Sessional Lecturers

Marina Bochar, MSW (UVic)
Email: mbochar@uvic.ca

Marina (she/her) grew up on Treaty 6 territory (Edmonton) and is of Romanian, Polish, and Ukrainian ancestry. She is a fourth-generation settler currently living out her great grandparent’s settlement on Turtle Island on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Marina completed a Masters in Social Work at UVic in 2021 and has 9 years of experience working in the social services field, where she has worked closely with youth experiencing sexual exploitation, sex workers, and folks experiencing gender-based violence. Marina currently works at First Nations Health Authority as a Project Manager on the Toxic Drug Response Team. Marina has a passion for harm reduction, and providing supports and programing that are peer led, culturally safe, and community based. In her spare time, you can find her walking along the river with her two rescue pups, Juniper & Lilah, or at the gym learning powerlifting.

Michele Fairbairn, Ph.D. Candidate (MUN)
Email: fairbair@uvic.ca

Michele joined the school as a Sessional Lecturer in 2009.  She teaches in both the BSW and MSW programs.  Her teaching and research interests include: decolonial and antiracist policy and social work practice, research methodologies, social work identity; and the application of colonial and neoliberal governmentality, queer, Indigenous, critical race, and feminist theories.     

Michele has completed narrative research with child welfare social workers who were in state care as children or were investigated as mothers. Her current research is a poststructuralist analysis of social work legal regulatory reforms in settler colonial nation-states.

https://mun.academia.edu/MicheleFairbairn

Kim Grzybowski, MSW (UVic)
Email: kimg@uvic.ca

Kim accepts academic reference requests from previous students who have taken a course with her.

Tony Ho, MSW (UVic)
Email: tho@uvic.ca

Areas of interest: Social work practice within interprofessional mental health teams, mental health and addictions, and private practice with a specialization in stress management and sleep disorders.

Course taught: 311 Introduction to Oppression; 312B Anti-Racist Social Work

Jodi Hoffman
Email: jodih@uvic.ca

Jodi accepts academic, employment and RSW registration reference requests from previous students who have taken a course with her.

Tyson Kelsall, MSW (McGill), PhD Candidate (SFU)
Email: tkelsall@uvic.ca

Tyson Singh joined the UVic School of Social Work in 2021 as a sessional lecturer. He otherwise works in Vancouver's DTES as an outreach and case managing social worker for Vancouver Coastal Health.

His social work-related interests are broad but include examining how biopolitics exclude people from dignified social services, healthcare and housing; police accountability; harm reduction and limitations of the state; as well as anti-racism and grounding social work practice in an anti-colonial worldview.

Sharnelle Jenkins-Thompson, MSW (UVic)
Email: sharnelleleigh@uvic.ca

Alyx MacAdams, MSW (UVic)
Email: alyxm@uvic.ca

Alyx (they/them) MSW is a trans-masculine queer person of Gaelic Scottish, Irish, and British ancestry. In community, they work with and alongside trans children and their families through community-based programs and a counselling practice. Their practice and teaching approaches are inspired by trans studies, transformative justice, decarceral politics, grassroots activism.

In the classroom, they invite somatic awareness and nature-based learning to get curious about decolonial and relational approaches to social work practice. They have taught courses in Social Work, Child and Youth Care and Gender Studies at UVic. They have been a Field Lisaison Instructor and are teaching SOCW 312A in the Fall of 2025.

Kirsten Mikkelsen, MSW (UVic)
Email: km28@uvic.ca 

Michele Morin, MSW (UVic)
Email: michelemorin@uvic.ca

Michele is a Métis woman—daughter, mother, sister, auntie, cousin, friend, and scholar. She is a proud member of her Métis community and a traditional knowledge keeper. Michele practices Two World Walking and Two-Eyed Seeing, working diligently to balance a contemporary Métis lifestyle with Eurocentric academia. She is an Indigenous Social Work instructor at the University of Victoria’s School of Social Work and also teaches Indigenous Studies at Selkirk College in Castlegar, BC. Her research interests are wide-ranging, but they share a common thread: the sharing of multiple knowledges, epistemologies, axiologies, and ontologies. Through this work, Michele aims to honour and advance decolonization through educational change.

Todd Ormiston, BSW, MPA, Ph.D
Email: toddo@shaw.ca

Trish Pal, MSW (UVic)
Email: trishpal@uvic.ca

Kîwetinohk Kîsik/Trish Pal (they/them) is a 2Spirit non-binary person of Red River Métis and mixed Euro-settler ancestry with an MSW-I. They currently reside at Amiskwaciywâskahikan, (Beaver Hills House, "Edmonton") in Treaty 6. Their scholarship focuses on connecting colonial violences including bodily violences and land-based violences. They work from a decolonial harm reduction lens, centering self-determination, consent, relationship, and accessibility. They have spent many years supporting survivors of many kinds of violence including Indigenous folks using illicit substances as the co-creator of the Indigenous Harm Reduction Team (ihrt.ca). They teach SOCW 435 -Decolonial & Anti-Oppressive Perspectives on Mental Health and

 SOCW 471 - Substance Use Theory, Policy, and Practice in Social Work.

Sarina Piercy, MSW (UVic)
Email: snpiercy@uvic.ca

Tracy Rapanos (Schonfeld), MSW (Dalhousie)
Email: trapanos@uvic.ca

Corrina Sparrow, MSW, PhD Candidate (UBC)
Email: lokwa00@uvic.ca

Leanne Stepp, MSW (UVic)
Email: leanneg@uvic.ca

Leanne is interested in decolonizing health care, health equity in addictions treatment, and the use of narrative therapy in supporting others.

Some of the courses she has taught include 200A & 200B: Introductions to Social Work and Social Policy; 311: Understanding Oppression; 312: Collaborative Conversations; 319: Research for Social Change; 400/532: Introduction to Social Work in Health care; 471: Addictions in Society; 512: Knowledge and Inquiry. Occasionally, she also takes students on for field education learning opportunities in the health authority.

Leanne enjoys creative writing, triathlon training and racing, and spending time with her two kids and her wonderful circle of friends.

Glen Tadsen, BA (SFU), MSW (UBC)
Email: glent@uvic.ca

I've been a Lecturer here at UVic for many years in addition to a 30 year career in government in social policy and program development - at times acting as BC director of income assistance, employment and training and disaster response planning. In my early career, I was a child protection worker, a District Supervisor, Coordinator of BC's Income Assistance Appeal system, Minister's liaison to the cooperative community and an Ombudsman's Officer.

Courses taught: 200B - Introduction to the Critical Analysis of Social Welfare in Canada and 350A - Social Work, Social Justice and the Law. Working at the School all these years has been the best job ever.

I have three adult kids and five grandkids.
In my spare time, I like to go fishing - or at least think about going fishing.

I accept academic and employment reference requests from previous students who have taken a course with me.

Chris Tse, MSW (UVic)
Email: christophertse@uvic.ca