Jane Gaskell

Professor Jane Gaskell went to school in Toronto then completed an Honors BA (Sociology) at Swarthmore College and an EdD in sociology of education at Harvard University. She returned to Canada to teach first at Queen s University, then at the University of British Columbia. While at UBC, she was Chair of the Department of Social and Educational Studies and then served as Associate Dean Research and Graduate Studies before becoming the first female Dean of education at the University of Toronto in 2003.

Dean Gaskell is an experienced teacher and graduate supervisor, and in the 2006-07 academic year, she team-taught a graduate course on the Politics of Education. She has carried out research and produced publications on a range of educational issues, including the organization of Canadian secondary schooling, the links between education and the workplace, feminist approaches to education and the politics of educational research. Her studies on the aspirations of young women, the organization of clerical education and the dilemmas of school choice have been funded by individual grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. On other projects, like the Western Educational Research Network and the Canadian Exemplary Schools Project, she has been principal investigator of large, networked, collaborative teams; still other research has been carried out on a smaller scale with Canadian colleagues. Her current research, with Ben Levin, is on the history of approaches to poverty in the Toronto and Winnipeg school boards. 

She has also served as President of the Canadian Association for Foundations of Education and the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, and been a member of the Council of the Social Sciences Federation of Canada and its Vice-President External Relations. She was a member of the Council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Chair of its Research and Dissemination Committee. She has also served as a consultant, a member of a number of expert advisory committees and on the editorial boards of several journals.

Since her arrival at OISE, Professor Gaskell has continued to build on her reputation as a leader who builds consensus, focus, and a firm sense of direction. Among the many initiatives she has encouraged at OISE are: an academic planning process culminating in a five-year institute-wide plan; a focus on partnerships and inner city schools, including the establishment of a Centre for Urban Schooling; a new, multi-divisional Concurrent Teacher Education Program (CTEP); and several community-building events and student-funding opportunities associated with the Centennial (2007) year.