Aboriginal Students in Extended Education Honoured With Awards

Twenty-nine Aboriginal students in Extended Education’s Access Programs and Aboriginal Focus Programs were the recipients of the Aboriginal Education Awards and/or the Helen Betty Osborne Award in 2008.

 Aboriginal Education Awards 2008

Every year the Business Council of Manitoba recognizes the potential in Manitoba’s Aboriginal community through their Aboriginal Education Awards Program.  Financial support and employment opportunities are awarded to Aboriginal citizens who are full-time students in post-secondary institutions in Manitoba. The award helps cover the cost of tuition, books and supplies during the academic year. Recipients may be considered for summer and/or part-time employment within companies that are members of the Business Council.

The criteria for selection include personal achievements, academic standing and financial need.  Those who receive the award represent diverse areas of the province and are enrolled in a wide range of programs. Fifty-four students from the University of Manitoba received the award in 2008.

The University of Manitoba’s Access Programs sponsor university studies at the degree level for Manitobans who have traditionally not had the opportunity for such experience because of social, economic, cultural reasons or lack of formal education. Preference is given to persons who are Aboriginal (Status, Non-Status, Métis and Inuit). Sponsorship includes academic and personal support and may include some financial assistance. These programs are funded by Manitoba Education and Training, Advanced Education and Skills Training Division.

Included among the 54 award recipients from the University of Manitoba were the following students from the Access Programs:

Ashley Blais, Faculty of Medicine

Aaron Colon, University I

Jade Delaurier, Agriculture and Food Science

Jennifer Guiboche, Faculty of Law

Edward Keeper, Faculty of Science (Pre-med)

Stephanie Lamirande, University I

Allison McKay, Faculty of Social Work

Tracy Parenteau, Faculty of Social Work

Joseph, Tozer, University I

Betsy-Ann Weenusk, University I

Beverly Wood, University I

Aboriginal Focus Programs in Extended Education provide programs that respond to the post-secondary and professional development needs and concerns of Aboriginal people. These include certificate and diploma programs as well as undergraduate degree programs through cooperative arrangements with Aboriginal stakeholders and faculties of The University of Manitoba. Programs are offered in Winnipeg at the Aboriginal Education Centre in downtown Winnipeg, as in-house training for organizations, or as community-based programs.

Two students from the Health Careers Transition Year Program, offered by the Aboriginal Focus Programs, also received the Aboriginal Education Award:

Julie Galvin

Helen Kay

Helen Betty Osborne Award

The Helen Betty Osborne Memorial Foundation was established in 2000 by an act of the Manitoba Legislature and administers an award named after the late Helen Betty Osborne, a young Aboriginal woman who was murdered in The Pas.  The award commemorates her tragic life and her personal goal of advancing through education; she wanted to become a teacher. On December 2, 2008 at the Delta Winnipeg, the Helen Betty Osborne Memorial Foundation sponsored their annual awards reception and celebrated the launch of a graphic novel: The Life of Helen Betty Osborne.

Among the award recipients were the following students from the Access Program:

Foundation Award:

Mandy Buss, Doctor of Medicine

Jennifer Soldier, Bachelor of Arts

Ashley-Faye Blais, Doctor of Medicine

Tracy Parenteau, Bachelor of Social Work

Cristen Crane, Bachelor of Education

Debbie Fisher, Bachelor of Science

Office of the Federal Interlocutor:

Neepikan Hunt, Bachelor of Nursing

Jerilyn Ducharme, Bachelor of Education

Danielle Bonner, Bachelor of Nursing

Barbara Ednie, Bachelor of Arts

Tracy Sloan, Dental Hygiene

Kaitlen Hogue, Bachelor of Science

Danielle Gamache, Bachelor of Science, Physiotherapy

Shanolyn Maytwashing, Bachelor of Arts

Champion Award, Manitoba Advanced Education and Literacy:

Deborah Myran, Master of Arts

Tanya Vincent, Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology

Manitoba Public Insurance Award:

Amy Pouliot, Bachelor of Science

Diana Marie Dreaver, Bachelor of Nursing

Posted in:  Extended Education

Meet Michael Trevan

What makes people choose the foods they eat?

