steph schuurman

M.Ed., B.Ed., B.Mus.

Steph Schuurman (she/they) is queer and neuro-atypical. These identities enrich her experiences as a curriculum scholar, education researcher, teacher, artist, budding philosopher, unapologetic maker-of-messes, and joy-seeker. Equally at home in a classroom, a choral rehearsal room, or an experimental soundscape, Steph teaches early childhood music and undergraduate music and education courses at the University of Alberta, alongside K–6 music in the public school system. They are based in ᐊᓯᓂᐢᑲᐤ ᓰᐲᓯᐢ, also known as asiniskaw sipisis, also known as stoney creek, also known as Camrose, Alberta, on Treaty 6 territory. She is a first/second generation settler. 

Steph holds Kodály Levels I & II certification, an MEd, BEd, and BMus (all from UBC), and is completing their PhD at the University of Alberta. They're a 2023–2025 Killam Laureate, a 2024 Curriculum Inquiry Fellow, and a scholar who’d rather make a glorious mess than a tidy conclusion. 

Her research doesn’t sit quietly in a library; it sings, stumbles, and asks questions that she has yet to find a way to answer. Steph's doctoral work challenges the idea of the passive, pathologized child and reimagines pedagogy as a collective, situated, environmental jam session -- where children, adults, technologies, and sonic ecologies improvise futures together.

Steph thrives in the in-between, the messy middle: where noise is music, paint is theory, and people collide into each other’s brilliance. Always love-forward, Steph insists that curiosity, generosity, compassion, tenderness, and relation are not just the backdrop, but the driving pulse of her work. She’s a scholar who sings, a musician who researches, and an artist who believes the best ideas arrive through collaboration: tangled in embroidery thread, covered in oil paint stains, pond water, sawdust, and feedback reverb.

educational philosophy; curriculum theory; thinking queerly // lived queer theories; vibratory epistemologies; ontology-otherwise; affect theory; ethico-political thought & philosophies of relation; sound studies + sonic ecologies; DIY culture; deep & situated listening; ecoliterate music pedagogies; critical disability studies; feminist new materialism; research-creation; poetic interventions & critical fabulation; climate justice + environmental social justice; world-making through queerness; messy queer imaginaries

[coming soon]