Biography

Sidrah Chan has over ten years’ experience teaching and developing curriculum in a wide range of community-based education programs, with a focus on serving high-need communities, facilitating outdoor education and arts-based learning, and engaging in abuse prevention. 

Sidrah worked as a course instructor for Frontier College's Beat the Street program in the Jane-Finch community, where she developed a new youth-led poetry initiative to inspire deeper engagement with literacy. She also coordinated an academic tutoring program for High School students in the Pathways to Education program in Scarborough, and developed arts-based enrichment opportunities for these students. Sidrah has worked as an outdoor educator for Evergreen Brickworks, where she facilitated experiential, nature-based learning for children ranging from Kindergarten to Grade 6. 

Sidrah's more recent work includes serving as the coordinator of a province-wide anti-abuse campaign called Neighbours, Friends and Families, where she engaged diverse communities across Ontario in learning about abuse prevention. She also directed the Rivers of Hope project, which empowered High School youth in schools across the Greater Toronto Area with practical skills around how to intervene in cases of discrimination and bullying. Sidrah’s doctoral work at OISE focused on taking up abuse memoirs as sources of knowledge about trauma, using a method that she calls “a pedagogy of witnessing”.