Archive for academia
Teaching
This week I start my twenty-first year of teaching at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Artificial Intelligence technology like ChatGPT has required that I prepare a layer of adaptations to my curriculum this semester. It will be a new experience and perhaps a fun one.
I started university teaching forty years ago, at Stanford – as a graduate student TA in Larry Friedlander‘s famous Shakespeare class. Heavenly bliss (and no personal computers, let alone no internet). I went on to create and teach my own classes there.
Before Kwantlen and after my initial Stanford years, I had taken a couple of lengthy breaks from teaching but stayed in the same mental neighbourhood (writing, editing, mentoring, and publishing). I have always known what I wanted to do.
Arley
My Kwantlen colleague Arley McNeney was a visionary who welcomed all manner of detail with a humbling level of attentiveness and who accepted everybody, and she made the people around her better. Such a strong good spirit.
Almost all of our interactions were via correspondence or social media, though I finally met her at The Commodore in Vancouver back in 2019. She was there for the headlining Mountain Goats, me for Lydia Loveless, who opened for them.
From our school’s announcement:
It is with profound sadness and a deep sense of loss that we share the passing of our friend and colleague, KPU instructor, Arley McNeney (Cruthers). Arley was a mother, a sister, a daughter, and a friend. She was a highly respected instructor and beloved colleague to those who were fortunate to collaborate and work alongside her. She was a decorated Paralympian and parasport athlete, a talented writer and novelist, an unending builder of community, an advocate for inclusion and disability justice, and a creative linocut artist.
Arley instructed business communications, public relations, and entrepreneurial leadership at KPU. However, her journey into becoming an educator was winding: in 2001 she joined the Canada women’s national wheelchair basketball team and won gold at the Wheelchair Basketball World Championship the next year. She was the recipient of BC’s Premier Athletic Award for New Westminster and in 2004, she was named to Team Canada’s national wheelchair basketball team to compete at the 2004 Summer Paralympics where she helped the team win bronze. In 2006, Arley was named to Team Canada for the 2006 Wheelchair Basketball World Championship. In 2014, Arley received the BC Wheelchair Basketball Society’s Coach of the Year award.
Not only was Arley a successful athlete and coach, she was a former communications/marketing/PR professional for parasports, the founder of an adaptive soccer team that uses disability justice principles, and the author of four novels. Arley’s first novel was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Foundation. She attended the University of Victory and earned an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Arley was an innovative leader in open education, Open Educational Resources (“OERs”), and open pedagogy. In 2019, Arley presented an open-licensed game developed by her applied communication students that focused on instructors developing compassion and empathy for students struggling with (unaffordable) textbook costs and the role OERs can play in supporting students’ well-being and success. Arley’s work was pivotal in the open education movement and the continued work in the area of Zero Textbook Costs (“ZTCs”). That same year, Arley was awarded for Excellence in Open Education by BC Campus.
In addition to being widely recognized as an advocate in the areas of open education, Arley was a tireless scholar and advocate in the areas of decolonization, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), anti-racism and anti-oppression, and disability justice. She collaborated with colleagues across KPU through her work as an Open Education Teaching Fellow, decolonization and Indigenization faculty champion, and disability justice activist. She was an early leader and mentor in developing Open Educational Resources at KPU, and published Business Writing for Everyone in 2019, an inclusive guide to writing in the workplace that has since been adopted, adapted, and remixed by KPU faculty and countless educators around the world. She was regularly consulted on questions of accessibility and UDL in course design and program review, and her expertise and the generosity with which she shared it, are irreplaceable. In recognition of her contributions to supporting social justice, in 2021, Arley was an inaugural recipient of KPU’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion awards.
Arley’s focus on supporting students in all aspects of their lives from UDL to food security was unparalleled, and her supportive, non-judgemental, and student-centred approach to teaching and focus on student success, has inspired us to do our best in our work at KPU.
Arley sought to truly understand and engage her students, co-creating empowering learning opportunities with them each semester, and often bringing food to share in the classroom. She was incredibly generous with her time and energy, supporting students and colleagues alike, and sharing her expertise and teaching resources freely.Arley’s legacy is immeasurably rich and will continue through the inspired work of her friends and colleagues, and the thousands of students she taught. Her work and contributions embody the highest values of our university’s motto, and are something we should all aspire to: “through tireless effort, knowledge and understanding.”
