Faculty Spotlight: Nishan Perera
Nishan Perera is a regular faculty member of the KPU Marketing department, the Educational Consultant for Course Design and Assessment with the Teaching and Learning Common, and the former Chair of Marketing. For this edition of our Faculty Spotlight, Nishan shares his story with us.
Also known as “the Pearl of the Indian Ocean,” Sri Lanka is a country surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar, and the Palk Strait. The island nation boasts gently rolling hills, endless stretches of white sand, and flourishing rainforests.
And in Moratuwa – along the Galle Road artery, near the city centre of Colombo – lived a mango tree.
This mango tree grew in the back of Nishan Perera’s home. Dense foliage offered shelter and shade from blistering heat and emanated a unique musky aroma when in bloom. Nishan sought refuge under the tree during the roughest periods of his childhood.
“I had a little lamp there and had some plastic covers,” Nishan told us. “I used to study really, really hard at school, come back, and then hide in the mango tree.”
Born in Sri Lanka, Nishan grew up as the middle child of three to an artist father and a teacher mother. Nishan painted a childhood with happy memories: the first ten years of his life was filled with stark memories of playing in the powdery-sand beaches with his family, and despite having no prior formal education, Nishan learned that he had been accepted into a highly prestigious private school after scoring excellently in a competency test in fifth grade.
That, Nishan explained to us, was the first of a series of events that forever changed his life.
As a young boy, Nishan had grown up wracked by the unyielding tide of poverty. He spoke candidly of hardships and struggle while growing up:
“The only way to break your cycle of poverty is education,” Nishan said. “So, at that point, my mom and dad asked me to make a promise: that I would never stop until I reached the highest level of education in my life.”
At the age of 11, Nishan was too young to understand the enormity of this promise, nor of the passion it would entail.
In the same year, however, tragedy hit: Nishan’s father passed away.
“I vividly remember that promise, which actually directed my whole life into what I’ve achieved today. And that same year, the saddest event took place in my life,” said Nishan, about his father’s sudden passing. “My dad was the primary income earner until that point, and all of a sudden we became exceptionally poor. We did not have food to eat. My mum was scrambling, so she used to give her food to us.”
He detailed a period of immense emotional struggle after his father’s death; the mourning and grief, his mother’s sacrifices for her children, an older brother who grew abusive, and the sharp swing into frightening financial struggles. At school, he faced isolation amidst peers who were born into privilege and battled with lapsing self-confidence.
During this transformative period, there were only three things during this time that provided comfort and refuge for Nishan: his education, his Faith, and the mango tree at the back of his home.
In an act of love and grief – for himself, for his father, for his family – Nishan took to studying with an assiduity that speaks only of his determination and resilience.
“I was the only student in the history of my school to get all A’s in all areas for the 10th and 12th grade ordinary and advanced-level national government exams.” Nishan looked contemplative. “Not because I was intelligent or super bright. It was sheer hard work.”
Hard work that showed results: the impact on his self-confidence was phenomenal. It felt like a promise that was starting to come true, and Nishan’s life continued to change from that point forward.
It coalesced by the time he graduated and jumped into a part-time job selling food samples at a market. Like most students in Sri Lanka, despite his high achievements in school, only the top five percentile of students could attend university right after graduation – a timeline that was further protracted due to an ongoing war.
If it weren’t for this part-time job, though, Nishan wouldn’t have landed an internship after a fateful conversation with the CEO of Richard Pieris & Company PLC. Charmed by Nishan’s enthusiasm, he offered Nishan an internship on the spot. Nishan would later continue to work part-time with him even after entering university.
University wasn’t what Nishan expected. Citing a lack of compassion from instructors and disappointed by pure theory with no material application, Nishan dropped out. Instead, he turned towards a postgraduate diploma program at a local university. It was laddered in from a correspondence course he had taken years prior with The Chartered Institute of Marketing.
“I had no idea what Marketing was,” Nishan says with a laugh. “Like many of our students, I was [blindly] bumping into this type of discipline.”
Luckily for Nishan, Marketing turned out to be the right fit. He completed his education in Sri Lanka with his MBA in Marketing.
Nishan moved to Vancouver, Canada on September 2007.
