Lorna Williams
Assistant Professor & Director of Aboriginal Education
Faculty of Education, Department of Linguistics
University of Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia

Lorna Williams is a member of the Lil’wat First Nation, Mount Currie BC. She is Assistant Professor and Programme Director of Aboriginal Teacher Education at the University of Victoria. She worked for the Ministry of Education as Director of the Aboriginal Education Enhancements Branch for three years where she directed research and policy development and implementation in all areas of education for Aboriginal students. Prior to this appointment, she worked as a First Nations Education Specialist with the Vancouver School Board. Lorna is a strong advocate committed to working with Aboriginal communities to increase achievement for Aboriginal learners, teach First Nations culture, heritage, traditions and history to all students. Lorna is a doctoral student at the University of Tennessee, her research is in the area of teacher development.

Lorna co-directed First Nations: The Circle Unbroken, a 23 program educational video series. She has written children’s books, teachers’ guides and developed Lil’wat Language curriculum to teach people to read and write this language, which was oral until 1973. Among Lorna’s many accomplishments, she has organized and trained more than 2,000 people within and outside the public school system in applications based on Feuerstein’s theory of structural cognitive modifiability and mediated learning. This work took her to Israel, the USA, South Africa and Europe and was the subject of a documentary The Mind of a Child that was awarded the Canada Award at the 1996 Gemini Awards.

Lorna was a group leader in the team that traveled to Malaysia in the inaugural year of Canada World Youth.

In recognition of Lorna’s achievements she has been presented with Outstanding Teacher Award, Dedicated to Kids Award and in 1992, was invested into the Order of British Columbia.