The outpouring of emotion and admiration on Twitter has been really something. I am at a loss for words, mostly, or at least for the adequate ones. My colleagues have helped me out in that respect. Melissa Ashman’s thread is close to perfect:
The Brooklyn College Cancer Center gets $2.6 million grant
My sister, Professor Jenny Basil (in red), is the Associate Director of Community Outreach for this terrific and growing initiative.
The Brooklyn College Cancer Center, BCCC-CURE, will be training, building, and supporting its network for the next generation of diverse cancer researchers thanks to a $2.6 million grant from the American Cancer Society.
Specifically, the Diversity in Cancer Research Institutional Development Grant (DICR IDG) titled “Supporting Cancer Research at Brooklyn College Cancer Center, a Highly Diverse Institution,” will support early career cancer researchers through $2.6 million over four years. The funding will go toward four areas: pilot grants for faculty who are in the early years of their tenure track; support for clinical scientists’ research and training; and offerings of two postdoctoral fellowships and six master’s scholarships over the length of the grant program.
Other funding earmarked for the center itself will support the mentoring of junior faculty, clinician scientists, and other early career scientists, travel to conferences for BCCC-CURE researchers, plus trainings and seminars on different areas of cancer research. It will also support the launch of the BCCC-CURE Molecular Modeling Laboratory for Cancer Therapeutics lead by Dr. Emilio Gallicchio, professor of chemistry at Brooklyn College and Dr. Shaneen Singh, professor of biology at the college.
“This grant constitutes a unique opportunity for Brooklyn College and the Brooklyn College Cancer Center to support cancer research activities, most specifically for early career scientists in a moment when we are hiring assistant professors,” said Maria Contel, director and research area leader of BCCC-CURE. “The money will support principal investigators and their research groups and allow us to train new experts in the field of cancer research. The support included in this grant for clinician scientists is key, as we will be able to recruit and collaborate with clinician scientists in research areas like cancer disparities, clinical translation of drugs, or cancer immunology.”
It’s a sweet gig!
Applications for two full-time regular faculty positions in my department – Applied Communications – are being accepted until February 10. If you know of anyone who might be interested, please encourage them to apply. This is the link to the job posting. Kwantlen Polytechnic University is a fine place to work.
Grandsons and brothers
With my partner I’ve endowed a student scholarship at my workplace, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, “The Luke Melvin Basil and Colby Joseph Basil Health Sciences Student Award,” to honour my miracle genius grandsons, their parents (both in the health sciences), and their great-grandparents who were so generous to those seeking postsecondary education. The $1,000 student award will be presented each year to a student in KPU’s Health Sciences (Honours) Program whose project thesis is audacious and advanced. This is the third endowed award I’ve supported at Kwantlen.
Workers Vanguard
My favourite Trotskyists are back with a new issue of The Spartacist. I was afraid that the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), which publishes that periodical as well as the newspaper Workers Vanguard, had ceased operations. No doubt its leadership is getting old; indeed, this issue of The Spartacist has three obituaries of former leading members.
I value these publications for their erudite, brilliantly written propaganda (their word), which has come in handy for me any number of times. I met a couple of their editors back at Stanford University in the mid-nineties, and featured an issue from their Women and Revolution series in my “Writing and the Bill of Rights” classes there.
I hope a younger generation of true Marxist-Leninists takes up the banner. I will miss this voice terribly otherwise.
The evolution of intelligence
My sister Jenny Basil, a brilliant biologist headquartered at the City University of New York (Brooklyn College), makes a spirited appearance in this piece in bioGraphic (by Kate Evans, with photographs and video by Dave Abbott and others):
What would be lost, if we lost the nautilus? Not just beauty, but brains, too. In the past, some marine biologists have dismissed nautiluses as “dumb snails,” the least intelligent of the cephalopods. The suggestion greatly offends Basil, who has studied chambered nautiluses in her Brooklyn lab for more than 25 years. Her hair is a color her students call “nautilus auburn,” and she has nothing but enthusiasm for her subjects. She and her doctoral students call them “the kids,” and Basil says looking after them is like parenting a gang of troublesome 12-year-olds: “‘I’m gonna go out the outlet pipe. I’m gonna fight for some shrimp even though I have some.’ They’re always trying to injure themselves.”
