Fenella Amarasinghe

About:

Fenella has over 15 years of experience in education, spanning K-12 and post-secondary, including teaching, student services, leadership, and research. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at York University. Her academic interests converge at the intersection of education, philosophy, political science and technology and is inspired by scholarly interlocutors such as Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, James Baldwin and Byung-Chul Han. Her research considers questions of ethics and pedagogy within engineering education and the ways that ethics and the socio-ecological imagination is anticipated and emergent.

In addition to her PhD research, she is presently working on a project with researchers from across Canada to investigate the pedagogy and outcomes of the Technological Stewardship Practice Program (TSPP). The TSPP was launched in 2021 by the Engineering Change Lab and MaRS Discovery District, and is an online, primarily asynchronous, program that teaches principles of Technological Stewardship. In another research project, she and her colleague Dr. Alpha Abebe are investigating post-secondary student perspectives on ChatGPT and higher education.

Previously, she worked on the Strategy Team for the Engineering Change Lab, and was the Senior Manager, Education Planning and Development in the Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science and Toronto Metropolitan University. Both of these experiences focused on ethics and culture change in engineering education and engineering professions more broadly.

Recently, she taught a first year engineering course on ethics, creative problem solving and communication at the Lassonde School of Engineering at York. As well, she is a member of the Future of Pedagogy taskforce at York University.