The future of the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences depends on understanding consumers.

Biochemist. Plant scientist. Partner in a functional food start-up firm. Michael Trevan has a multi-disciplinary background in the sciences, which makes him a perfect fit for his job as dean of the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences.

Michael Trevan has spent his life training to be dean of the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, even though he hadn’t heard of the University of Manitoba until just a few years ago.

A native of England, agriculture was probably the last thing on Trevan’s mind when he entered the University of London in the late 1960s.

“I started life as a medical student but then got captivated by biochemistry,” Trevan said. “I took off in the middle of my medical courses – in England medicine was an undergraduate course – and took a bachelor of biochemistry instead and then a PhD.”

He moved on to a teaching position at Hatfield Polytechnic and was part of the revolution in biotechnology that started in the 1970s and 1980s.

“By the 1980s there was a great new industry in biotechnology. There was a lot of hype and a great deal of interest,” Trevan said. For someone who maintained an interest in medicine it brought everything full circle. He helped provide the science behind the practical and industrial applications of enzymes, from washing powders to testing kits to detect glucose in urine.

In 1988, Trevan moved to South Bank University where he was head of the department of biotechnology and then dean of the Faculty of Science, Technology, Health and Society. He also got his first taste of plant sciences while at South Bank. It was a field he got to develop further when he moved to the University of Westminster to become university director of research and Provost of Cavendish Campus.

A couple of things happened while Trevan was with the University of Westminister – he became involved with the development of a new tofu-like food product called Quinova. It was derived from quinoa a South American grain that is super nutritious but has kernels not much bigger than a pinhead. The challenge Trevan and his partners answered was finding a way to process the grain into a food product that was attractive to people.

“When I left they were beginning to develop markets in Holland and Germany. It was an interesting lesson in how you set up a company.” The company had already survived its first two years when Trevan left, no mean feat given that most companies go under within two years of launching.

However, the other thing that happened at the University of Westminster is perhaps even more significant for this story: Trevan made contact with the University of Manitoba.

At the time, in 1998, he was researching how the cell walls in tomatoes change their physical structure as a result of attack by a pathogen and then made the leap into studying the impact of disease in grain – specifically fusarium in wheat. And of course, one of the places where fusarium has its most devastating impact is in the Red River valley. So when Trevan went searching for research contacts one of the first people he came across was at the Cereal Research Centre on the University of Manitoba campus. A linkage that brought Trevan to the U of M campus several times for research purposes.

From the University of Westminster, Trevan moved to be higher education policy and liaison manager with the London Development Agency in 2003. It was an opportunity to try something different after 30 years of teaching and researching. But when the Agricultural and Food Sciences dean position came open at the U of M last year, Trevan’s past work and knowledge of the university made him take note.

“I thought it would be an exciting and fun thing to do.”

So after a lifetime spent working and living in the London area, Trevan uprooted himself and traveled some 4,500 miles to Manitoba.

“The cultures are similar but they still have their differences.” Driving might be one of the biggest. Trevan had to take a driver’s test to earn his license again.

“Four-way stops terrify me. The notion that you would trust another person to stop. You just don’t DO that in England.”

“But the great thing I’ve enjoyed since being here is the enthusiasm and support of my colleagues. Everyone has a great enthusiasm about what they do, they just want to get out and do more.”

When Trevan worked in England he was also working at one of several dozen universities and colleges. In Manitoba, only the University of Manitoba has a focus on agriculture –giving it access to government and industry sources that he could only have dreamed about in England.

Plus the agricultural and food industries play a more critical role in Manitoba – accounting for 24 per cent of the province’s manufacturing output compared to the 13 per cent seen in most countries.

“The industry is crying out for graduates. We can’t get students in fast enough,” Trevan said. “So our goal is to increase enrolment.”

