Gallery of Human Migration Literary Award
2025 Honourable Mention
Awarded to the story
Where the king goes, the queen follows
Brenna Tomas
Total Reading Time: 11 minutes
I was born and raised in the city now called Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Although my early life was shaped in this small northern community, much of my adult life was spent in larger cities, where I lived and worked in both rural and urban contexts. Since the age of eighteen, I have worked on the frontlines in nursing homes, non-profits, and school boards, supporting vulnerable and diverse populations. These experiences, combined with my training as a recreation therapist, my role as a mother, and my practice as an artist, have shaped how I understand learning.
I have come to see learning as an experiential process that is deeply tied to identity, culture, and belonging. As a child, I struggled in conventional education systems that rewarded conformity and academic performance in narrow terms. Later, through modifying programs and developing interventions for others, I discovered ways to create alternative pathways for success—pathways that valued resilience, creativity, and lived experience. This journey has sparked my ongoing interest in inclusivity and diversity in experiential learning.
My history, my family’s story of migration, and my professional practice converge to form a central question: How can communities and institutions embrace experiential learning in ways that value difference rather than erase it?
David A. Kolb’s Toward an Applied Theory of Experiential Learning (1974) provides one of the most influential frameworks for thinking about how people learn. Kolb outlines a cycle of learning through experience: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. In this model, learning is not simply the acquisition of knowledge but an ongoing process where individuals integrate their experiences with reflection to generate new understandings. Kolb’s work builds upon social constructivist theorists such as John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky.
Dewey emphasized the importance of “learning by doing” (1963), challenging the rigid structures of formal education that separated thought from practice. Piaget focused on the structures of cognitive development, showing how individuals construct knowledge through interaction with their environment. Vygotsky, meanwhile, introduced the concept of the “zone of proximal development,” emphasizing the social and cultural dimensions of learning and the role of collaboration (Vilhjálmsson et al., 2009).
“Growth requires vulnerability, risk, and the discomfort of being unprotected. Similarly, my own experiences of culture shock represent moments of exposure that ultimately push me toward new understandings of self and community.”
Yet Dewey also warned of the danger of miseducative experiences—moments where experiences fail to contribute to growth, reinforcing narrow perspectives or harmful ideologies instead. This idea resonates deeply with my own experiences, both in school and in my community. As a child, I often found that conventional education did not validate the ways I processed knowledge. Later, as a professional, I encountered situations where learners from diverse backgrounds faced similar exclusion, their experiences dismissed as irrelevant to “real” education. These miseducative moments illustrate the importance of critically examining not only how people learn, but whose experiences are valued as learning.
While Kolb’s model provides a foundation, it requires expansion to address power, culture, and identity.
Postcolonial theorists have shown how educational systems often reproduce dominant Western and patriarchal hierarchies. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) highlighted how knowledge production has historically marginalized non-Western perspectives. Contemporary postcolonial educators such as Sandra Styres (2017), Eve Tuck (2012), and Gaztambide-Fernández (2012) have extended this critique, showing how curriculum often disregards Indigenous, immigrant, and hybrid experiences.
Building on these critiques, Richard Kearney and Melissa Fitzpatrick (2021) introduce the concept of radical hospitality. For them, education should not only transmit knowledge but also serve as an act of welcoming the other—engaging in “narrative hospitality” by listening to, hosting, and valuing diverse stories.
This idea connects directly with the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who in her TED Talk The Danger of a Single Story (2009), warns against reducing people to one narrative. To embrace experiential learning fully, communities and institutions must be hospitable to multiple stories, even when they complicate dominant cultural norms.
These frameworks resonate with my life and family history. Both my personal experiences of culture shock and my Nonna’s migration story illustrate how belonging is negotiated through difference. To practice radical hospitality, communities must make space for these complex narratives, rather than expecting conformity to a single, local identity. My family’s history of migration offers a concrete example of experiential learning across generations. In 1900, my great-grandfather Giacomo visited Canada from Italy to see his brother Vittorio in Sault Ste. Marie. During this trip, he encountered a friend who showed him a photograph of his wife and her sisters. From that moment, Giacomo became determined to meet and marry Giorgina, one of the women in the photograph.