In Sri Lanka, there were no opportunities to obtain your PhD. With the promise he made to his father still lingering in his mind, he asked his wife for support in fulfilling his dream – and received it wholeheartedly. They sold everything that they had, packed their whole lives and their worth in Sri Lanka into four suitcases, and entered Canada as economic migrants in 2007.
It was difficult. Nishan applied to more than 100 different jobs, and was rejected from every single one of them. Despite his prolific work experiences and his education, he didn’t have “any Canadian experience.” In a system built on settler-colonialism, Nishan faced a country that dismissed and invalidated the decade’s worth of expertise he brought forth.
Instead, Nishan worked night shifts at Walmart. It was the only place that would hire him. He lasted a week, worn down by the exhausting hours and shiftwork and compounded with a deep sense of unbelonging in Canada, before he quit.
And yet, Nishan persisted. He sought out community in Canada and made friends through Church. His roots grew here, and so did his kinships. One such friend that he had met through Church was an instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University at the time.
It was also this friend who advised him of a job opening on the KPU Langley campus.
He was hired. Nishan was the only candidate of colour who succeeded, a reality that both terrified and intimidated Nishan. Navigating the intricacies of identity and the liminality of belonging on Canadian soil, as well as the purgatorial landscape as an immigrant, had been a minefield – both in his personal and his professional life.
“But Kwantlen did not ask me for Canadian experiences,” Nishan said. For the first time since settling in Canada, Nishan could forge his own category for where he belonged and how it was occupied – rather than be categorized by others.
This next stage in his journey began at KPU, but from there, he only grew further. Nishan completed the Provincial Instructor Diploma Program (PIDP) to improve his teaching practices within the Canadian post-secondary education environment, and he spent yet another two years completing his second Master’s degree in Education for entry into a PhD program.
In the fall of 2016, Nishan’s hard work came to fruition: he graduated with a doctorate. Three decades of dreaming and six years of rigour was realized at long last. Nishan’s graduation was witnessed by his wife, his two sons, his younger sister, and thanks to live-streaming, an audience back in Sri Lanka.
When asked about his teaching philosophy, Nishan told me that he likes to teach students and not courses.
“When you teach a course, the student becomes a statistic,” Nishan explained further. “But when you teach a person, that creates a different level of commitment, engagement, compassion, and care since you are now moulding a young mind to be a successful global citizen.”
This year marks his 15th anniversary with Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
For the past two years, Nishan joined the Teaching and Learning Commons as an Educational Consultant.
“Working in Teaching and Learning has been my dream ever since I completed my doctoral studies. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” Nishan shared with us.
He described the experience as a faculty member as being a “frog in a well,” where he was shrouded and enclosed from others in the community. His work as an Educational Consultant is to free said frog, break down those walls, and to foster a sense of collective wisdom among faculty colleagues.
To Nishan, this is how the greatest learning happens: when you interact with one another, engage with them, learn how they design and teach courses, and to be able to advise and support them.
“We don’t work in isolation. We are a community,” added Nishan. “As much as you talk to a consultant for advice, you are also sharing your pedagogy and your expertise with others. I think this collective wisdom will be useful for our collective growth at the end of the day.”
Nishan’s pedagogical approach is borne from a constructivist and social constructivist approach to teaching and learning. Rather than positioning himself as a disseminator of knowledge, the instructor instead plays the role of a facilitator. As a facilitator, Nishan strives to create the right environment for students to learn through discovery and the co-creation of knowledge in collaboration with their peers, the instructor, and the content.
The more Nishan grew, the more homes he made for himself, and these are homes that he now shares with the friends, family, students, and peers he has encountered along his journey. And in this home, Nishan shares a story about resisting categorization and of enduring hope. He speaks of fatigue and exhaustion, of being broken down and yet flourishing despite it all. His struggles didn’t evaporate overnight, nor did they ever fully end.
“It has been a hard-fought battle. Even today, I still struggle,” said Nishan.
Throughout the conversation, I am reminded of the mango tree that sheltered Nishan during his youth. Nishan’s journey shared poetic resemblance; in growing in deep soil and laying down roots, in anchoring oneself down, and in blossoming. From a seedling, Nishan has nurtured himself into someone incredible.