Currently the faculty has about 365 degree and diploma students and an additional 200 graduate students. Trevan said the program and the industry could accommodate another couple of hundred students.

But the problem – and it has been an ongoing one – is that people believe that the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences is only for people who intend to go into farming. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

“It’s not just about farming. In terms of employment, farming production only accounts for a small percentage of the jobs in the industry,” Trevan said. “What we really are is a faculty of applied sciences with attention to food or agricultural production.

“The challenge for a faculty like this is to make people understand what it does. The rural population understands it. But we need to get the idea across to the urban population.”

In the 1970s the University of Manitoba was involved in ground breaking research, such as the development of canola – an edible oilseed that now brings billions of dollars a year into the agriculture industry.

For the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences today it’s not just a question of researching what will be tomorrow’s ‘canola’ but understanding how people will react to that product. People make their decisions about food based on emotional responses. For example, genetically modified foods have been driven out of the European market because people turned against them.

Trevan said he watched the issue play out in the European media – initiated by, of all things, a rather dry industry advertisement that explained in detail the science behind genetically modified food. Problem was the advertisement ran in what are considered some of the more intellectual newspapers in the United Kingdom. The other newspapers took offence and labeled genetically modified food ‘frankenfood.’ From there the image problem was off and running with stores soon advertising that they were selling GM-free food.

So was it a question of genetically modified food being safe or unsafe? Probably not.

“It’s a very fragile industry and consumer perception is all. If you don’t get the consumer on your side then you have a problem,” Trevan said.

Similarly, simply cranking out more food isn’t the answer.

“In North America we produce 4,000 calories of food per man, woman and child per day. If we want to maintain the industry just producing more will not work. In fact, it’s obscene. We have more than enough to eat. The industry has to be able to add value to the product.”

So as the industry looks at issues such as whether it should add genetically modified crops, Trevan said the debate has to go beyond whether the crop will result in more production because ultimately the ability of a crop to add production will not be an effective means of selling the change to consumers.

“It’s all very interesting to research nutraceuticals but what if nobody eats them?” Trevan said. “In that sense we’re working with not just the sciences but we’re into the social sciences.”

Posted in:  Agricultural and Food Sciences

Christina Penner - Computer Science Instructor/Novelist

Instructor, Department of Computer Science, University of Manitoba

Author, Widows of Hamilton House, 2008

I grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, went to high school in Sacramento, California, and moved to Winnipeg, where I completed Grade 12 at the Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute.  After finishing a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Winnipeg, I intended to pursue an MBA, because my family was in business, but somehow, the fit wasn’t right for me.  I had always been interested in reading and in stories, and I pursued this interest through a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English.  I came to the University of Manitoba for my graduate degree, because, at the time, it was one of only two universities in Canada that offered a Master of Arts degree with a creative thesis. 

In order to pay the bills while going to university, I taught computer courses in the corporate world.  I was approached by the Computer Science Department at the University of Manitoba to teach a first-year Computer Science course, and I took the job because I wanted to have University-level teaching experience, especially since I was thinking I would someday complete a Ph.D. in English.

I didn’t anticipate preferring teaching science courses to teaching literature.  I liked teaching students to think in new ways and apply that thinking to solving problems. To learn computer programming means you have to think in a way you didn’t think before.  And it’s hard and uncomfortable.  And exciting.  Also, for me it’s great to teach in our Computer Science department because the department is very pro-teaching and pro-student.  Lately, I’ve boiled my teaching philosophy down to three words: to be kind. And I mean that in a personal and social sense, but also in an intellectual sense.  I think that an openness and curiosity in education contribute to an intellectual versatility that is important to the world.

Although I work in the Department of Computer Science, I still think about literature and literary theory. In my third year course, Technical Communication for Computer Scientists, we talk about rhetorical theory and the importance and power of language.  I feel lucky that the Faculty of Science supports and appreciates the Arts.  And I try to encourage my students to think openly, to be aware of their own paradigms, and to try taking courses in both the Arts and the Sciences.  Many times there’s no need for this kind of encouragement because many students (and faculty) come to the Computer Science department with backgrounds in music, literature and fine arts. It’s exciting to see these different perspectives come together.   