He returned to Italy, found her, and declared his love. When questioned by her family about leaving home for Canada, Giorgina responded, “Where the King goes, the Queen follows.”
They married in 1913 and landed at Ellis Island in February 1914, bringing Giorgina’s sister and niece with them.
After settling temporarily in Campbellford, Ontario, they moved to Florida with only one thousand dollars. Life there was difficult, and they soon returned to Canada before relocating to Peterborough, where their daughter Anita—my Nonna—was born in 1917. Anita’s childhood was marked by constant movement: between Canada, Florida, and Italy. The devastating Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 drove the family back to Italy, where Anita remained until migrating independently to North America a decade later.
Upon arriving, Anita spent three months at Ellis Island before settling permanently in Sault Ste. Marie.
During the war, she worked shoveling pig iron at Algoma Steel and later as a waitress at the Adanac, where she met my grandfather, Leo. Together, they raised three children and established a home that became the center of family life. That same home, filled with the remnants of her life and the stories she shared, is where I now live with my own children. For Anita, migration and hardship were part of building a home. For me, however, the meaning of home has always been complicated. After years of living in diverse urban environments, returning to Sault Ste. Marie often feels like a kind of reverse culture shock. While the city provided stability for my family, its tightly-knit communities can also be resistant to diversity, prioritizing long-standing social norms over inclusivity.
As George Carlin once observed, “I love individuals. I hate groups of people who have a common purpose… cause pretty soon they have little hats.” His critique of conformity resonates with my experience of community life in a small northern city, where belonging is often conditional on fitting pre-existing molds.
My professional work, family history, and personal experiences converge on a central question: how can communities and institutions embrace experiential learning in ways that truly honor diverse experiences?
Dewey’s idea of miseducative experiences is useful here. Not every experience contributes to growth—some experiences reinforce exclusion, limit perspectives, or reproduce systemic barriers. For learners like myself, whose ways of knowing did not align with conventional measures of academic success, school often felt miseducative rather than transformative.
Yet discomfort and dislocation can also spark growth. I often describe this process through the metaphor of a lobster shedding its shell. When a lobster grows, it becomes uncomfortable in its shell, eventually shedding it and exposing itself to predators until a new, larger shell forms. Growth requires vulnerability, risk, and the discomfort of being unprotected. Similarly, my own experiences of culture shock, whether in leaving Sault Ste. Marie or returning to it, represent moments of exposure that ultimately push me toward new understandings of self and community.
By sharing my Nonna’s stories with my children, I emphasize that identity is formed not by erasing difficult experiences but by integrating them into a broader narrative of growth. Some experiences may feel miseducative in the moment, but in hindsight, they become stepping stones in the process of becoming. This is the essence of experiential learning: integrating lived experience, reflection, and cultural narratives to create meaning.
Experiential learning is not simply a cycle of doing and reflecting. It is a dynamic process shaped by culture, history, and identity. My journey as a mother, artist, recreation therapist, and student has shown me that inclusivity in learning requires more than providing opportunities—it requires radical hospitality. It requires communities and institutions to value multiple stories, even when they challenge traditional norms. My Nonna’s story of migration and endurance illustrates how home can be built and rebuilt through resilience. My own story of searching for belonging demonstrates how growth often involves discomfort and dislocation. Together, these narratives suggest that experiential learning is most powerful when it embraces complexity and difference, turning miseducative experiences into opportunities for reflection and transformation.
In both personal and professional practice, I have learned that the measure of success is not conformity to mainstream definitions but the ability to create meaning, foster belonging, and welcome diverse ways of knowing. If communities and institutions can embrace this vision, experiential learning can become a tool for inclusivity, justice, and authentic growth.