia began in 2012 when she started teaching English as an additional language in Brazil. From then on, she has had experiences in schools and in teacher education. Her teaching philosophy heavily resonates with the concept of "conscientização" - a Freirean term emphasizing critical consciousness. This notion encourages students, and the teachers themselves, to critically reflect upon the world and their societal roles within it but also take actions that foster its transformation.

Having navigated the challenges of teaching English at high school level and its ties with the high-stakes national exam system, Lilian gathered rich experiences. This environment catalyzed her interest in understanding classroom testing practices that could support meaningful learning, beyond exam-driven skills. Her subsequent master's research meticulously explored the fusion of critical literacy practices with classroom assessment processes, an endeavor that fortified her grasp on critical pedagogy, citizenship and social justice.

Recently, Lilian has committed herself to critically teaching English at elementary and middle school levels, which allowed her active involvement in implementing the 2018 Brazilian common core curriculum. Currently, her PhD research (spanning 2021-2025) is an in-depth exploration of Brazilian English language teachers' experiences and challenges in adapting to the new common core curriculum. With this, Lilian aspires to provide a space for teachers to make their voices heard about the complexities of curriculum adaptation and their experiences, as well as a study that advances discussions of critical pedagogy, social justice and educational policies in Brazilian teacher education.

Zehui Zhang

Zehui Zhang（zzha993@uwo.ca） is a PhD student of the Graduate Education Research Center of Beijing Institute of Technology, and is currently working with Professor Jun Li on the research of “Research Field Development Status Monitoring under the Digital Background”. Her research interests focus on the development of university research fields and “ Chinese double first-class University” research. She is committed to exploring the development model of different levels and types of universities, focusing on the formation of research fields in universities and the factors and internal relationships that promote their knowledge production, talent training and social services. She has participated in 7 national, provincial and ministerial research projects. Recent research focuses on the development of interdisciplinary research fields and the research field development of local universities in China, and the research results have been published in Fudan Education Forum, Journal of Graduate Education, and China Higher Education Research.

Marianne Larsen

James Budrow

Currently a PhD candidate in Critical Policy, Equity, and Leadership Studies Education at Western University, James’ 20 years teaching adult and young-adult learners in Canada, South Korea and China have opened opportunities to research, collaborate, write and teach across diverse cultural contexts. His research examines the experiences of teachers in local, Northern, and international school contexts under heightened internationalization. Specifically, his work illuminates the cosmopolitan conditions of teachers’ day to day and how they negotiate the intercultural complexities inherent to that condition in their being and becoming (more) internationally-minded.