Posted in:  Science

Doctors balance teaching and patient care

In medicine best patient care is paramount, and, everything depends on having the right information at the right time.

Little wonder than that when Faculty of Medicine dean Dean Sandham was critical care director in Calgary he made information flow his top priority.

“In critical care, to be sure that you are providing the best quality care, you need to have data about what you did,” Sandham said – who you cared for, what treatment was involved, what drugs were used, and so on. Hospitals have always collected that information, the leap Sandham wanted to make was in how it was accessed. Through his efforts as director of critical care he worked to have the information not only digitized but electronically available beside each critical care bed.

Not long after taking Calgary through that innovation, Sandham was on walkabout in Australia and got the call from the University of Manitoba asking him to apply for the dean’s position. He applied, got the job and joined the U of M last year – the latest twist in an interesting career that began on a farm near Coalhurst, Alberta.

Back then the obvious choice for Sandham would have been to go into farming. But there were other influences.

“There was a lot of respect in my family for learning and my elder sisters, who were nine and ten years older than me, had become a nurses and we were all very proud of them for doing that,” Sandham said. As he was growing up, the family also took on the responsibility for caring for his ailing grandfather.

“It was really hard caring for him because we didn’t have the modern conveniences then,” Sandham said. In the end entering medicine became an obvious choice, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t look back.

“Choosing to do one thing means choosing not to do something else. I’ve always thought farming would have been a wonderful way of life and a wonderful way to raise a family.”

And it doesn’t mean he went straight into medicine – Sandham went on his first walkabout in 1960, when he took a year off school to tour and work in New Zealand, Australia and Europe. He returned to start classes in Lethbridge College and move on to the University of Alberta for medical school.

“It was interesting because of the difference in backgrounds,” Sandham said of medical school. “Most of my classmates were from professional families so it was interesting to have that kind of mix and it was also one of the difficult parts.”

After graduation, Sandham spent four years working as a family doctor at a clinic in Red Deer, Alberta – many of his patients were Second World War vets who had their own wealth of experiences to share.

“It was a wonderful experience. I enjoyed every minute of it. It was a clear case of not knowing when I was well off when I left it,” Sandham said. “If I had had any sense I would have stayed there and been retired by now.”

But when he decided to move from running a practice to critical care, he wasn’t thinking about the road to retirement.

“It was clear to me that critical care was a place where you could really really make a difference,” Sandham said. “I was looking for a challenge and an adventure and professional growth.”

He moved to a position with the Calgary General Hospital – with 1,100 beds it was a far cry from the clinic where he had been working. At the time, there was a turf debate at the hospital over which medical director should run the new 31-bed intensive care unit.

In the end they created a new position to run the unit directly and Sandham, straight out of residency, got the job.

“I was 34 and being head of a clinical department I was sitting at the board table with people 20 or 30 years older than me,” Sandham said. “But they were a wonderful group of people, good role models and they taught me a lot about how the hospital worked.”

The trick for Sandham was in finding away to do his job without letting it devour him. He had to set a call schedule that allowed him free time and the occasional statuary holiday off – initially neither goal was met. But eventually, he found that balance and was able to move on with other goals, such as creating a teaching program for residents – a process that began his relationship with the University of Calgary.

He was director of the Calgary General Hospital ICU for nine years before being approached by the rival Foothills Hospitals to run and develop its intensive care unit.

Jumping ship didn’t win him any friends, but it was an opportunity to make a difference by developing the intensive care unit at Foothills Hospital and an academic department of critical care affiliated directly with the University of Calgary. As part of the process, Sandham received MRC research funding and was able to recruit researchers into the program.

But whatever other plans he may have had at Foothills Hospital were interrupted when Alberta went through health “amalgamation” beginning in 1995.

“The process was much more draconian than it was here,” Sandham said. “They closed four of the seven hospitals and blew up the one that gave me my start.”

