Dr. Dirk J. Rodricks (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor (Research Stream) with the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at OISE/University of Toronto. He completed his Ph.D. in Critical Studies in Curriculum and Pedagogy under the supervision of Distinguished Professor, Dr. Kathleen Gallagher, and began teaching at OISE in 2021 as a Sessional Instructor (2021-2022), while pursuing his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto Scarborough through the Flourish Research Collective under the supervision of Dr. Andrea Charise. Thereafter, he transitioned to a teaching stream appointment in 2022.  

Dr. Rodricks examines how minoritized communities generate knowledge about wellness and collective thriving through creative practices, mutual care networks, and self-determined infrastructures across formal and nonformal sites of learning. His research program uses critical pedagogies of social wellness to investigate how communities create conditions for their own flourishing—working with youth and young adults navigating multiply minoritized identities in schools, universities, community organizations, and cultural spaces. His award-winning scholarship operates through three interconnected dimensions: critical literacies of wellness examine how communities develop sophisticated ways of knowing; creative pedagogies for embodied learning analyze how arts-based and participatory methods enable intergenerational knowledge transmission; and infrastructures for collective flourishing interrogate how institutional structures in educational and community settings enable or constrain self-determination.

Dr. Rodricks brings two decades of student affairs administrative leadership (2004-2024) across four institutions: Northeastern University, University of Vermont, University of Toronto, and York University. Most recently, he served as Director of Student Engagement at York University (2021-2024), and prior to that appointment as Assistant Dean, Residence Life at New College, University of Toronto (2018-2021). His administrative leadership advancing equity and inclusion was recognized with NASPA's Gender and Sexuality Knowledge Community Intersectional Inclusion Award (2021).