Fiona Allan started her career nearly 30 years ago at the head of a college classroom.
These days, Allan is the head of all classes, in a sense. She’s NC’s newest vice-president, Academic, a role that will see her navigate an unprecedented transformation to post-secondary education brought on by the extraordinary circumstances of a global health pandemic.
Still, for all the challenges that implies, Allan is excited by what lies ahead for her and NC after a year of remote, online teaching and learning by faculty and students.
“I think it’s the most exciting time to be in this position,” Allan said. “The pivot to digital delivery had to be done suddenly, but our team pulled together and rose to the challenge. Now we have the opportunity to innovate and be strategic. It feels like a very open road, like a fresh start for the College.
Turn the clock back 30 years, though, and it was very much a new beginning for Allan, who’d just graduated with her teaching degree from Brock University.
Becoming part of a college executive team wasn’t on her professional radar. Instead, like most new university graduates, Allan took work where she could get it. That included a post as a part-time instructor at NC, teaching academic upgrading at the Wellandvale campus. When she wasn’t there, she could be found putting in part-time teaching hours with a local school board.
Allan just wanted to do good work, and it didn’t go unnoticed. She was eventually awarded for her tenacity with a full-time faculty position in NC’s fledgling International Department. She would teach English as a Second Language (ESL) and go on to serve as ESL program co-ordinator and chair of English Language programs.
Bringing NC to the World
Her connection to the International Department came with the opportunity to bring Niagara College to the world. Allan was tapped in 2008 to help establish the hospital office administration program and deliver language programming in Riyadh for NC’s new training endeavours in Saudi Arabia.
“That was a great experience because then Saudi Arabia was very different,” Allan recalled. “It was still very traditional there and a very different culture and it was great to go and live in that culture.”
That experience made her the ideal candidate to return to the Middle East for projects in 2016 and 2019 to build capacity for technical and vocational training for women. But in between, Allan proved herself for another job: as NC’s newly appointed director of Workforce Development.
The challenge at the time was to get Niagara’s economy — one of the hardest hit in all of Canada — to get off life support after the Great Recession of 2008, and the college had a significant role to play.
There was still a lot of a teaching, but those teachable moments were often her own as she connected with the greater Niagara community to determine what the labour market needed to pull the economy out of the doldrums.
Allan would use that information to implement the province’s Second Career program, a massive effort to retrain those who lost jobs in 2008 for new and more sustainable ways to make a living. She also helped the College carry on its entrepreneurship programming for business start-ups, an effort that launched 2,100 local enterprises.
“That was the stretch,” Allan recalled. “It was stepping away from the classroom, which I loved.”
Workforce Development was also an opportunity to leverage close connections with business and industry – the essence of applied education – to strengthen the college’s experiential learning.
“Business and industry are critical partners in our students’ success,” Allan said. “They provide students the opportunities for hands on experience and exposure to the workplace. Through our system of program advisory committees, they help us to ensure our programs are relevant and responsive to labour market needs.”
As Niagara region — and the rest of the world — moves into a period of economic recovery once the COVID-19 pandemic wanes, it’s Allan, as NC’s Vice-President of Academic, who will help the executive team position the College as a pivotal player in helping the economy rebound. That includes, once again, ensuring the college offers a strategic mix of programming that’s in lock step with the changing nature of the post-COVID labour market.
It’s a tall order, but Allan knows how to turn a post-secondary institution into a healer of lagging economies even if at one time, she pictured heading up a classroom, not an economic revival as a college VP.
Looking Ahead
Still, she’s grateful for the opportunities she’s had in her career and hopes to offer others the same prospects while in her post.
“That’s something I’m hoping to do in this role — to give back and to open doors for people and give them opportunities,” Allan said.
That includes navigating those immediate changes to education delivery, thrust upon Allan and the entire college faculty one year ago when the world was forced to shelter in place.
Allan sees a role for a significant online teaching and learning presence going forward. But as someone who once stood in front of a classroom full of students, she’s clear there will always be a place for the in-person learning that’s made NC the top-tier college it’s known to be.
“So much has been learned about teaching and learning online throughout the pandemic that we don’t want to lose as we move forward strategically with a transformative focus on how our students learn in the increasingly digital world,” Allan said. “We want to continue to build our capacity to deliver a quality learning experience for students both digitally and in our labs and classrooms.”
