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I am so humbled by the students with whom I work," admits Deborah Berrill, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Queen's-Trent Teacher Education program. "They are already my colleagues when they arrive and I am proud to be associated with them in the smallest way when they are here and after they have left."

Deborah Berrill doesn't just teach; she teaches teachers. Though officially called students, to Deborah they will always be colleagues with ideas and energies all their own. In her 20 years of teaching, Deborah has been continually impressed and awed by the leadership and ethics shown by the Concurrent Education (Con Ed) teacher candidates at Trent.

"I am struck by their commitment and ethic of service," says Deborah. "These are people who carry course overload with this program, who do school placements, who often do other community volunteer work, and who are active participants on campus in virtually every activity." She explains that Con Ed students are involved in many activities from college cabinets to Introductory Student Week committees to athletics. "Even Marisa Barnhart, this year's TSCA [student union] President is in the concurrent program," says Deborah.

Students and graduates are equally full of praise for Deborah, both professionally and personally. "She's totally inspirational," says Con Ed graduate Susan Rhee, currently teaching in the Toronto area. "She's always asking me about my experiences, encouraging me to excel, to write articles and to provide professional development for colleagues."

Their professional relationship has become a friendship and, though Susan has travelled and taught in Thailand and Northern Ontario, they continue to exchange cards and books that each thinks might inspire the other. "She's got so much energy," says Susan. "It's frenetic this exchanging of so many ideas you walk away from a conversation and you feel you can take on the world!"

Originally from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin 200 miles north of Peterborough Deborah says "I love to tell people that I moved south to Canada!" Growing up in a small community with an even smaller high school, Deborah learned to value the contributions of each student. "In order to do almost anything (e.g., have a basketball team, put on a musical) it was important to involve everyone."

"For me, school was always a very positive experience," Deborah remembers, "with many memorable teachers who challenged us, supported us, celebrated our achievements. I am very fortunate in having experienced such a rich education, including things like art classes, music performance and enrichment activities."

Deborah herself is a graduate of Trent University. Though she doesn't hold an official Trent degree, she finished her honours equivalent here after leaving Northwestern University to be with new husband Michael after he accepted a post in the Biology Department. Deborah felt very much at home in Peterborough and embraced her new country. "I'm proud to be Canadian, I've been a citizen for 24 years!"

Michael and Deborah met in her home town, which is a summer tourist destination, through a mutual friend who'd invited Michael for a holiday. He was working on his PhD at Princeton and she was a first-year student at Northwestern. They both attended a music festival one warm summer evening and the rest, they say, is history. Or, considering Michael's discipline, perhaps we should say 'biology'. "She's endlessly interesting," says Michael, "She's put together a remarkable career."

Deborah did her English honours thesis on J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Popular at the time, it presented a problem at Trent for lack of precedent: no one had taught the trilogy before. Classics professor Janet Bews ended up being her primary supervisor, an appropriate choice given Tolkien's own classical background.

Also an avid Harry Potter fan, Deborah organized a Harry Potter Workshop & Quidditch Clinic during the Fall Term at Trent. Facilitated by Laurie Thomas, partner of Con-Ed graduate David Brownlee, the half-day session included a workshop on how to teach Harry Potter ("The Potter") as an integrated unit incorporating language arts, mathematics, drama and phys-ed.

"Laurie was spectacular and we had the time of our lives!" exclaims Deborah about the Quidditch Clinic. "We were at the Athletic Complex on scooter boards, hefting around a large exercise ball, trying to get the ball through hula-hoops suspended from the basketball hoops!"

Despite the lack of flying broomsticks, the house league game that Laurie co-invented was very popular with the over 50 Con Ed students, area teachers, Queen's faculty and final-year candidates from Kingston who attended the workshop and clinic. In fact, rumour has it that a movement is afoot to bring Quidditch, at least the Muggle version of it, to Trent!

A strong interest in contemporary literature and a special interest in the poetry of Wallace Stevens took Deborah to the University of Toronto for a master's degree. "No one would agree to be my supervisor because Northrop Frye had published a paper on Stevens and they felt that it was his territory." Ultimately she approached Frye, foremost literary critic prior to the postmodern revolution, and he agreed to be her supervisor. "One of the reasons I worked on Steven's poetics of death was to come to terms with the premature death of my own mother."

