Key Personnel

Lorna Williams is a member of the St'at'yemc Nation.  She grew up on the Mt. Currie reserve, a few hours north of Vancouver, British Columbia.  Lorna was the last offour generations sent to residential scools, but in her community the memory of a time before colonial rule was still strong and present during her childhood.  Lorna helped take over control of the government school in Mt. Currie in 1972, and she was hired by Vancouver School District in 1984 as the First Nations education specialist.  Lorna organized teams of First Nations educators to work with the 2000 aboriginal children in the district, and she created the Variety Learning Centre to assess children and train teachers.  More than 1000 teachers have received courses in Feuerstein's teaching methods through the centre, and Lorna has conducted additional workshops in Western Canada and the USA.

Reuven Feuerstein was born in Botosan, Romania in 1921 and grew up in a family of nine children.  His Father was a Jewish scholar. Reuven was teaching disturbed children in Bucharest at the beginning of World War II, and later escapred to Palestine where he worked with thousands of children and their dependence on cultural transmission where further developed in his work with Moroccan, Berber and Ethiopian children immigrating to Isreal.  More than 30,000 teachers worldwide apply his ideas to the education of children affected by Down's syndrome.  He founded the Hadassah Wizo Canada research institute in 1965 and he is currently director of the International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential (ICELP) in Jerusalem.

Face to Face Media producer and director Gary Marcuse previously collaborated with Lorna Williams in the creation of First Nations: The Circle Unbroken, a collection of 13 twenty-minute programs about First Nations communities in Canada, available from the National Film Board of Canada.  His other projects include Alive in the Nuclear Age, a collection of short programs about nuclear issues and the arms race, and Scanning Television, a media literacy collection.