Theresa Southam

Theresa is the Chair of the Teaching and Learning Institute at Selkirk College and a PhD graduate of Fielding University’s School of Organizational Development and Change. Her dissertation on the contributions of the growing number of older adultsto the sustainability of their communities dissertation is titled 27,000 Sunrises: Everyday Contributions of Grateful and Giving Age 70+ Adults. At the College she leads projects on indigenization, internationalization and student-centred learning.  Living in Nelson, BC with her husband and supporting her three amazing children is her first love and joy.  From that foundation she has become an avid road cyclist and yoga practitioner. One day she will attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and cycle across Canada with Tour du Canada.

SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Theresa was born in Burnaby, BC to mother Merle Kathleen Bent and Father William Charles Lowe (Gerrard). Both grandparents were new immigrants to Canada – on her mother’s side from the Ireland, Scotland and Britain and on her Father’s side additionally from the Ukraine.  She grew up in the lower mainland of British Columbia with her three siblings attending fourteen schools since her mother had to move a lot after her parents divorced.  She moved to Nelson, BC  in 1980 to attend the Writing Program at David Thompson University.  Meeting Vietnam War resistors, Doukhobors and Quakers led her to visit China in 1982 to see communism for her self.  Back in Nelson, she studied science another two years and then was off again – this time to live in the spiritual community of Findhorn, Scotland. Returning to Nelson and the owner of a war-time house she enrolled in the Fine Woodworking program to gain some basic home maintenance skills. In 1987 she married and moved to Vancouver where her husband could finish a building design program and she could complete a degree in Communications at SFU.  When her first son arrived the new family moved back to the house in Nelson where they continued to run Southam Consulting Inc. a small company that provided environmental communications services. Between working on salmon education, wetland conservations and coordinating the building of twelve nature and culture centres two more children were born.  For the first fifteen years the children were home educated. In 1998 Theresa began working full-time for Selkirk College,  obtained her Masters in Intercultural Communications from Royal Roads University which involved returning to China for a residency with two of her children and eventually forming and running Selkirk College’s Teaching and Learning Institute. 

Professional Goals

I am fully immersed in the field of teaching learning. I’ve been running the Teaching and Learning Institute at Selkirk College for over ten years and I was the Co-Chair of the BC Teaching and Learning Council and Treasurer of the Educational Developers’ Caucas of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. I have published in the Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, have a fellowship with BC Campus titled Pivoting to inclusion: Designing ancillary OER in a collaborative cross-institutional environment and was Co-Chair of the Program Committee for Symposium on Scholarly Teaching in Vancouver..

As part of my long-term career strategy I have completed a PhD in Organizational Development and Change and have three fellowships. I am an ISI Fellow at Fielding Graduate University where I am also the co-editor for a planned monograph Leading Toward Greater Social Justice in Precarious Times. My dissertation documents an ethnography of nine highly generative, wise and transcendent 70+ adults. 27,000 Sunrises: Everyday Contributions of Grateful and Giving Age 70+ Adults can be found here. I attended the International Association for Gerontology and Geriatrics conference in San Francisco in July, 2017. I am also a CMMI Fellow which has led to my current research The Croning of Older Women: Leading Major Projects with Crone-Informed Senses, Imagination, and Thought and my ongoing support for Cosmopolis 2045.

I am an Associate Professor at Royal Roads University where I’ve taught the course Communication for Health and Well-being and supervise graduate students in the School of Leadership.

I have been the Principal of Southam Consulting since it was incorporated in 1987 where I have contributed to the conservation of wetlands, oceans and other salmon habitats. I’d like to continue to give back to society.