Ruth Kane

Ruth Kane has been Director of Teacher Education at the University of Otago and full professor, Secondary Education at Massey University before moving to the University of Ottawa, Canada in 2006 to take up the position of Director of Teacher Education within the Faculty of Education. She has since served as Director of the Center for Research with Educational and Community Services (CRECS), a bi-faculty (Social Sciences & Education) research and evaluation centre that works with the educational, social service, and community health sectors to improve the health and well-being of children, adolescents and adults, including those who are vulnerable or who have special needs. Currently, Ruth is Director of Graduate Studies (Anglophone) within the Faculty of Education, a position she has held for five years.

Ruth Kane’s research focuses on the preparation of teachers for urban schools and equity in teaching and teacher education in Canada and internationally. She leads annual international practicums to Uganda through which Canadian teachers engage in teaching within a very different context. Ruth is co-Director of the Réseau de Savoir sur l’Équité| Equity Knowledge Network, an Ontario-wide bilingual Knowledge Network and principal investigator in a five-year SSHRC-funded study, of how school boards, teachers, and students take up citizenship within urban schools that serve youth from indigenous and first-generation refugee and immigrant communities. She is currently co-lead in a 3-year ArcticNet-funded study of sustainable inuit-centred teacher education for Inuit Nunangat, a collaborative project bringing together researchers from five universities (uOttawa, UPEI, Memorial, Winnipeg, Queens) and the four Inuit Nunangat jurisdictions. Ruth has also recently launched a collaborative study of graduate supervision and the well-being of graduate students with colleagues internationally.

Ruth is committed to creating spaces and mentoring younger colleagues and graduate students as emerging researchers. She contributes to graduate students training, including as a priority a number of students and colleagues on her funded research projects. She has supervised 16 PhD and 8 MA students to graduation and is currently supervising six PhD and four MA students, as well as serving on the committees of many more. Underpinning all her work is a longstanding concern regarding equity of access to and participation in K-12 and higher education.

As an adjunct professor with Victoria University of Wellington Ruth hopes to support and foster the research connections and collaborations among colleagues and graduate students between our two institutions. She would like to create spaces for graduate students and colleagues to engage in research partnerships and knowledge mobilization beyond our immediate contexts.