Sandham’s job after amalgamation was to take the three intensive care units that remained standing and help them work together. As department director he also partnered with the University of Calgary to make critical care an academic department. It was a partnership that allowed him to pursue bringing critical care data right to the patient’s bedside.

And it was not long after, that the U of M came calling. Once again, it was a challenge and a chance to make a difference. He couldn’t’ resist. But this time the focus is on what a faculty can do for its students and people in the community.

Sandham said the mandate of the Faculty of Medicine to the people of Manitoba is to provide healthcare professionals who are “fit for purpose” and prepared to function in today’s world to provide the best possible healthcare.

“This means we must keep the best of our traditional emphasis on knowledge about the human condition, but be the agents for change which helps our profession adapt with new skills that allow us to transfer that knowledge into the best possible care,” Sandham said. These incremental areas of intellectual endeavor in knowledge transfer include understanding process design, quality and safety methods, health informatics and measurement for quality, and interdisciplinary education and practice. This requires a huge cultural shift for healthcare faculties but it is an expectation of the people they serve.

“Our endeavor is supported by the three pillars of medical education are research, education and clinical service,” Sandham said. “The challenge is to bring all three forces in balance in the school.”

The medical school more so than any other faculty at the university relies on a delicate balance of clinician scientists who are training students and conducting research at the university and physicians in the field who work with residents and students to give them the hands on training required in medicine. Part of Sandham’s job is to keep and recruit people for both aspects.

The Faculty of Medicine also has to work together with the other medical research establishments in Winnipeg. Having diverse collection of agencies all focused on research is what gives Winnipeg its strength in the field, Sandham said.

“We’re not in competition with each other but we are in competition other Canadian universities. We can’t out-spend them but we can out-cooperate them.”

On the personal side, Sandham met his wife Joan Jackson while at the University of Alberta – she was training to be a nurse while he was working on being a doctor and they married while students. They have four children and three grandchildren.

Sandham said they’re thrilled to be in Winnipeg.

“Winnipeg is a well kept secret in Canada. It’s a much better place to live and work than people realize.”

In some ways it’s a perfect fit for them – they enjoy canoeing, Sandham hunts and rural Manitoba has plenty of appeal for someone who has never turned his back on an agricultural background.

Posted in:  Medicine

Provincial pet peeve tackled by third-year law student

Posted in:  Law

Students Say Summer Session ” A Great Way to Learn”

What student hasn’t daydreamed about completing their degree faster, in a more relaxed atmosphere with smaller classes and more personal attention from professors?   Students who participated in a recent online survey described that as the norm in Summer Session at the U of More . They found that taking courses in summer is “a great way to get your degree done faster”. It also allows students to spread their course load over the year and ease the stress that can develop from a heavy load in the fall and winter terms.

Students reported that taking one or two courses in a compressed format allowed them to focus more easily.  As well, the accelerated learning experience is convenient and saves time. Survey responders noted that the immersive approach made it easier to retain information: “the shorter time span gives you less time to forget key material before the final exam”.  “My grades are always significantly higher in the years that I take summer courses”, observed one student in the survey. Students pointed out that the summer courses were an intense experience because of the shorter time frame and while they had to commit to working at a fast pace, the class was over very quickly. 

For some students, who work full time, taking a class in summer evening means they can still work. As one student replied in the survey, “Night courses are a great way to get ahead while still maintaining employment.”

Summer Session classes are smaller and students appreciate the more relaxed atmosphere of a quieter campus versus the more chaotic fall and winter terms.   Instead of feeling overwhelmed, “You feel more in control of your studies”, remarked one student.  Smaller classes also mean professors are more available to help individual students.

Perhaps one student summed it up best: “It was a great way to learn”.

Posted in:  Extended Education

U of M Team Wins Great Northern Concrete Toboggan Race

Students began building the toboggan in December, making a compact toboggan that had curved aluminum sides and a concrete base made out of a specialized mix. The team, called Loggin-Boggan, won awards recognizing their frame design and concrete mix, as well as the top overall prize!

