About Our Faculty Members

Mary Beattie, Professor

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Mary Beattie has extensive teaching experience in elementary and secondary schools and taught in the public school systems in England, Ireland, and Canada before coming to the University of Toronto in 1989. She teaches courses in both the pre-service teacher education and graduate education programs at OISE.

Mary explores the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of educators' professional knowledge. She has also focused on investigating school development (exemplary secondary schools across Canada) by restructuring middle and secondary schools in Ontario and being concerned with the construction of professional knowledge by beginning teachers. Mary's works have been published in a number of books with major publishers, many articles in international journals, and chapters in books.

Mary was an invited Visiting Professor at The University of Iceland in Reyjkavik in 2008. In 1997, Mary was an invited Visiting Scholar at The School of Education, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. Mary was an Elected Faculty Member of the Governing Council of The University of Toronto, and of its Academic Board (1999-2005). Mary is the recipient of the Professor of the Year Award 1999/2000 from the OISE/UT Students’ Union.

Mary's recent SSHRC funded research is entitled: Professional Learning: Interacting and Enacting Narratives. As a principal investigator, she conceptualizes professional learning holistically using the concept of interacting narratives. This research examines the links among the differing learning contexts that define how educators construct and reconstruct their professional knowledge.

Research Interests:
• narrative inquiry; arts-based research; teacher development, holistic education