Heather Cardin holds degrees in Arts and Education from the University of Saskatchewan and a Master’s degree in English from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. She has published three books and has another forthcoming. She and her husband Bernie have settled in rural Saskatchewan, Canada after living for lengthy periods in British Columbia and Quebec. Their three children are now grown up.

First I’d like to thank you for agreeing to give this interview. Congratulations on the recent publication of Mind, Heart, & Spirit: Educators Speak, an interesting read. Let me start by asking what was the motivation to write this book?

Heather:  You are more than welcome. Thank you for asking me! Honestly, for the book, I thought that in many societies, I hear teachers being blamed for a lot of the problems of the world, or the children’s problems, and my experience with working in several schools was that most of the teachers I knew were completely committed to excellence in their work.  So I thought that to showcase some of that work would perhaps help the people who read the stories to see what excellent work most teachers were doing, often in very challenging conditions, and to counteract some of the teacher blame.