Chris Colley: 0:13

Here we are back at another episode. Another school year begins 25- 26. ShiftED is back with some amazing guests and podcasts for the school year. Please subscribe to us so that you can always be in the know. Now we're starting off this season or this episode this school year, I should say with a very fine guest from LEARN. We have the new CEO with us, Christine Truesdale, who has just recently stepped into the position of the CEO, and we felt that it'd be a great time for us to talk a little bit about LEARN's history and present and future, and Christine has been here for a long time and she'll tell us a little bit about that, but we'll get some ideas as to where LEARN will be in 10 years from now. So, Christine, thanks so much for joining us here on ShiftED podcast. It's great that you joined us today.

Chrstine Truesdale: 1:17

Thanks, it's great to be here

Chris Colley: 1:20

Christine I mean, I know you very well, but I would like our listeners to get an idea of where all this began for you. What were your beginning footsteps in the beginnings of LEARN and then the evolution into LEARN? Can you lay that out for us a bit?

Chrstine Truesdale: 2:07

So just for people who might not know the history of how LEARN started, we were created as a merging of three different organizations. That a gap where the larger publishers didn't see that it was profitable to create materials in English around the time of the reform, so that's back in around 1999. And the Quebec English Schools Network, RECIT, had been around to support the integration of technology across the province. So there were a team of people working on that way back at the creation of the RECIT around the year 2000 as well, created so that boards that needed to provide mostly classes in math and science to students who needed the courses to graduate and to move on to higher education but didn't have necessarily a teacher that could offer those classes within a school. Three boards got together Western Quebec, Eastern Shores and Central Quebec to support distance education and to go beyond a pilot project that had been created actually through the ministry would sort of provide one shop for these kinds of services for the English community and it would be more effective to provide services that way.

Chrstine Truesdale: 3:35

So I was involved myself in the Learning Materials Centre and the Quebec English Schools Network-RÉCIT. So I've been around since the beginning of LEARN. I was an instructional designer and a pedagogical consultant at the time, and so my role has evolved in the organization. I was involved in organizational learning as the director of IT for a while and then for 10 years the director of pedagogical services, I had kind of a deep understanding of how the organization works and what we could do and continue some of the good work that we've been doing, but also, you know, have taking the opportunity to look at the future. Since we have been around for 20 years and we're very proud of what we've done, but we also have to look at where we need to go, given the context that we're in right now.

Chris Colley: 4:31

Can you recap just that one more time, because it's hard for, I think, some of our community members to understand that we are a merger of three different kind of organizations that existed prior.

Chrstine Truesdale: 4:43

So the Learning Materials Center had been created to work on projects and develop print materials for the English-speaking community in education and the school boards, because a lot of the bigger publishers weren't willing to develop materials in English during the educational reform because it wasn't necessarily profitable, and so they would publish the major textbooks, but other kinds of materials that were community-based were not necessarily going to be produced through the larger publishers.

Chrstine Truesdale: 5:19

So it was created to develop educational materials and print, publish, print materials as well, and the Quebec English schools network was a network that had been created initially through the Ministry in Anglophone services and had been the small schools network that then evolved into the Quebec English schools network and then the and then. So there was a provincial team since the year 2000, 99, to help support the integration of technology across the province for teachers and students. And the Distance Education Community Network was built out of a pilot project that also had been started at Anglophone Services at the ministry provide distance education for primarily math and science courses for students at a distance, initially through CC mail and over the phone and fax.

Chris Colley: 6:31

And talking about the 90s here right.

Chrstine Truesdale: 6:33

Eventually it evolved and started happening over the internet in a variety of different platforms, and three school boards Western Quebec, eastern Shores and Central Quebec together formed the Distance Education Community Network to support distance education for the English school boards across Quebec to provide online courses where it was difficult to find teachers to serve the small, very small schools or students in specific circumstances. So those three organizations were merged into what is now LEARN, that was created in 2005.

Chris Colley: 7:16

Right, and can you tell us what the acronym LEARN stands for? Like what is that?

Chrstine Truesdale: 7:22

Leading English Education Resource Network. So we are a network. I think the N is really important we are a non-profit organization that was created by the school boards to support.

Chrstine Truesdale: 7:38

This was the original mission of LEARN is to that was the original mission to serve the english-speaking educational community across Quebec by providing services, different types of services, so online learning, eventually a tutoring program online, supporting the integration of technology and also developing and providing initially print materials. But we quickly moved into creating digital materials and hosting them on our website, just because the print business is really difficult to sustain.

Chris Colley: 8:15

Right and expensive and dying really. I mean, most stuff ends up not on print. That's created Very interesting, and what were some of those early projects that Learn engaged in that some of our listeners might be familiar with in?

