Maggie MacDonnell is the winner of the Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize 2017. She won from a field of over 20,000 applications from teachers in almost every country in the world. In this lecture she reflects on the challenges, opportunities and experiences of teaching in the Canadian Arctic.

For the last six years Maggie has been a teacher in a fly-in Inuit village called Salluit, home to the second northernmost Inuit community in Quebec, with a population of just over 1,300. It cannot be reached by road, only by air. In winter temperatures are minus 25C. Due to the harsh conditions, there are very high rates of teacher turnover which is a significant barrier to education in the Arctic. In areas of high deprivation, isolation and limited resources, teenagers often turn to drinking and smoking, even drugs and self-harm, as forms of escape and release. Maggie’s whole approach has been about turning students from “problems” to “solutions”.