Session 7 – 3pm-3:50pm: Chat with Heather MacTaggart and Cameron Jones
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Cameron Jones
Cam collaborates in the development of learning experiences with children from kindergarten to high school, and adults; with industry partners from music to aerospace, the skilled trades to apiarists, urban farmers to food banks, filmmakers to politicians. Cam’s leadership is thoughtful and responsive, oriented towards understanding needs in the development of creative possibilities. Cam’s thinking begins with listening to people, and reading voraciously: and then wondering about how the world should be and taking the first steps in that direction, encouraging others to join me from wherever they are. Cam is the Leader of Experiential Learning for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.
Heather MacTaggart
Heather MacTaggart is a social entrepreneur, educator, author, innovator and consensus builder. She began her private sector career at Proctor and Gamble where, over the course of seven years, she held progressively senior marketing and management positions. She thereafter applied her expertise to establish a unique consulting hub.
Through her leadership, Classroom Connections evolved from a grass-roots resource for schools to a social enterprise dedicated to educational transformation. Classroom Connections is now a respected source of leading edge, government sponsored, training curricula in use across Canada and around the world. Corporate sponsors include RBC and 3M.
Along the way, Heather and her team also designed practical, life-changing programs to engage at risk indigenous youth. Ultimately, Classroom Connections spawned the revolutionary Change It Up! platform, with Heather on the front lines at First Nation reserves, providing self-development and employment skills to young women and men who had previously dropped out. This platform spawned the widely distributed CIU! Toolkit: an easy-to-implement program based on a decade of practical field experience in the delivery of employment, pre-employment and life skills training.
As the Executive Director of Classroom Connections, and as the Canadian Deputy of The 21st Century Learning Initiative, Heather consistently inspired disparate groups to enthusiastically support innovative change in education. In 2010, she co-authored Overschooled but Undereducated with John Abbott in the UK.
Her newest and most exciting venture is Unschooling School which, with the support of an international cast of diverse and free-thinking academics, promotes a quiet revolution which will permanently alter the systemic rigidity of schooling. Unschooling School unleashes the freedom to learn in a thoughtfully considered but bold encounter with stale and traditional teaching methods.
Heather is a creative and dynamic change agent, fostering both growth and disruption in the learning environment. Her influence at the highest levels of government and business has made a meaningful difference in the lives of marginalized young Canadians.