Basil studies animal brains and behavior—hamsters, jays, chickadees, lobsters—but she finds nautiluses particularly compelling because they can help answer questions about the evolution of intelligence. As a group, cephalopods have the most grey matter of any invertebrate on Earth, Basil says—“big, fat, sassy brains” that evolved hundreds of millions of years before the vertebrate brain. But while octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid live fast and die young after laying a thousand eggs, nautiluses don’t mate until they are at least 10 years old, then lay a handful of eggs that take a year to hatch. “They are solving problems in a different way with a different brain.”
Basil’s early studies showed that nautiluses have superior powers of smell—they are able to detect very low concentrations of odors at distances of more than 10 meters, and move toward the source with great accuracy by comparing minute differences in the intensity of the odor reaching the receptors on each side of their body. In other words, they smell in stereo—an adaptation requiring complex sensory processing, and a surprise in such an ancient animal.
Their eyesight isn’t bad, either. In another experiment, Basil and doctoral student Robyn Crook strapped each nautilus into a harness—dubbed the “nautilus car seat”—and exposed them to a flash of blue light, giving the animals some food immediately afterward. Just like Pavlov’s dog, the nautiluses learned to respond and continued to do so hours later, proving they have both short-term and long-term memory.
The whole piece is utterly engrossing.
Solidarity
Kwantlen Polytechnic University president Alan Davis sent out this message to faculty and staff today:
KPU is honouring the lost Indigenous children and survivors of residential schools by participating in Lighting the Country Orange from September 27 to October 1. The orange lighting displays are featured at KPU’s Surrey and Langley campuses every evening this week. You can see pictures of the lighting display on the KPU News Flickr channel. My thanks to Facilities Services for making this happen.
Lighting our Langley and Surrey campuses orange is a display of solidarity with Indigenous communities. But on the first national day for Truth and Reconciliation it is important for those of us who are uninvited settlers in this land to do more than simply acknowledge the profound loss of life and culture and ways of being as a result of colonization. We must take time to listen, read, and learn in partnership with Indigenous peoples to figure out what actions are needed for true justice to be served and for true healing to begin.
Indigenous Services at KPU has compiled the following selected list of virtual and in-person events on September 30 recognizing the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation:
• Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc calls on people worldwide to drum simultaneously for the missing children of Indian Residential Schools at 2:15pm PT. Learn the Secwepemc Honour Song and join Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc Drum for the Children.
• Squamish Stories with Kung Jaadee – 8-8:45am PT (virtual)
In this live storytelling performance, Kung Jaadee will share her telling of Squamish legends popularized by Indigenous activist and poet E. Pauline Johnson’s book, Legends of Vancouver. The legends she’ll share may include Siwash Rock; the Two-headed Sea Serpent; Two Sisters (The Lions mountains); and how the Squamish People Came to Be.
• XWEÝENE:MSTA:M ?ƏKWƏSQWEL, SEÝEḾ – Vancouver Art Gallery, Noon PT (in-person)
Co-created by Tsatsu Stalqayu, Mortal Coil and Butterflies in Spirit, Xweýene:msta:m ?əkwəsqwel, seýeḿ (translation: call to witness / listen to respected one) is a performance to honour Orange Shirt Day.
• Skookum Surrey National Day for Truth & Reconciliation – Holland Park, near the fountain, 2-4pm PT (in-person)
An afternoon of stories, tea, bannock and drumming will be held rain or shine. Wearing orange shirts and bringing drums is encouraged.
• Beyond Orange Shirt Day – National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, 10:30am CT (virtual)
Survivor Phyllis Webstad speaks live on the NCTR Youtube page.
• Reconciliation and Me – APTN, 11am ET CT MT (broadcast)
Sarain Fox leads a meaningful conversation on truth and reconciliation with five youth allies.