After earning her MA, Deborah completed her teacher education degree during the last year of the Peterborough Teachers' College. She taught Grade 7 and 8 at Adam Scott Collegiate and Vocational Institute in Peterborough; she had just finished directing the school's multi-media production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat when daughter Rebecca was born. While on maternity leave, she took a part as a Kit Kat Girl in the Peterborough Theatre Guild's production of Cabaret. Three months into her leave she was asked to go back to school to teach OAC English as a replacement for a very ill Head of the Department. "So, it was a busy time: nursing Rebecca, rehearsing decadent dancing and singing, and then teaching the OAC class!" remembers Deborah. "Some of my students got wind of the Cabaret production and came to class the day after our opening show, letting me know that they had seen me in the mesh stockings and skimpy shorts the night before!"

Daughter Margot was born two years later and joined mother, sister and dad in a small lobstering village in Maine where Michael was on sabbatical. Deborah and Michael spent the year writing a Sierra Club book called The North Atlantic Coast: Cape Cod to Newfoundland. "It was a stimulating academic time, co-authoring the book," says Deborah, "but also challenging for us both in the parenting demands of an infant and toddler." Researching, writing and underwater photography shared priority, Deborah recalls, "with learning from our children how to be parents."

It was a postal strike in the summer of 1981 which resulted in over admission of students in the teacher education program that brought Deborah to Trent. "That first year I taught part time and realized my love for teaching at this level." Five years later she enrolled in a PhD program at the University of East Anglia in England, looking at the development of written argument in 11 and 16 year olds. "I did my research in schools in South London, just as the British national Curriculum was being introduced. It was fascinating."

Deborah feels that it was this period in her life that awakened her to the importance of cultural heritage to teaching. "The Hindu and Muslim students, in particular, taught me that my research question ('Should parents be able to control the lives of their teenage children') carried religious significance for them. They taught me that I needed to critique my teaching with respect to inclusion and that I need my students to help me do this."

One of Deborah's most interesting projects at Trent is the development of Personal Professional Portfolios. When it began 13 years ago, the portfolio was geared around the needs of interviewers. "Everyone always asked the same kind of questions, and the portfolio demonstrates the teaching competencies (we call it the 'dimensions of teaching') according to the questions people are asked," she explains.

Portfolios contain numerous items including photographs, goal statements and personal belief statements as well as professional evaluations and tables which explicitly note the individual's teaching approaches and the underlying theory which supports those approaches. A few teachers, like Susan Rhee and Deborah who maintains a portfolio herself also include examples of especially effective units and entries of recent professional learning. "Some principals have been using them for a number of years," says Deborah. "They help you see your own areas of strength, to identify your professional learning priorities, and to establish specific strategies for doing that learning. It's a very visible way to reflect on your own career and to establish what is missing as well as to celebrate what you have accomplished."

Deborah is now involved in developing Professional Portfolios with teachers in the UK and is doing research around portfolio development and professional identity. She has launched a new website for making your own portfolio: www.PortfolioMaker.ca. "We looked at professional standards in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, and this has structured our focus so that our portfolios are 'pertinent globally'."

Another popular project is the Penpal Program which matches Grade 1 and 2 children, who are learning to write, with Trent students as mentors. The mentors are assigned a younger student to write to, and drop their letters off at Deborah's house which are then picked up by the classroom teachers. The children then respond as part of a classroom activity, and back the letters go to Deborah's for distribution through the college mail.

"As I write, there are 12 grocery bags hanging on hooks on my front porch, waiting for the teachers to collect their letters," Deborah writes in an email. "I wish you could see the letters that are in those bags! They are so inviting to these emergent readers and writers." And they are inviting: written in coloured markers, including pictures drawn by Trent students as well as the Grade 1's and 2's with words written in big letters so the children can read them more easily. There are almost 500 people exchanging letters and, though it began 14 years ago as a Con Ed project, almost half of the Trent penpals are not in the Con Ed program. "I like that!" smiles Deborah.

"There is even a book!" says Deborah, which she co-authored with Peterborough Grade 1 teacher and Trent grad Molly Gall. Published by Pembroke Press in 2000, the book is aimed at classroom teachers who want to start their own programs.

One of Deborah's dreams is to facilitate a conference for the graduates of the Con Ed program. "Ah! It would be spectacular to see them," she says. "And, of course, they would be the presenters, sharing their superb professional practice."

"If I remember many grads," Deborah says, "it is precisely because they are so very memorable!"

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