Instructors
Paola has been teaching in Academic Bridging since 2020, and she is the Program Coordinator. She has taught Contemporary Canada and will teach Introduction to the Study of Literature in the coming academic year. She also runs the Read, Write, Research Lab – a co-curricular initiative that supports the development and practice of high-level academic reading, writing, and research skills through a series of sessions tailored to each Academic Bridging course, curriculum, and assignment. Paola’s pedagogical practice centers reading, writing, and rhetoric as technologies of agency, creativity, and self-transformation.
Prior to joining Woodsworth College in 2018, Jon Johnson taught at York University and in the Transitional Year Program at the University of Toronto. His research is focused on urban land-based Indigenous Knowledge in Toronto and their representation through oral and digital forms of storytelling. He practices forms of teaching and pedagogy, such as field trips, tours, and community-based social justice projects, that go beyond the classroom. He is particularly interested in projects that create mutually respectful and beneficial collaborations between Indigenous communities and the university.
Dr. Michael P. Lapointe joined Woodsworth College’s Academic Writing Centre in 2005 and the Academic Bridging Program in 2006, where he regularly teaches the Introduction to the Study of Literature as well as Contemporary Canada. Last year, Dr. Lapointe developed and taught the course Media, Culture and Society. Prior to that, he also designed Order and Disorder II: Nationalism, Identity, and Conflict for the full-time Academic Bridging students and the Woodsworth One Program. His research background includes Irish Literature, James Joyce, Nationalism Studies, Queer Studies, 20th Century Canadian and European history, and Literary/Cultural Theory. Dr. Lapointe is TESL Canada and TESL Ontario certified and has several teaching awards and nominations to his credit.
Megan has been teaching Environmental Studies in the Academic Bridging Program since 2018, and has been a Writing Instructor in Woodsworth College’s Academic Writing Centre since 2021. Her research interests centre around the political ecology of conservation and development and decolonial conservation. Her postdoctoral research with the Conservation Through Reconciliation Partnership based at the University of Guelph involved collaboration with Indigenous leaders, knowledge holders, and communities, as well as academics and conservation practitioners, to facilitate Indigenous-led conservation across Canada. She has taught courses on political ecology, climate change, globalization, conservation, the green economy, gender and migration.