Her inspirational keynote will give an in-depth look into the classroom of Maggie MacDonnell. Through engaging visuals and stories you are brought to an Arctic school in the village of Salluit, where students face staggeringly high dropout rates, a youth suicide crisis and disturbing social injustices. These Inuit students carry the burden of colonization and inter-generational trauma on their shoulders every day and Maggie explains how she grounds her teaching practice in feminist, post-colonial and community development theory to allow her students to become masters of their own destiny. She shares examples of how her students have developed resiliency through innovative educational programs. This resiliency has led to suicide prevention, school perseverance and the graduation of Inuit girls who were previously drop outs. This emotional keynote will underline the message of how much teachers matter, re-igniting the teaching passion for an audience of educators. Please be aware this keynote will discuss topics of suicide and inter-generational trauma which may be triggering.

Maggie MacDonnell is an educator and sport for development practitioner with over 10 years of global field experience. Her work has brought her to many corners of the globe and ranged from working with Congolese refugees, to Tanzanian HIV/AIDS activists, to Inuit youth in Northern Canada. She completed her undergraduate in Human Kinetics at St. Francis Xavier University, studied community development at Coady International Institute, and pursued her Masters on gender, sport and community development at the University of Toronto. She studied directly under Dr. Bruce Kidd and her work on sport as a tool in peacebuilding was shared at the Beijing Olympics. In 2009 she was awarded a prestigious Jeanne Sauve Fellowship and joined a community of 14 international youth scholars and activists.

For the last 7.5 years, Maggie has been teaching in a fly-in Inuit community called Salluit, where she helped establish an all-girls project based learning program. In 2017 Maggie was named the winner of the US $1,000,000 Global Teacher Prize, standing out from over 20,000 nominees from 179 countries. Maggie has been recognized for her work by the Governor General, to the Albert Einstein Foundation to most recently being named one of BBC’s top 100 Women. Maggie is passionate about creating education programs that create opportunities for social mobility, empower youth and cultivate healthy communities. She is the co-founder of Qajaq/Kayak – an organization that aims to revitalize the culture of kayaking with Inuit youth and adults. She is also co-founder of the Nunavik Running Club which trains Inuit youth to both be runners and philanthropists.