PDTCA 2025

Want to start some more student projects but concerned about that "magic sauce"? Right students, right teacher, right time? Come learn about our community greenhouse and the continuum of student projects involved in its construction. An off-grid solar PV system, permaculture landscape, climate battery, vermicomposting and so much more. Every project has been tackled by SHS students in collaboration with community members.  Some projects have been totally student led and others have been teacher led but the common theme has been everyone walks away fulfilled.

Learn about ways to fund your own project, potential pitfalls, and how to leverage your story into something that can potentially grow over time all while learning about the amazing space that is the Strathmore High School Community Greenhouse.

The Alberta ELAL Curriculum has an explicit focus on morphology. Are you wondering what it is and how to teach it? In this session, Karen Filewych will provide a foundational understanding of morphology and the many benefits of teaching it to students. She will also walk through the new Pearson resource: Bug Club Morphology to demonstrate how it can support your teaching in this area.

Now you can find Mathology Little Books and Pearson ebooks on New LearnAlberta through Explore Resources! Let’s take a look at how we can use this digital collection of e-books to achieve literacy goals outlined in the new ELAL curriculum. Join Karen Filewych to explore these e-books in various instructional contexts such as Interactive Read Aloud, Independent Reading, and Shared Reading.

In this presentation, we will look at how to use Excel at the Administrative level to expedite and lesson your work load. No excel experience necessary.

How do you create a learning environment that not only honours the loudest voice in the room but also encourages the softest? How do we create classrooms that cultivate confidence, courage and community? Ensuring each voice has a place where they are celebrated. Where we learn through the failures and uncertainty. To take a risk and learn through the hurdles. This session will take the principles of process-based theatre and give you the tools needed to bring it into your classroom. This session will work as a powerful resource for teachers to support their students to express, learn, and create - courageously.

In this session you will walk away with a greater understanding of how to create courageous learning environments in your classroom. Environments that encourage engagement and buy-in from the students whether they are more quiet or bold. This session will teach skills of recognizing behaviour, allowing choice/autonomy and developing collaborative leadership skills as an educator that allows for kids to advocate for what they need. We will talk about how process-based approaches can create an environment that helps students build community in the classroom while feeling empowered to embrace their own individuality. This session will pair well with the discussion of Growth Mindset and how students can apply it to their own learning with the support of their teachers.

Providing a flexible environment is key for students to achieve success in Outreach Settings. An ongoing question has been how do we provide structure around the flexibility to support student success.

Join us to discover how we created systems that provide high levels of support while holding high expectations. This method has enabled our campuses to truly reach students where they are at and reach their personal goals.

This session examines the history of Congo as a case study of Imperialism… from Leopold’s Congo to ‘Independence’. It focuses on the roles of foreign actors, including Canada, and their motives. Were they truly motivated by the enlightened Idealism they professed or the dark Realism described by Joseph Conrad, “The conquest of the earth is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much”? The session quotes from "Heart of Darkness" to illustrate the continuity of Realism in Imperial policy from Leopold's Congo to ‘Independence’ and challenges many of our most cherished historical myths… including the admission in a DND document that Canadian Peacekeepers played a vital role in Prime Minister Lumumba’s capture leading to his assassination. Kwame Nkrumah, Politburo members and US NSC staff explain how UN Peacekeepers were misused for Neocolonial control in Congo. As we shall see in Part 2, this quote regarding Eisenhower’s order to kill Lumumba still applies today, "the norms of private life and of a polity regulated by law are only with difficulty invoked in global politics.” Whether the scramble for rubber, copper, coltan or cobalt... in International Politics, "The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must". We will explore the implications of this history for Social Studies Curricula.

This session examines the history of Congo as a case study of Imperialism… from ‘Independence’ to the ongoing Congo Wars to todays Scramble for Rare Earth Minerals...
“Where formerly the natives hardly knew how to get their daily food, now European enterprise, has brought [them] unthought-of wealth” - King Leopold
“The horror, the horror” - Conrad in “Heart of Darkness”
“Apple works to protect the environment and to safeguard the well-being of the millions of people touched by our supply chain” - Apple Inc.
“Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. The scale of destruction caused by cobalt mining in the name of renewable energy is without contemporary parallel.” - Kara in “Cobalt Red”

Topics include - Lumumba’s assassination, Hammarskjold’s death, Katangan succession, Mobutu’s rise, The Rwandan Genocide, Kagame’s rise and Rwanda/Uganda’s invasion of Congo (5 million deaths). It focuses on the roles of foreign actors, including Canada, and their motives. Were they truly motivated by the enlightened Idealism they professed or by the dark Realism described by Joseph Conrad, “It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale”? This session quotes from "Heart of Darkness" to illustrate the continuity of Realism in Imperial policy from Leopold to the present and challenges many of our most cherished historical myths including our ‘Peacekeeping’ missions … and make it embarrassingly clear that General Dallaire’s presentation of Paul Kagame in “Shake Hands with the Devil” as a hero of Idealism masks the truth of Kagame’s massive war crimes. “What redeems it is the idea only” (Conrad). Boutros-Ghali, (“Was this not Fashoda?”) and others describe how UN Peacekeepers were misused by our Anglo-American Alliance to wrest control in Rwanda and Congo from France (Franc Afrique) and if that was a Geopolitical error… as now China is the rising Neocolonial Master of Congo. We will also explore the implications of all this history for Social Studies Curricula.