Joan McArthur-Blair, Ph.D.

Co-President, Cockell McArthur-Blair Consulting 
Victoria, BC, Canada

Phone: 1-250-858-9435
Email:joan@cockellmcarthur-blair.com
Web:http://cockellmcarthur-blair.com

Joan McArthur-Blair, Co-President of Cockell McArthur-Blair Consulting is an inspirational writer, speaker and facilitator. After more than 25 years of institutionally based work as an educator, she has returned to her loves of consulting, writing, speaking and facilitating, and works with groups of all kinds to make a positive difference. Joan specializes in the use of Appreciative Inquiry to foster leadership, strategic planning and innovative strategies for organizational development. She also provides short term leadership through executive-to-go services.

Joan has fulfilled faculty, department head, dean, vice president and president roles over her career at four diverse Canadian Colleges – Selkirk College, Kwantlen College (now Kwantlen Polytechnic University), Vancouver Community College, Nova Scotia Community College. In her life as an educator from faculty to president she cared most deeply about learners, their access to higher education and their success when there. She sought to catalyze the kind of change and planning required to create excellence in higher education.

She has sat on and/or chaired community arts boards, Executive Leadership Institutes and boards related to education and sustainability. As well, she has worked around the world in India, Pakistan, Qatar, and the United States from her bases in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, Canada. She has been humbled by the recognition of her work, most recently with the awarding of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013.

Grounded in a life time of leading, she  co-authored with Jeanie Cockell Appreciative Inquiry in Higher Education: A Transformative Force, (2nd edition 2020) and Building Resilience with Appreciative Inquiry: A Leadership Journey through Hope, Despair, and Forgiveness (2018); and guest edited the International Journal of Appreciative Inquiry August 2012 issue

Joan has a BA in English from the University of Western Ontario, the British Columbia Instructor’s Diploma, a MEd from Simon Fraser University and an EdD from the University of British Columbia and is a Certified Appreciative Inquiry Facilitator Trainer.