Laurier researchers lead development of homelessness learning materials for secondary schools across Canada

April 9, 2026
For Immediate Release

BRANTFORD — Two professors at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus are leading a project to develop homelessness learning materials for secondary school students across Canada.

Building Bridges: Youth Education on Homelessness will provide teachers with lesson plans that help students in grades nine through 12 better understand the complexities of homelessness in their communities.

“The homelessness crisis has risen so dramatically in the last five years, young people are bound to have questions — and there aren’t many places they can turn to for answers,” said project co-lead Erin Dej, associate professor in Laurier’s Criminology department. “Through these lesson plans, we aim to build both empathy and a factual understanding of homelessness, while engaging students in civic dialogue and supporting critical thinking on complex social issues.”

The lesson plans are designed to complement existing secondary school curricula, allowing teachers to integrate content into courses in civics and citizenship, politics, sociology, law, economics and English.

To create these educational resources, Dej and project co-lead Carrie Sanders, Criminology professor and director of Laurier’s Centre for Research on Security Practices, have collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of homelessness and education researchers, community-engaged scholars, and experts with lived experience. The project was supported by a Connection Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

The learning materials are currently in their second round of piloting, with team members at Laurier, York University and the University of Guelph gathering feedback from secondary school students across Ontario. Today, students from Brantford’s Assumption College School are test-driving the materials at Laurier’s Brantford campus. When piloting is complete, more than 200 students will have engaged with the content.

Feedback from these sessions will inform the final iteration of the resources, which will be made available to secondary school teachers and the public through an online platform this summer.

The lesson plans build on Dej and Sanders’ work on an acclaimed 2024 documentary, Bridging Divides: Voices and Visions about Homelessness in Canada. The film explores homelessness through the diverse perspectives of five community members, including people with lived experience of homelessness and housing precarity, a law enforcement officer, a business owner, and a service provider.

“The response we kept getting at community screenings of the documentary was, ‘You’ve got to keep showing this — what's next?’” said Dej. “Incorporating the documentary into lesson plans that support secondary school learning outcomes was a natural next step.”