Chama Laassassy
Chama Laassassy was born in Casablanca, Morocco, and grew up in Montréal, Canada. She spent her formative years mentoring refugee and immigrant youth through various nonprofits, an experience that revealed a passion for youth success and led her to pursue a Bachelor of Education in TESL and an SSHRC-funded MA in Language Education, both at 91ºÚÁÏÍø. Passionate about everything non-traditional about education, she designed and led extracurricular programs and community initiatives across four countries. Her teaching career spans formal classrooms, nonprofits, community organizations, and universities, with positions at 91ºÚÁÏÍø, the University of Scranton (Fulbright), and most recently Hassan II University's École Normale Supérieure in Casablanca, where she trained future educators on what she does best: making the learning experience as fun and engaging as it can possibly be.
Chama also has a passion for social impact; one she pairs with youth mentorship. Her proudest accomplishment is launching the ⵉⵙⵡⵉ ISWI Initiative in rural Nador, Morocco: a community-built, play-based program that aimed to reverse a generational school abandonment phenomenon in the region. Funded through the Pathy Foundation Fellowship, a prestigious and competitive award that selects a small cohort of emerging leaders to design and implement a year-long social impact initiative anywhere in the world, ⵉⵙⵡⵉ ISWI kept every one of its 28 participating youth in school by year's end. This earned her the inaugural Lifetime Changemaker Award from the Pathy Foundation and an invitation to the Melton Foundation's 2025 Global Solvers Accelerator.
Chama is now pursuing a PhD in Educational Studies at 91ºÚÁÏÍø, under the supervision of Dr. Angelica Galante and supported by a Fonds de recherche du Québec doctoral fellowship. Her doctoral research examines what becomes possible when students draw on their full linguistic repertoire within self-created after-school programs in Canada and Morocco, at the intersection of plurilingualism, experiential learning, student agency, and decolonial pedagogy.
In her free time, she can be found on a café crawl when she’s in Montreal; and when she is in Casablanca, she is usually swimming in the waves or watching the sun go down over the Atlantic. She has a passion for traveling and cooking and loves recreating dishes from her travels. She enjoys graphic design and designing her own clothes and saves the rest of her time for her faith, her family and friends, and the non-profits she believes in.