• Walk for Reconciliation – Grand Chief Bernard Charles Memorial Plaza, White Rock, 1-2:30pm PT
The Semiahmoo First Nation is hosting ‘Walk for Reconciliation’ on Thursday, September 30th 2021 for Truth and Reconciliation Day to honour the lost children and Survivors of residential schools, their families and communities.
Salut, Kwantlen!
My university‘s beer-brewing program gets another accolade. From the Aldergrove Star:
Student brewers at Langley’s Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) campus have tied for second place overall in the top brewing schools in North America. KPU also won one gold, two silver and one bronze medal in the 2021 U.S. Open College Beer Championship (USOCBC) this month.
Competing against 11 other colleges and universities from Canada and the United States, KPU won gold in the American Amber/Red Ale category for Birra Rossa, brewed by then first-year students Michael Hodgson, Peter Bartnik, and Donghwan Chang.
The two silver medals were awarded for KPU’s Noble Steed Coconut Porter brewed by second-year students and now graduates Emily Comeau, Rebecca Deil, and Alex Paul in the Hybrids Coconut category; and for the Pale Ale in the American Strong Pale Ale category brewed by then first-year students Jacob Wideman, Colton Yakabuski, and Donghwan Chang. KPU won bronze for the Helles Lager brewed by Kayla Gibson, Wakana Sakurai, Philip Chrinko, and Kevin Reid during their first year of study. …
Alex Paul, a recent KPU brewing grad now working at Mariner Brewing in Coquitlam said their team was “blown away” to win a medal for their signature recipe beer, Noble Steed. “This was our capstone brewing project, so Rebecca, Emily and I were fully responsible for creating the recipe, brewing, analysis, and quality control, as well as being involved with marketing and sales of our beer,” says Paul. “It’s so cool that it won an award and we really appreciate all the amazing support of our instructors to help us get to where we are.”
Fall semester!
Classes at Kwantlen Polytechnic University start this week. One of my three courses was going to be face to face. Unaccountably, though, the province required that students be vaccinated to enter any room on campus EXCEPT the classrooms, so I moved that class to an online platform for everybody’s peace of mind and safety (the administration gave a green light to all faculty for that). I was truly hoping to step into a classroom again. (I am a lot funnier in person – I try to graft Johnny Carson onto Professor Kingsfield while talking about not necessarily enchanting topics.)
At any rate, I’m looking forward to meeting my new students in our online environment. I am very grateful I have this blessed gig.
7 Sept. – New guidance from my university today: “Individuals can remove their masks while actively consuming food or drink when seated in classrooms.” Pot luck time!
Somehow I missed this
My fine university has an O.R.G.A.S.M. lab. (It’s a clever acronym for Observations and Research in Gender and Sexuality Matters.) Its director and principal investigator, Cory Pedersen, is a really sharp person and a beloved professor and mentor. Here’s a short article published today describing research the lab did on inferences people make regarding body shape and sexual traits.
My sister Jenny’s new project
My sister Jenny has been busy. The Brooklyn College Cancer Center “has a mission to enhance the lives of cancer patients through research, education & community outreach with a focus on Brooklyn residents.” Here’s the Center’s Facebook page.
No ICE
Several former students of mine work (or have worked) for Vancouver-based Hootsuite. I’ve used Hootsuite Academy materials in my digital-marketing classes at Kwantlen. So I’m very glad the company has terminated its contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I imagine social-media managers around the globe would have dropped the platform otherwise – and that some of my students might have abandoned ship as well.
Feedback
A theme in all my orientation classes is the primacy of feedback in communication: how you give it, how you receive it.
When you gratefully welcome feedback into your life from colleagues, you grow as a professional, because you learn. When you usefully provide feedback to your colleagues, they get better as professionals, because they learn.
That’s why defensiveness and unfriendliness are killers when it comes to the work of communication.
