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This fall, we were pleased to welcome Dr. Cary Campbell into a continuing Lecturer position in the Faculty of Education. Cary has a long-standing connection to the Faculty, having first joined as a research assistant in 2015 and later serving as a sessional instructor, teaching assistant, and term lecturer from 2021 to 2024. A music educator, educational theorist, and community-based researcher, he brings a unique blend of academic depth and creative practice to his work. In this Q&A, Cary shares some of his recent highlights, current projects, and what inspires his approach to teaching and scholarship at SFU. 

Q: What have been a few highlights of your time with the Faculty so far?

A: First of all, I’m extremely grateful to work with great faculty and staff colleagues who are honestly all super amazing, thoughtful and compassionate. The students I work with, mostly undergrad education majors and pre-service music/arts teachers, not to mention a small batch of grad students I supervise,  are also amazingly kind people who care passionately about the field of education deeply, and have dedicated their lives to the social reproductive work.

I’ve been able to write about some truly significant teaching experiences working with these undergrad students in a number of recent publications. In particular, I want to highlight the articles:

• ‘’: meaningful environmental education, beyond the info dump’ published in 2024 by the Journal of Philosophy of Education. 
• ‘’ published in 2023 by the Journal of Educational Controversy.

Some of this recent writing, including those two articles, are being featured and adapted in my upcoming monograph, to be published by Routledge in late 2025 or early 2026, entitled Education in a Time of Social and Environmental Unravelling. The book will feature the voices of some of my students as well several dialogues and interviews with faculty colleagues like Heesoon Bai, Michael Ling and Zuzana Vasko as well as other scholars and mentors like Tim Lilburn, Tim Ingold and William Rees.

Additionally, I’ve been fortunate to bring over international colleagues and collaborators through the ongoing support of my faculty. For instance, in late 2023 I was successful in securing an internal Faculty FIRE Grant (Funds for International Research in Education) to bring over my long-time, European colleagues and collaborators Dr. Alin Olteanu (previously of the University of Aachen, Germany) and Natasa Lackovic (University of Lancaster). This resulted in fruitful seminars, workshops and ongoing research collaborations, including two recent pubs for the journal Postdigital Science & Education on the topic of postdigital literacies:

• Campbell, C., Olteanu, A. (2023). The Challenge of Postdigital Literacy: Extending Multimodality and Social Semiotics for a New Age. Postdigit Sci Educ 6, 572–594 (2024).
• Lacković, N., Olteanu, A. & Campbell, C. Postdigital Literacies in Everyday Life and Pedagogic Practices. Postdigit Sci Educ 6, 796–820 (2024).

The collaborations stemming from this grant have continued to evolve: For instance, I have recently been invited to attend and give talks pertaining to this work at two seminars/Workshops in China hosted by the University of Dalian and the University of Shanghai on the title of “Language, literacies and the digitalization of education”. These two universities are inviting a small group of about 10-12 scholars whose work is significant in the fields of multimodality, critical media literacy, and postdigital literacies such as Kay O’Halloran, Leslie Gourlay, and Zoe Hurley, amongst myself and others.

More recently, in November/December 2024 I was grateful to arrange the visit of Music Education Professor Maria Spychiger (Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts) with my colleague and close friend Dr. Michael Ling. We were able to arrange a seminar-workshop as well as have Maria work with my pre-service music teachers.

Furthermore, in 2022 I worked with my awesome colleagues Dr. Heesoon Bai and Dr. Charles Scott with a group of American and International scholars led by Dr. Hyeyoung Bang (Bowling Green State University) and Dr. Jing Lin (University of Maryland, College Park) to launch a new open-access journal: the Journal of Contemplative & Holistic Education. I continue to work as an editor with this journal today, and am proud of what we have accomplished as an editorial team.

Q: What are you most looking forward to in the months ahead? 

A: I’m particularly excited about an in-progress music education book and video series I’m currently completing with my co-writer, Thomas Hoeller, called: , and currently under review with the University of Cambridge press. The materials and ideas stem from the two music education courses that Cary teaches at SFU, which Thomas has helped co-develop: EDUC 468: Music Education as Thinking in Sound and EDUC 478: Designs for learning music. Through three short books – Book 1 Sound; Book 2 Music; Book 3 Instrument – we present a series of prepositions and guiding heuristics that can be used by both musicians and music educators to cultivate and bring attention to different aspects of their artistic and pedagogical practices.

Furthermore, I currently have several in-progress collaborations with past-students that I’m very excited about. For instance, I recently presented at westCAST (Feb, 2025) with a group of past students (now mostly all in-service teachers) a workshop entitled “The challenge of acknowledging land: land-based education, exploratory practice and duo-ethnography”. After first meeting in an upper-level education course at 91��ܽ I was teaching at the time – we formed an inquiry group, meeting semi-regularly to co-create a couple of public curriculum resources and to share about our collaborative learning journey with others across our network. We have united around the question of what it means to acknowledge Land seriously and meaningfully through our shared educational/life-practices and across our shared

locality of the Lower Mainland of BC, in particular. Some of this work and resources has been featured on the . The group is now working hard to complete an article about our research journey, likely for the Engaged Scholar Journal.

I am also super grateful for the community of practice I’ve been able to form with my colleagues Michele Schmidt, Michelle Nilson, Paula Rosehart, Zuzana Vasko, Daniel Chang and Ania Husak around Online Teaching and Learning. We have been collaborating on a duo-ethnographic study that explores belonging among higher education faculty and staff in relation to undergraduate online courses at SFU, and are currently pursuing funding as well as presenting on this research at upcoming conferences, such as at the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education (CSSHE) in Toronto in June.

Finally, something very recent: I’m excited to be a collaborator on a recently awarded SSHRC Small Grant, working with PI and SFU archivist Andra Tarnawsky and a graduate student researcher on another duoethnographic project entitled: Feeling the Archive: Materiality, Affect, and Embodied Knowledge in Special Collections.

There are many other teaching and writing projects I could speak to, but hopefully this gives some sense of the amazing opportunities that SFU and the Faculty of Education has brought to me. I can’t emphasize enough how appreciative I am to be working in the place I was born and have lived all my life with passionate communities of teachers, artists, students and researchers who care as much about this place and land as I do.