The 2009 University of Manitoba Concrete Toboggan Team prepares to make the run that wins the top prize in Red Deer, Alberta

Posted in:  Engineering

U of M Team Cleans Up at Western Engineering Competition!

Congratulations to the most successful University of Manitoba delegation to the Western Engineering Competition ever!

WEC was held the final week of January in Regina, and our teams won or placed in almost every category.

2nd Place :  Junior Team Design
Members:  Simon Cooke, Justin Richards, Chris Trenholm,   Steve Fetterly

1st Place:  Senior Team Design
Members:  Sean Hervo, Cody Nowell, Iian Ho, Andrew Condon
2nd Place:  Senior Team Design
Members:  Matthew DeMonye, Matt Fair, Derek Neufeld, Ryley Davidson

2nd Place:  Engineering Communication
Members:  Nikou Jalayeri and Melissa Haresin

3rd Place:  Impromptu Debate
Members:  Ryan Gryba and Kathryn Marcynuk

All the teams will now proceed to the nationals!

Posted in:  Engineering

Looking at the big picture

There’s something to be said for an economy of scale.

It’s something that Faculty of Nursing dean Dauna Crooks has come to appreciate since coming to the University of Manitoba in July 2007 after spending most of her career in Ontario.

“There’s a different culture here,” Crooks said. Sure we’re friendly and that’s made it easy for Crooks and her husband to settle into the province.

But the real difference is how plugged in the University of Manitoba is to the province. Crooks said soon after taking up her position, she set up a meeting with Health Minister Theresa Oswald.

“I was thinking I was just going to speak with her alone, because that’s what would happen in Ontario,” Crooks said. “But when I arrived at the meeting the table was full of people. So I met ministers from different divisions, and we were able to talk about what was I thinking, where the Faculty of Nursing was going, and what the ministry saw as priorities and where were they going. The government is our major funder and it was just a wonderful way to start.”

That experience wasn’t unique. She found Manitoba Health, the Assembly of First Nations Chiefs and a long list of other groups involved with community health were equally keen to see what the U of M was doing.

“In Ontario a number of universities and colleges vie for resources and attention. Here’s it’s different,” Crooks said. “It’s not that we’re the only game in town for nursing, we’re not. But you don’t find that same sort of political manoeuvring.

“I think it’s the economy of scale that you find here. Ontario is a messy sort of conglomeration of things, and they don’t all speak to each other.”

Crooks said that collegiality also extends to how the university operates.

“The other thing that is really different here was the fact that deans, myself included, are asked for their opinion and it actually matters. In Ontario it would be the president who speaks for everybody,” Crooks said.

Since she arrived at the U of M, the faculty has revised its masters program.

“It had been a specialty program,” Crooks said. So, if you were interested in cardiology, you would take the cardiology stream. If you were interested in child health, you would take the child health stream and so on. But students and faculty were spread thinly between the diverse streams and often the fields being offered didn’t reflect what students went on to do.

“We looked at where our masters’ students ended up and we found they went on to become educators for us, clinical educators, clinical nurse specialists or they went on to be administrators,” Crooks said. Given that, the faculty has turned to focus on giving students the skills to enter their field of choice or giving them the skills to acquire their specialization in the work place.

The new masters program will be up and running this fall. The next step will be to create a doctoral program.

“We have a whole community of masters prepared nurses that have come out of the U of M for the most part but nowhere for them to go locally.” Developing a doctoral program won’t happen over night. The first step will be to bring in a consultant to pull together faculty and community ideas and give the faculty members a straw dog to react to. Even as it looks toward developing a doctorate degree, Crooks said the faculty will have to look at its undergraduate program.

“We’ll need to ensure that we’re refining our programs so that students are ready by year four of undergraduate to move on to a graduate program, if they so choose.” The faculty is also hoping to develop an after degree program if there is sufficient govern-ment interest.

