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Beyond the Blackboard Educational Consulting Founder and Executive Director Josée Lebel is a bilingual educator with over 15 years of educational programming experience in schools, science centres, and museums across Canada. She combines her classroom teacher experience with her informal learning expertise to provide organizations with unique insight as to the challenges and opportunities of developing educational programs in informal settings.
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Over the past decade, Creative Director Mariee Devereux has been combining professional teaching certification with her extensive performance background to create innovative, education-based workshops, school programs and public performances.  Mariee is a science-theatre specialist, environmental educator and her super power is writing nature raps. She graduated with a Bachelor of Education from the University of Victoria 2002 and holds a professional teaching certificate. 

After 10 years of educational programming in science centres, museums, and non-profit organizations across Canada, Josée Lebel decided to formalize her teaching passion by enrolling in the Bachelor of Education program in 2002. During her tenure as a Social Studies and Science teacher at Kitsilano Secondary School, she made three important discoveries:

• field trips/resources are not aimed at secondary students
• lack of French resources specific to B.C. doubles a French Immersion teacher's load
• informal learning opportunities, such as field trips, do not typically integrate well into the classroom

After leaving her teaching position, Josée decided to dedicate herself to bridging the gap between the formal classroom and the informal learning environment. Finding innovative ways to seamlessly integrate field trips by developing pre- and post-field trip activities for the classroom is key to bridging this gap. Advocating for the bilingual integration of workshops and resources as well as revving up secondary level programs are among Josée's passions.

Beyond the Blackboard strives to apply sustainable living principals in its day-to-day activities. We have set out the following objectives to achieve our goal:

1. Weave sustainability principals into our programs, across all subject areas.
2. Continually improve the greening of our business practices. Using post-consumer recycled paper, double-sided printing, communicating with clients electronically are small ways in which Beyond the Blackboard contributes to reducing its ecological footprint. We purchase carbon offsets for travel to conferences and use public transportation to meet with clients whenever possible.