Chrstine Truesdale: 8:32

that some of our listeners might be familiar with. We had begun developing with the Learning Materials Centre the Focus Series, which were a series of tools to support graphic organisers, to support the integration of the cross-curricular competencies, and we had lesson plans to go along with that and ways to help teachers understand what the cross-curricular competencies were and also how to integrate them.

Chris Colley: 8:59

And to some degree we're still using some of those graphic organizers or adapted versions of them now, almost 25 years Still very useful materials, almost 25 very useful materials.

Chris Colley: 9:15

I mean, yeah, it's a lot of process and brainstorming materials for students and, um, just great materials. And it shows the time, you know, it shows the life of something when it is still being used now or adapting to now. Can we talk a little bit about the administrative like who, who? Who are the who's the board at Learn? That kind of helps us figure out what directions we need to go in and what might be coming down the pipe or the needs out there. Who helps assess what those are Like? Who oversees kind of Learn's operations?

Chrstine Truesdale: 9:47

Well, LEARN's a nonprofit that was originally set up in 2005 by the nine English school boards, and so currently we have the Directors General of the English school boards and Littoral, which is a service center status , as well as the executive directors of the Quebec Association of Independent Schools, QAIS, AJDS, the Association of Jewish Day Schools, and QESBA, the Quebec English School Boards Association. And right now our chairperson president of LEARN is Stéphane Lagacé, who's the director general of the Central Quebec School Board and he started as DG last fall, 2024. And our vice president right now is Mike Helm, who's the DG of the New Frontiers School Board.

Chris Colley: 10:49

Both great educators, administrators, people. We're lucky to have them. Yeah, when teachers ask me what's LEARN, I always say LEARN is us, learn is all of us right.

Chrstine Truesdale: 11:01

We're a community organization that belongs to the community.

Chris Colley: 11:05

Right. So a teacher that teaches in central Quebec is a part of our network, is a part of our community. We can work with those people.

Chrstine Truesdale: 11:15

Absolutely, and I did mention before that there were three organizations that were merged together to create LEARN and then later the Provincial Resource Team that supports the Community Learning Center network also joined LEARN. So, that was a very happy addition, I think, well suited to the organization as well, because it brings in the whole school community approach, looking at our English schools and community as linked. In some communities the English school is the hub for the English community because you know, you know the services that can be offered. If you look at the local library, it doesn't necessarily have a lot of English books, it's difficult to find services in English, and so the school can become the hub for connecting community and the school.

Chrstine Truesdale: 12:08

And so I think it was a great fit when the provincial resource team joined our team.

Chris Colley: 12:16

Community has always been central to LEARN's approach. People probably know out there that I work at LEARN. This is a LEARN podcast, but how does the organization ensure that its programs and services really reflect the needs of the English-speaking communities?

Chrstine Truesdale: 12:34

Well, we don't operate in a vacuum, right, we have to listen to the community, we have to look at what the needs are. We look at research that's done around the community, organizations like QUESCREN, other community organizations that do reports. We survey our community. We're embedded in the network. We're part of the people that we serve and, whether it's through the CLC network or partnerships that we have with school boards, or regular conversations with educators and parents, or surveys that we send out and consultations that we're a part of, everything we build is shaped by the input of the community.

Chris Colley: 13:12

Right. And when you say community you're talking about all those nine boards, right? All those nine English school boards. That's the community.

Chrstine Truesdale: 13:19

School boards, the independent schools, but also, you know, our broader community, the other community organizations that we partner with, whether that's in culture or health and social services or employability. That's an important part of the ecosystem. I think that you know that's where the future lies is looking at at how we're all connected, because we can't operate just in an education vacuum either. We have to see what the larger picture is. The other thing is it's important to not just look at data and reports but make time for dialogue. So we do spend a lot of time in schools. We're on, we're, you know, at the ground level and we meet people across the province, and it's about building also long-term relationships, not just within the schools but with other organizations, to work together to promote the vitality of the community. Because it's not just the kids that are in our schools today that are important. Right, we have to have the long view. We want to make sure that the community is thriving, to make sure that we have kids in our schools in 20 years from now too.

Chris Colley: 14:25

Right, right. Who are the employees that bring, LEARN together and mobilize?

Chrstine Truesdale: 14:30

We do have a team of educators and people who've worked in the milieu for decades. We also have people, for instance, on the provincial resource team, that have worked in community development but also worked in the education milieu and, you know, in employability in different spheres of the community. We also have people who work in administration and information technology, because we have platforms and infrastructure that supports the projects that we do. But we also sometimes work with other organizations in order to provide just support administratively in some cases. So sometimes we've managed different grants for other organizations that we're working in partnership with, like the English Language Artists Network for the Arts, Inspire grants.

