Faculty and Staff Profile
Nick van Orden
Drawn particularly to English and History after his courses at NIC, Nick transferred to the University of Victoria where he spent four years completing a Bachelor of Arts, with a double major in English (Honours) and History.
His first teaching experience came in Taiwan after finishing the BA in 2007. Teaching English for a year at a small English school in Kaohsiung (southern Taiwan) put him in front of students aged three to thirteen and was a crash course in classroom management, student engagement, and not knowing the answer.
UVic pulled Nick back from Taiwan after a year: the English department’s Masters beckoning with its commitment to pedagogical training and its affiliation with the Cultural Social and Political Thought program. Two years in CSPT, including a two-hour defense of his Masters thesis, and then, sadly, farewell to the sunny shores of Victoria and on to the ragged frozen wasteland of… Edmonton.
After five years in the University of Alberta's English PhD program (unfinished...), Nick and his family returned to Vancouver Island: home at last.
Since 2015 Nick has taught a wide-range of courses in the NIC English department--from technical writing and business communication to narrative theory and Indigenous literature.