“It would be a
two-year accelerated degree program,” Crooks said. “If you have a science degree then we would spend the two years socializing the students into the aspects of nursing.” With this cohort in nursing it would lead nicely toward the goal of a nurse physiologist graduate stream.

“So this all fits together, the jigsaw is forming. We almost have the corners, but not quite.”

Crooks has spent most of her life thinking about how that puzzle should go together. She was born in Toronto, but her father worked for Trans Canada Pipelines, so she spent her youth moving from place to place in Central and Western Canada.

“It was just normal,” Crooks said of the multiple moves. The family did settle down in Saskatchewan during her teen years. “What it does is allow you to adjust to new places and to love them very quickly because you’re not going to be there that long and to make friends very quickly and find the best in situations.”

She knew from the start that she was interested in the medical field.

“It was a profession where you would meet people, you would be part of the community and you would meet people’s needs.” A visit to the Faculty of Nursing while she was studying science at the University of Toronto sealed the interest. The experience was everything she might have hoped for.

“The faculty were excellent mentors, and our classes were small so they knew all of us and would join us for lunch, giving us all those experiences that created, for lack of a better word, a fellowship,” Crooks said.

Just by deciding to study nursing in a university setting, she was influencing how her career would go.

“At that point only about three to five per cent of nurses in Canada were actually university educated. So in that sense as a university graduate, you were an outlier.” The other 95 per cent of nurses entering the field were trained by a facility or hospital where they would later be working and their training was tailored to meet the needs of that specific work setting. University trained nurses were given a broader education that included courses in philosophy and history. They were also given placements at multiple agencies in the field.

“We weren’t bound to one agency. We had an idea of how different agencies worked and what they were like, how they treated students, and where you would want to be when you graduated, based on the environment you were working in,” Crooks said. “One of the hot topics in the 2000s has been quality work environments, but we were thinking about that way back.”

Crooks kicked off her career by working with the Victorian Order of Nurses. “During the first six months in that role – in terms of being in the community and entering someone’s home, learning how to do assessments and to make referrals – I learned more than I did in four years of school. So it was good for me. It developed me as an independent thinker.”

She knew quickly that she wanted to continue her education, but she was juggling family responsibilities and career aspirations. So it was a question of being able to fit everything in.

“The other thing is that within my family there were no role models: no one had gone to university on either side. So there was no guidance there to say Dauna you should go back and do this,” Crooks said. But she did go on to get her MScN from the University of Western Ontario in 1983, balancing four jobs and three children under two years old. The PhD from State University of New York at Buffalo would follow in 1997. The masters helped Crooks get a job in the School of Nursing in McMaster University, where she split her time between teaching and working with cancer patients as a clinical nurse specialist, a focus that would encourage her to study breast cancer in older women during her doctorate.

“The experience at McMaster University was great because it gave me the ability to refine my approach to education in a wonderful environment, but it also gave me an opportunity to make an impact clinically.”

Crooks was involved in the graduate and doctoral level curriculum at McMaster University – perfect training for her current goals at the University of Manitoba. But she also moved on to become a researcher in the Hamilton Regional Health Centre and then director, education services, at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto from 2001 to 2003 and then associate chief of nursing: education from 2003 to 2005.

“Sick Kids was an incredible environment that allowed me to develop educational strategies and work with the clinical educators, developing their standards and career paths,” Crooks said.

In 2005 she was appointed as the director of the Trent/Fleming School of Nursing at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Crooks had interviewed for the U of M when she was working for the Hospital for Sick Children, but at the time she didn’t have experience leading a school or faculty. When the opportunity to apply came up again last year, Crooks was ready and willing.

“I knew my background in cancer research matched one of the major thrusts here, so it was a good fit that way. And through talking with people I had a sense of the community and this faculty, and that if there were issues, people were willing to address them,” Crooks said. “It was an easy decision to come here when the job was offered.”

Crooks’s three children – a daughter and twin boys – are grown up now and she has four grandchildren. Her husband Terry, a teacher, is now retired and devoting himself to studying and writing about the U.S. Civil War.

Posted in:  Nursing