Chrstine Truesdale: 15:25

Great community we're part of that larger sphere. That's cool, that we provide, and the materials that we produce are primarily education and classroom-based or community-based. We have to look more broadly at how we support the community as a whole.

Chris Colley: 15:47

Well, that kind of feeds into my next question. So, stepping in you've been in now for about six months-ish or so. What have you found the biggest challenges have been stepping into this role. I mean, you only have a small sample of time that you've been there, but what are the challenges of moving forward, learn into the future? I imagine anytime a new CEO comes in, there are new, fresh ideas that come out and different ways of seeing how our community will function and how we'll interact with that community. Can you paint a little bit of a picture for us about where we might be heading over the next 10 years or so?

Chrstine Truesdale: 16:29

So some of the challenges that we're experiencing, as you can imagine, have to do with what is happening in education with respect to different laws that are being implemented language laws and this certainly poses a challenge with respect to funding as well. So if we look at different challenges that we've been faced with, funding when you're funded by grants are primarily the funding that Learn has had over the last 20 years comes from the Entente Canada-Québec for Minority Language Education, and this money goes from the federal government to the provincial government and we deal with the Ministry of Education for a large part of our funding. So this is challenging because often the Ententes take many years to sign, there are delays, there are delays in getting paid.

Chrstine Truesdale: 17:34

It's not always easy to plan ahead because we don't know when the money is coming from what kind of budgets will be allocated to us. It it has been reoccurring over the years. So I think part of what we need to do is be proactive and and although realistically, this will be part of the funding that we have in order to move forward, we also have to look at what other opportunities are out there for us. So whether that's partnering with other organizations to see if we can apply for funding together, looking at potentially different foundations that might help to support us, looking at federal funding that could help with the community-based initiatives. I think we have to make the effort to look beyond the sources of funding that traditionally we had, because it is getting more and more difficult to plan ahead and to be able to offer the services that we've been able to provide over the years. Right, so that, I would say, say is a main challenge.

Chrstine Truesdale: 18:40

It's also difficult for people to understand who we are and what we do, and so we have to make an effort to be visible and to explain what we do and to show the impact that we have in the community. So that's also interesting.

Chris Colley: 18:57

We've often talked about and I've had conversations with teachers and consultants and administrators alike about the consequence of not having an organization like LEARN around, where we're pushing for those English rights and English education across the board. I mean as a conglomerate, and because we bring those nine boards together, there's a common voice that we can actually express to the governments, to community members of the importance of Anglo educational services within the province.

Chrstine Truesdale: 19:34

I mean, we're not a political organization but at the same time we live in a highly politicized environment right now, and so I think that the fact that we are a community-based English-speaking organization, you know, places us kind of at the center of that. Our primary mandate is not advocacy, but the fact that we do develop resources in English and provide services in English in some cases has been challenging for us.

Chris Colley: 20:03

Right, I hear you on that. Well, Christine, just to wrap things up a bit, thanks again for shedding some light on who LEARN is and the direction and that kind of is my last question. If you're going to look forward 10 years from now, what are your hopes for LEARN and the impact it might have on education in Quebec?

Chrstine Truesdale: 20:26

I think, looking ahead, we have to look not just in terms of scale but in terms of how we operate. I think it's great that our English school boards and our English schools have a really high success rate. The graduation rates are really high. But we need to ask ourselves how can we ensure that our English speaking youth in Quebec feel that they belong, that they see it as an opportunity? It means helping students, families and communities access services that they need within the education sphere, but also looking at employability, health and social services and culture and identity, and I think LEARN can be a connector across those spheres, those fears. I hope that you know, in 10 years from now, LEARN is viewed as playing a critical role for the English-speaking community, not just surviving but thriving, and that we help students succeed academically but also that we help them feel rooted in their identity, confident in their bilingualism and feeling connected to their future in Quebec.

Chris Colley: 21:40

Beautiful.

Chrstine Truesdale: 21:41

And I think we should be working together to ensure that students can see themselves staying here and building careers and families and contributing to the community and living fulfilled lives here. So it means that we need to collaborate across the spheres and that LEARN can be a bridge, that we work in partnership to build those systems of support so that our community can thrive.

Chris Colley: 22:12

Right. I mean that's an amazing goal and I see it being very achievable. We're a strong community, the Anglophones here in Quebec, particularly in our educational field, there is a camaraderie and a willingness to be a part of this larger community and I think we're in really good hands with you at the helm of LEARN for, hopefully, the next long time. So thanks, Christine, for joining us. It's been a real pleasure talking with you and learning a little bit more about LEARN and what it can do and where it came from Very enlightening, and I hope that our listeners have a little bit better idea of what Learn can do for them now and into the future. So thank you.

Chrstine Truesdale: 22:54

It was a pleasure.