Emerging Scholars Present: Learning from Ottawa School Heritage Stories
From communities reacting to health and safety measures, to findings about unmarked graves on former Indigenous Residential School properties, schools have been in the news across Canada.
This Emerging Scholars lecture presents the impressive project results of a winter 2020 graduate seminar on heritage conservation at Carleton University. Ten students collaborated on case studies and thematic essays to examine conservation issues, successes, and losses of Ottawa’s school heritage. With help from a Heritage Ottawa Gordon Cullingham Research Grant, professor Susan Ross and student Micah Norris further developed and transformed the results into the Ottawa School Heritage website.
The class project looked as much at pressures for change, such as growth, urban renewal and closures, as at achievements, including cases of ongoing use or adaptation, or site improvements to meet new goals.
Susan Ross is Associate Professor in the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University, and cross-appointed to the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism. Susan has worked as an architect in Montreal and Berlin and is a former senior conservation architect in the federal government in Gatineau.
At the time of the project, Micah Norris was working towards his MA in Canadian Studies, Robin Hoytema towards her M.Arch and Nivethini Jekku Einkaran and Kamal Raftani were each completing a Graduate Diploma in Architectural Conservation. They have now all graduated.
