Archive for education
“Orange Shirt Day” in Canada
My colleague Seema Ahluwalia of Kwantlen‘s Sociology department has given me permission to share this:
The Kwantlen Faculty Association (KFA) acknowledges the underlying title and inherent rights of self-determination of Indigenous peoples, and our presence as uninvited guests in the traditional and unceded territories of the xwmƏθkwəyə̓ m (Musqueam), qi̓ cə̓ y̓ (Katzie), SEYMONE (Semiahmoo), scə̓ waθən (Tsawwassen), qiqéyt (Qayqayt), and kwikwəƛə̓ m (Kwikwetlem); and qw̓ ɑ:nƛ̓ ə̓ n̓ (Kwantlen) Peoples.
The truth is we must learn from and alongside Indigenous Peoples in order to make things right.
September 30 was chosen as “Orange Shirt Day” by Indigenous people in 2013 to commemorate and honor the survivors of The Indian Residential School System (IRSS) and those who never returned home. At this time of year, over the course of more than 100 years, Indigenous children were forced to return to IRSS institutions where they were targeted for indoctrination and torture organized by the Canadian state to weaken and destroy Indigenous nations. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) recommended that the Canadian government establish a statutory holiday so that Canadians may never forget the history and ongoing legacy of the IRSS. September 30 is now also Canada’s National Day of Truth and Reconciliation.
In solidarity with Indigenous Peoples, we mourn the loss of the children who did not make it home and honor the courageous survivors and their allies who worked for decades to break the walls of silence and denial surrounding the IRSS. On this day of solemn reflection, we acknowledge that racism and religious persecution were used to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their territories, and that we must educate ourselves about the ongoing and current impacts of colonization and genocide on Indigenous peoples. We must do the urgent work of ending systemic racism by engaging in a meaningful process of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples that leads to decolonization.
Many Indigenous leaders have warned that “reconciliation” has stalled and advised that Indigenous perspectives must be employed to understand the critical issues impacting Indigenous peoples. Canadians must ask ourselves how we are holding our governments, associations, and ourselves accountable for the work that must be done and transform our talk into action.
On September 30, we encourage Canadians to learn, reflect, and act.
Here are some resources that you may find useful:
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: 94 Calls to Action
Calls to Action Accountability: A 2022 Status Update on Reconciliation
Semiahmoo First Nation 3rd Annual Walk for Truth & Reconciliation: Sept 30, 2023
National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation: Lunch and Learn Webinars, Sept 25 – 29
Sign CLC’s petition “Justice for First Nations’, Inuit, and Metis is Long Overdue”
BCFED Reconciliation Plan Framework
TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION: CUPE TAKING ACTION THROUGH COLLECTIVE BARGAINING
UFCW: Indigenous Rights and the Workplace Bargaining Guide
Support Services and Resources:
Indian Residential School Survivors’ Society: Toll-Free Line 1 800 721 0066
Indian Residential School Crisis Line: (604) 985-4464
Hope For Wellness: Toll-Free Line 1 (855) 242-3310
Metis Crisis Line: 1 (833) 638-4722
KUU-US Crisis Line: 1 800 588 8717
Tsow-Tun-Le Lum: 1 866 925 4419
Fall term …
… starts today at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I have 85 new students, and life is very good.
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:
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.
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.
Summer teaching
This weekend I will be fine-tuning teaching notes for next week’s classes.
At Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the summer term is starting. I’m teaching third-year courses: Technical Report Writing and Advanced Professional Communications. I’ve made a couple small changes in the curriculum to streamline my students’ efforts (I hope). This will be the first semester since spring 2020 I’ll be meeting students face-to-face in a classroom. I doubt my mask will conceal my real excitement. I am truly thrilled.
On Monday I will be visiting, via Skype, a classroom at Brooklyn College. The class: “Parapsychology: A Critical Examination” (PSYC 3585). I’ve been an invited guest to this class since 2017. I discuss what it was like to be part of organizations that promoted skeptical interpretations of paranormal and psychic phenomena back in the 1980s and 1990s. The students and I always have really wonderful back-and-forth discussions.
I am blessed to have my gig.
the teacher who taught me the beginning of everything
God knows how quickly I would have perished had I not been blessed by teachers of miracles. The teacher who truly started me on my way was Dr. Florence Prawer, my French teacher in secondary school and later my French and Spanish tutor as I prepared for graduate school. I learned last week, from my beloved friend B., that she recently passed away.
