Dawn Thompson

• B.A. (Alberta)
• Ph. D. (UBC)

Canadian/Quebec Literatures, Comparative Literature, Literary Theory, First Nations Literatures and Pedagogy, Children’s Literature, Gay and Lesbian Young Adult Fiction. Bibliography of Gay and Lesbian Young Adult Fiction.

I’ve known I wanted to teach since grade two, when my friend, Sue, asked me for help with a new arithmetic concept (subtraction, perhaps?). The look on her face when she finally understood the concept filled me with such a sense of satisfaction that my career goals shifted from farmer to teacher in that moment. Now, my math skills peaked shortly thereafter, but at that time I was also being introduced to the world of books, and so I found two of my most profound passions at around the age of seven.

My teaching philosophy has developed slowly over the years, as I have taken what I have learned from my students and combined it with what I have learned about myself. One of the things I have learned is that for me, in this discipline, the acquisition of skills is far more important than that of information. I am much less concerned about what students know about a text or its context than about what they can do with a text. My teaching practice follows from this. I encourage students to be actively engaged in reading in class, speculating, taking risks, creating meaning together. I find teaching and learning in this manner to be both challenging and exciting, and my hope is that my students do too. I think it serves them well when they encounter any new text in any situation. And I still look for – and often see – that look I saw on Sue’s face a long time ago!

My research interests inform my teaching at all levels. I have published one scholarly book, Writing a Politics of Perception: Memory, Holography and Women Writers in Canada (U of Toronto P, 2000), and a number of articles, the most recent being “Prussic Acid with a Twist: The Well of Loneliness, M.E. Kerr, and Young Adult Readers” in the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.  I am currently working on two more essays on gay and lesbian young adult fiction, looking specifically at literary attempts to counter the negative effects of internalized homophobia, or write it out of existence, and the impossibility of doing so. My analyses bring together issues in queer theory, narrative structure, and narrative voice. I am also co-editing, with my colleague Terri Doughty, the proceedings of a conference that we co-organized along with other faculty here at VIU in May 2009, on The Child and The Book.