Beresford is a former vice-president and president of the Manitoba Teachers' Federation. Her parents met at a Young Communist meeting in Britain during World War II, and she was raised in a culture of socialism and union activism ("Winnipeg Free Press", 25 June 1998). She has taught high-school English in the Manitoba system at Notre Dame de Lourdes ("Winnipeg Free Press", 4 December 1993), and was a frequent critic of the Progressive Conservative government of Manitoba's education policies in the 1990s. In 1998, she dismissed charter schools as an "imported education fad" that fails to address the problem of funding ("Winnipeg Free Press", 21 April 1998).