Brent Saccucci

Brent is passionate teacher who believes wholeheartedly in the transformative power of education for a better social world. Crucial to this belief is developing classrooms that center on belonging, care, and relationality. Brent has taught students from elementary to graduate school, and is now a faculty member in the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge. At ULethbridge, he teaches education students in the social contexts of education, literacy, and leading change in schools. In 2025-26, Brent created the Leading Social Change in Schools Cohort, the first of its kind at the University of Lethbridge – equipping new teachers with leadership skills to enact social change in their schools and communities across southern Alberta.

Brent holds a BEd and MEd from University of Alberta, an MA in Curriculum & Pedagogy from OISE/University of Toronto and is currently a doctoral candidate in Social Justice Education at Western University. Before coming to the University of Lethbridge, Brent taught social justice education and literacy education at the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta. In K-12, he has been a teacher in all divisions—elementary, middle, and high school. He has also worked as a school guidance counselor, literacy learning interventionist, and district-wide equity consultant. One of his career highlights was working as a literacy/ELA teacher and as an equity and belonging consultant with Lethbridge School Division.

Teaching and Research Interests

Brent sees his praxis as a braiding of research, teaching, and learning happening in relation to one another through constant overlaps, knots, and re-threading. Brent sees his classroom as a lab where all students (and himself) are simultaneously teachers/learners/researchers. Here, students get to try out pedagogical ideas, make mistakes and ‘mess up’, and are celebrated when failure happens – crucial ingredients to authentic (un)learning that’s necessary for real social change. 

As an educational scholar-practitioner, Brent’s main areas of expertise are in the related domains of: 

Educational & Social Foundations:

Belonging, psychological safety, and social change in education; Two-Spirit, queer, & trans belonging (particularly in rural, religious, and 'conservative' spaces); teacher-as-activist and praxis pedagogy; intersectional queer theory and queer pedagogy; controversy, contention, and ethics in education; critical social-emotional learning, student mental health and mad studies in education; affect theory and the cultural study of emotion in education, esp. confusion and discomfort in learning

Curriculum Studies, Literacy, & Transformative Learning:

Critical curriculum studies and the sociology of knowledge; marginalized and at-promise ('at-risk') learners; student-centred learning and democratic classroom culture; the ‘ungrading’ movement as a decolonial-wellness praxis; language arts curriculum and pedagogy and media literacies; the ranking and social values of ‘academic rigour’ and 'academic form' incl. creative multimodal literacies and research-creation in education.