A short while ago a friend forwarded me a short memoir written by Phil Mott, a mutual friend from our university years four decades ago. It covers this theme:
My girlfriend encouraged me to write and set me up with the Prodigal Sun editor [Bob Basil], the entertainment section of the paper. He assigned me a rather harmless assignment of reviewing the movie American Gigolo. I wrote the review and sat down with one of the editors to review the article. Bob was a kind-eyed soul with a talent for writing and an affection for the spirit of Jack Kerouac. His stories took him on wild trips riding rails and visiting the less fortunate of the world. He sat next to me with a red pen and wrote more in red than I had double-spaced typed. I was crestfallen. He wrecked me in ten minutes and crushed any dream that I ever had of writing anything but a to-do list ever again. He then looked up at me with a smile and told me “looks pretty good. I like it. You made some nice observations”. His support was greatly appreciated and kept me from jumping out of a window. He passed the review on to the copy department, red marks and all, and, just like that, I was a writer.
In giving me permission to reprint this passage, Phil wrote, “I would love it if my addled brain remembrance is of some use. Take it as a grand compliment that your advice stuck with me all of these years. It helped me give feedback to my own college students.”
Summer Semester
I meet three groups of new students starting on Monday – a third-year class and two first-years. They are all online, “distant learning” endeavours. I’ve done a bunch of online courses in the past – it took me a couple of semesters before they were truly “robust” – so I am not climbing the learning curve the way some of my colleagues are.
That said, everything is nonetheless different for *all* of us, and in my interactions with my new students – as well as with my old colleagues – I am trying to focus on being extra-courteous to everyone.
Some help for Kwantlen students during the pandemic
A message from my university:
The Kwantlen Student Association [KSA] has donated $100,000 in emergency funding for students at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. To match this generous gift, KPU will also donate $100,000.
“The KSA always strives to represent its students, and we hope that with this donation, we can give students financial assistance to reduce financial hardships they might face due to COVID-19,” says David Piraquive, president of the KSA.
The funds will be available from March 30 to any student registered for the Spring 2020 term. Students are eligible for up to $250.
“During these unprecedented times, many people will face financial hardships and this includes KPU students. We are deeply grateful to the KSA for this generous gift, and we are proud to partner with them in this effort by matching their donation. Our collective efforts will help our students financially as they try to navigate the current situation,” says Dr. Alan Davis, president and vice-chancellor of KPU.
For students who require more emergency funding, there are other grants and bursaries available to students who meet specific criteria. For more information about student financial aid and to apply, visit kpu.ca/awards.
Additional message tweeted me from KPU:
Students can begin applying March 30, closer to the end of day. There will be a form on http://kpu.ca/awards. For more information please contact the student aid office.
I’ve sent this out to all my current students directly – and posted the message here for my former students who follow basil.ca.
KDocs
Kwantlen Polytechnic University‘s Social Justice Film festival gets better every year. I’m very lucky the films will be shown just down the street from my home.
“Intimate supervision”: Surveillance on campus
This Washington Post report – holy crap:
Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health. …
Instead of GPS coordinates, the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’ movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data points per student every day.
School and company officials call location monitoring a powerful booster for student success: If they know more about where students are going, they argue, they can intervene before problems arise. But some schools go even further, using systems that calculate personalized “risk scores” based on factors such as whether the student is going to the library enough.
The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed.
cross-posted from nocontest.ca
h/t Clarissa
Can I get class credit for that?
My beloved province is home to so many financial ruses and scams.
This story amused me more than it should have.
Almost six months after the B.C. government asked post-secondary institutions to stop taking large cash payments for tuition, many [universities] have closed the loophole identified in Peter German’s report on money laundering. [German is a former high-ranking RCMP officer leading a province-wide investigation into money laundering and the gambling industry.]
Contained among the recommendations … was concern that B.C. universities and colleges could be vulnerable to money laundering.
The report included an example of a student who went to an unnamed college with a duffel bag containing $9,000 in cash and asked to deposit it.
“Peter German has advised that people are paying thousands of dollars in suspicious cash for multiple semesters in advance and then seeking refunds by cheque,” Attorney General David Eby said at a new conference in May. “Our post-secondary institutions must not be used to launder money, and we are asking them to review their policies to put a stop to it.”
Since then, many of B.C.’s public post-secondary institutions have moved to end the practice, including Thompson Rivers University and the University of the Fraser Valley. …
Several schools are still reviewing their policies. [My employer] Kwantlen Polytechnic University … still accepts cash but is “looking at the possibility of moving to a fully online payment model and recently adopted a new online payment method for international students.”
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