Nathalie Carrier

Ph.D. Candidate, Educational Administration

As a scholar in development and valuing versatility in her doctoral experience, Nathalie [Nat] has conducted research and written in a number of areas in the past couple years including: the development of micro-political savvy amongst social justice education leaders and administrators; an outline of student-centered learning practices and the implications of their implementation across high performing districts in the United States; a quantitative comparison of leadership programming experiences of engineering and non-engineering students via the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership at the University of Toronto; a social network analysis of leaders and practitioners in underperforming school districts under the corrective action requirements of NCLB; why and how Canada outperforms other countries on international assessments; and a look at the importance of school architectural design principles in school improvement frameworks.

Nathalie has a background in international education, business and sociology, and has been on the founding team of entrepreneurial education organizations. Her current thesis research examines the diffusive characteristics of faddish-type educational innovations, where she finds a strong link to knowledge mobilization work. As part of the KM team, Nat will be investigating the ways research based innovations (products) are interpreted and acted upon, and how they might be crafted in ways that are more attractive and impactful to users. A native of California, Nat earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, and holds masters degrees from Stanford and the University of California, San Diego.

Email: nat.carrier@utoronto.ca