Benjamin lee hicks

benjamin lee hicks, PhD (they/them), is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the FLOURISH Collective in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. They are also a visual artist, elementary school teacher, and sessional instructor for Elementary Arts Education in the Master of Teaching program at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. benjamin completed their PhD in Curriculum and Pedagogy (OISE/UT) in June, 2022. Their dissertation contains a series of graphic stories, which aim to centre the educational experiences of trans/gender diverse (GD) people in ways that are different from how we have been centred-out by others (To Do This Discussion Differently: Queering Teacher Professional Learning Through Comic Art and Graphic Stories). Visual communication and creative expression are integral to every aspect of benjamin’s professional practice because sharing stories and being deeply, intentionally present with others when they offer to share theirs is one important way that humans can enact greater care in the places/spaces we travel. 

benjamin has had the very good fortune of working closely with several research collectives over their academic career thus far, including: The LGBTQ+ Families in Schools Project (OISE/University of Toronto, 2015-2022), The Addressing Injustices Project (OISE/University of Toronto, 2015-2020), and QTPiE (Queer and Trans People in Education, University of Vermont, 2021-2022). As a teacher and educational researcher, benjamin has written and designed curriculum on topics of sustainable community building, queering school space, arts-based activism, and comic art as pedagogy. These publications and others can be found at www.benjaminleehicks.com/blh-publications To see more of benjamin’s work in visual art, elementary education and educational research, please visit: www.benjaminleehicks.com