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Angela Coldwell has made it her mission to raise awareness about careers in construction and expose students, as well as teachers, to those opportunities at as early as possible.

Coldwell, a teacher who founded with her husband who is in construction, was one of the speakers at the ’s (RESCON) Women in Construction webinar held recently.

“We saw that there was a missing gap in the country to do outreach to elementary teachers, in particular at a time when students and teachers are actually talking about community helpers,” she explained. “The educational research really supports the fact that if we do not integrate and introduce students to diverse careers between Grades 1 and 6, we miss that opportunity to plant the seed of who they can become. We also miss the opportunity to catch parents as well.”

To address the gap, Coldwell and her husband created turnkey curriculum lesson plans.

“We’ve partnered both in Ontario as well as Alberta and we have teachers doing it in both places,” said Coldwell. “The interesting thing is that the conversations are the same in both provinces…The biggest thing is that there is a lack of awareness.”

It starts with exposure at the teacher level, she said.

“Teachers go K (Kindergarten) to (Grade) 12 then they go and do their Bachelor of Education program and then back to the classroom. They don’t have awareness about what those careers look like in the industry,” Coldwell said.

Between the ages of five and seven children create gender biases, she pointed out, adding at Grade 4, about age eight, girls start to decrease their confidence in STEM. Grades 5 and 6 is when Canadian parents and youth are most engaged in career exploration.

She used an example of a teacher who was reading the book The House that She Built to her Grade 4 class and one of the boys asked if girls can be carpenters.

“If we don’t catch it when they’re young, we don’t have an opportunity to really transform the culture. Not just the culture from the construction industry, but generally the culture that men and women are equitable and should have equitable roles of their own choosing,” said Coldwell.

Honour the Work recently held its third Explore the Trades event. This year they also brought a virtual welding machine to one of elementary schools in partnership with Sheridan College.

“The girls came back during their recess and the boys too because they wanted to virtually weld,” said Coldwell. “We know there is an appetite for this. We realize there is a lack of connection between what they’re learning in school, the curriculum, the opportunity for hands-on activities, the opportunity to connect with somebody from the industry in a really meaningful way and then to be able to connect that with the diverse careers.”

While reaching students early is critical, reaching teachers is too.

“One of the ways we can do it is as simple as going into undergraduate facilities, the universities where these students are going to come out,” said Coldwell. “They’re going to do practicums with a placement teacher and then go into the field and become teachers.”

She also pointed out the Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program and similar programs across the country are run by teachers who don’t necessarily tend to have connection in the industry.

“I’m lucky I’m married to someone who has been in the industry. He’s been hugely informative to me. He’s undone so many biases that I unconsciously had. I call them innocent blind spots,” she noted. “When we talk about guidance counsellors it needs to go broader than that because as a chem and physics teacher, I had far more time, semester after semester, with my students than a guidance counsellor that had a one to 400 ratio with students at the school.”

It’s a different relationship, she added.

“I was able to have a much different kind of either culturally appropriate conversation for students that came from cultures where this maybe was not something that was encouraged,” she said. “Or just being able to say, ‘Hey, have you ever thought of this because you seem to have a real aptitude for this?’ The bottom line is education is ripe for connection with industry and it’s just been missing up until now.”

The panel discussion also featured Shailey Allison from BuildForce Canada and Dominique Skubnik from the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum who shared statistics on labour and apprenticeships in Canada.

Follow the author on X/Twitter @DCN_Angela.