Before becoming a teacher educator and educational researcher, Jen Watt taught English Language Arts to middle and senior years students in Ontario and England. Jen’s personal, professional, and research experience lend themselves to supporting this feminist collaborative study of GBSV in schools. Her earlier research focused on how teachers, learners, and families cultivate compassion and well-being in times of crisis, discomfort, and uncertainty. The most-recent catalyst for the GBSV focus within Jen’s research agenda comes from her lived experience as a mother. As an educational researcher, Jen’s pain and rage at how her daughter was dismissed and turned into the feminist killjoy (Ahmed, 2017) within systems that should be protecting GBSV survivors and helping them heal compelled her to consider how the K-12 school system recognizes its ethical obligation to educate students about GBSV, rape culture, and consent.

Jen contributes to another collaborative project that engages undergraduate nursing and education students in mobilizing knowledge about the Murdered Missing Indigenous Women, Girls, 2-Spirit+ Calls for Justice through the arts. Jen has also been a co-investigator on The Re-imagining Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment in K-12 Languages and Literacies Assessment project which brought together a working group of Manitoba educators to respond to four webinars of scholars from the field to create podcasts, working papers for professional learning in the field, and co-create final literacies assessment manifestos. Jen also frequently collaborates with teachers in Manitoba on place-writing and place-walking research and pedagogical initiatives through her role as Co-Director of the Manitoba Writing Project.