The sugary smoke of burning sweet grass curls around the faces of those gathered within this sacred and spiritual hut. Cupped hands sweep smoke towards bodies. Within this modest shelter north of Winnipeg, these people are cleansing their bodies, spirits, hearts and souls. They’ve come to share in the tradition of the Ojibwa sweat lodge.

One woman in the hut, the one with the rosy complexion and blue eyes, is doing more than cleansing; she is learning and she is changing. She has been volunteering with an ecumenical committee devoted to helping First Nations people in crisis and she has begun to encounter the world behind the stories she reads about and teaches in her English courses at the University of Regina. This experience is helping to open her eyes to how the world connects outside of her classroom.

After the sweat lodge Angela Terpstra never teaches the works of First Nations artists
the same way again. She develops a relationship with the First Nations University of Canada and begins to invite First Nations people to speak in her class and to deliver lectures. Everything, within and beyond the classroom, is connected, and Angela carries this insight with her.

Angela Terpstra has a wide range of experience in the world of education. She is also a devoted wife, a loving mother of three and holds the very demanding position of senior school principal at BSS. Many aspects of Angela’s life are interwoven: she and her husband, Nick, met in university at McMaster and eventually both taught at the University of Regina; her oldest son just completed his fourth year at university in the same field as Nick (renaissance studies); and her passion for literature and teaching morphed into her career as an English teacher and ultimately led to her role at BSS, where her youngest child, Alison, is also a student.

What brought Angela to BSS was, in her words, serendipity. In fact, serendipity has a role to play in most things in her life. She and her husband were living in Ontario where Nick pursued his studies and Angela taught at a high school as the English department head. They moved to Regina to pursue their careers at a post-secondary level. The move, in hindsight, was beneficial for everyone.

“It’s really neat as a young couple to actually move away from your family and have to develop friends and connections in a whole other culture and I really think of the west as being different,” she says.

They later relocated to Toronto. The family moved so that Nick could take a great opportunity to teach at the University of Toronto. Upon moving to Toronto, Angela was able to undertake the process of getting her masters degree at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. True to Angela’s style of completely immersing herself in her surroundings, not only did she study at OISE but she also taught English Education courses. After a year of full-time study and teaching at OISE, Angela continued to work on her degree, but at this point serendipity stepped in again.

“I remember being in my brother’s kitchen and both [my brother and husband] said, ‘I saw an ad today in The Globe and I think you ought to apply. I think there’s really something about it that connects with you,’” Angela explains.

The ad was placed by Appleby College, which was looking for someone to help navigate a new curriculum. “I’d never thought about going back to a secondary school environment, but why not? It sounded like a really great opportunity. So I applied and they hired me,” she laughs.

From 1999–2005, Angela juggled motherhood, marriage, a masters degree and the responsibility of teaching the teachers at Appleby how to incorporate a new curriculum. It wasn’t long until Angela was promoted to assistant head of the school, a position that allowed her to be more involved in all aspects of the school.

The exciting challenges that initially drew Angela to Appleby began to fade and she was ready for a change. That’s when another opportunity came knocking, this time with BSS. She was ready for something new and was delighted with the idea of using all her skills to tackle the challenge of running the senior school. With over 600 students at any given time, and a constantly evolving curriculum that demands innovation, research and the latest thinking about how girls learn best during these crucial growing years, Angela dove in using every bit of her teaching and school administration experience, as well as her experience as a mother of three.

“Surprised by joy,” she says, quoting William Wordsworth as she describes the day she was offered the job at BSS. “I always think that’s a really neat phrase, surprised by joy, because you just really are surprised by moments that sometimes take your breath away,” she explains.

Along with taking on her position at BSS, Angela wanted to further pursue her education, so she returned to OISE for her doctorate.

In November of last year Angela received her English Education doctorate and completed a thesis titled The Art of Improvisation, which explores the intersection of education, pedagogy and technology.

“I asked questions like, ‘What does technology do to the relationship between teacher and student in a literature setting?’ What happens to literature when it is fused with technology? How do we engage with new forms of text in courses that have traditionally depended on paper texts?’” explains Angela.

Angela has been able to apply her doctoral studies to the dynamic environment of education at BSS.

“Working at a school with intense technology allows me to use the background knowledge that I have to help engage staff in discussion about the integration of curriculum and technology in innovative ways. I do also believe that being well-read is helpful in being able to engage in a myriad of conversations about education, especially in a school that engages students and staff in larger questions about our role in the world.”

Along with the intense focus and scheduling involved in completing her doctorate while being fully committed to her work at BSS, Angela has balanced the roles of principal and mother as well. She has had to remind Alison that the principal’s office is not her personal locker, but it’s nothing new for Angela—her two sons were students at Appleby while she worked there. Still, she has to be conscious of which hat she wears at school.

Being a parent as well as the principal gives Angela a unique and very useful perspective. She is able to tap into her daughter’s experience and see how the school is influencing her decisions.

“What’s really interesting for me to see is how many opportunities [Alison] is getting at this school,” say Angela. “It’s like with so many of the girls here—they really are listened to in ways that I never was in secondary school. I think their voices are really important. When I go into a classroom I’m really astonished and I come out of it thinking how neat that these girls are articulating their thinking out loud and are confident enough to do it.”

Angela believes that her daughter and the rest of the students at BSS are getting a very different education than the one she received as a teenager, and she is glad for it.

Born in Ireland, Angela moved to Canada with her family when she was 12, an age at which it is difficult to fit in at a new school. Matters were complicated further because the Ontario school system had trouble placing Angela in a class that matched the level of education she had. The result was that Angela went through three grades in one year. She calls that time in her life a “huge transition.”

Even at that young age, Angela turned to the written word for solace. “I read,” she says. “That was my saving grace.” She rattles off the names of the 19th-century authors she read during those times—Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë—as if they were her schoolyard friends.

Angela and her family have returned to Europe over the years for several weeks at a time, traveling mostly in Italy. They travel there mainly for Angela’s husband’s studies but Angela sees the experience as being invaluable for herself as well as her children.

“The best part of traveling in Europe so often is learning to experience what it is like to move from being an outsider to an insider,” she says. “Also, seeing my children come to understand what it is to be flexible and appreciate things that are not native to one’s culture or family life—having my children feel comfortable in a very different culture.”

At BSS, Angela faces the task of evolving the curriculum to meet the fast-paced changes
of a technological, globalized world. To tackle this challenge she is using every bit of her experience and instincts that have been finely honed as both a teacher and a student.

One area that Angela is particularly excited about is one that she taught to first-year students at the University of Regina: service learning. Service learning is a combination of volunteering and applying that experience to your studies. “Right now we have a really viable community service program,” says Angela. “We’re just on the verge of now moving that program forward, transforming it from being community service to service learning.”

Service learning is exemplified in how Angela’s volunteer work with First Nations people led her to change her approach to teaching First Nations literature. The program will encourage and enable the girls to reflect on and learn from their volunteer work. Now the goal is not just knowledge, but applied knowledge.

Another new step for BSS that Angela is excited about is interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teaching.

The terms sound convoluted, but the definitions are relatively easy to grasp. Interdisciplinary learning involves a unifying topic and the collaboration of several courses. For example: the topic is a river, and the teachers of geography, English and social studies all come together to plan a unifying curriculum where the geography aspect focuses on how rivers are formed, the English aspect teaches how to prepare a written research report on rivers, and the social studies segment looks into the importance of rivers in civilizations.

In many ways, Angela believes, BSS is already promoting interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Transdisciplinary teaching, like interdisciplinary, spans several subjects, but then takes the next step by creating something new out of it all, and this is the ultimate goal.

“I think many of the things we’re doing right now are interdisciplinary rather than transdisciplinary. It’s really hard to do transdisciplinary in a secondary school although it’s not impossible and hopefully we’ll get there,” she says.

“One of the big things we’re looking at is trying to move out of the disciplinary silos and you see it already in our science program. People are really talking to each other across the sciences so instead of just doing biology, you’re looking at biology and chemistry and saying, ‘Well they really do have connections and I really need to know this in order to do that,’” explains Angela. “I know when you get into the real world now you’re not operating in a silo. The real world is very much an overlapping place.”

Angela feels responsible for providing the students of BSS with the best experience she can, and of all the roles she has—parent, principal, teacher—she is, above all things, an encourager.

“I see myself as a major encourager,” she says. “I should be encouraging the faculty to be the best they can be and encouraging the girls to be the best they can be and sometimes it’s just when you hear of a really good idea it’s saying yes, run with it, go, you really need to go with it.”

Posted July 20, 2008 at 08:47pm

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