—
This is reposted from March 2016:
My friends and readers know that I spend a lot of time thinking about mental hygiene. This is a scary concept when you plumb it. Here’s why: You are the only one in charge of keeping your mind humming strong, and bad habits can be irreversible.
In the spirit of this month’s Easter season, here’s a story I wrote awhile ago of how one teacher sought to redeem an angry and lazy lad:
This Easter weekend I have been contemplating, uncharacteristically, a verse from the Bible, Ephesians 4:30: “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed until the day of redemption.” On this verse the 19th-century evangelist Charles Finney sermonized: “If the Spirit leave you, you will have no heart to offer prevailing prayer, and if you attempt to pray, you will find that your mouth is shut, and if opened it will only be opened to mock God. And you will find as a matter of fact, that instead of being benefited you are only hardened by engaging in prayer.”
That remark reminded me of Sidney Bechet’s autobiography, “Treat It Gentle.” To me, the “It” is one’s muse, the source of one’s creativity. In his book the great clarinetist/saxophonist writes, “Oh, I can be mean — I know that. But not to the music. That’s a thing you gotta trust. You gotta mean it, and you gotta treat it gentle. The music, it’s the road. There’s good things alongside it, and there’s miseries. You stop by the way and you can’t ever be sure what you’re going to find waiting. But the music itself, the road itself — there’s no stopping that. It goes on all the time. It’s the thing that brings you to everything else. You have to trust that. There’s no one ever came back who can’t tell you that.”
Bechet tells the story of Buddy Bolden, a brilliant trumpeter whose love of showmanship made his muse abandon him. “You take someone that’s grinning and stomping and moving around on the stand where the music should be going — for the moment you’re lost from the music, you’re so busy watching him fool around. But you get his same record and try to listen to the music then, and there’s no music there.”
I remember the day when I learned about not grieving the holy spirit, about treating it gentle.
I was in ninth grade, French class. We were going over our homework and my teacher, Dr. P., noticed that, in an exercise in which we were supposed to rewrite present-tense sentences as conditional sentences, I had changed the verbs only, using quotation marks to indicate the missing words. She took my assignment, explained what I had done to the rest of the class, ripped it up, and noted that being lazy was no way to get ahead in life.
After the bell rang and the rest of the class had left, I told Dr. P. that if she embarrassed me like that again, I would kill her.
Not surprisingly, I was yanked out of Art class the next period. There was my “guidance counselor” and Dr. P. — no disciplinary people like the Vice Principal, and no cops. She told me that, just this one time, she would speak to me in English, not wanting there to be any misunderstanding as to what she needed to say.
Dr. P. was very serious, but without any anger or even sternness. “Mr. Basil, you have a fine mind. Right now you do. And only you are in charge of what gets inside of it, how it runs, how it thinks. I’m not in charge. Your parents are not in charge. Your friends are not in charge. Just you. You’re the gatekeeper. Cutting corners is lazy. If you keep it up, it will become a bad habit. And then you will no longer notice that this is what you do habitually. And then … you will no longer have a fine mind.”
That was it. The meeting couldn’t have lasted more than three minutes. No reprimand, no letter in my file, no call to Mom and Dad. (God knows how much trouble a student would get into making such a threat — even an obviously empty one — today.)
Dr. P. had scared me, but not in the way I thought she was going to: I had never known until that moment in that small office that my mental hygiene was entirely in my care. Dr. P. had also spared me, answering my anger with grace … and with words I could understand.
Blessed is the true judge.
A man
This obituary in the Washington Post really struck me.
Just past 1 p.m. on Oct. 9, 1967, a young and trembling Bolivian army sergeant named Mario Terán pointed his M2 carbine from point-blank range at Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The long-hunted Latin American revolutionary, 39 years old and an international hero to Marxist guerrillas, had been captured by an army patrol the day before.
Guevara lay wounded and shackled on a filthy stone floor of a mud hut in the Bolivian town of La Higuera. He looked directly at his executioner and said, as Mr. Terán recounted years later: “Calm yourself. And aim well. You are going to kill a man!” …*
Although Mr. Terán rarely talked of the day he shot Guevara, Bolivian reporters who tracked him down years later quoted him as saying: “It was the worst moment of my life. I saw Ché large, very large. His eyes shone intensely. When he fixed his gaze on me, it made me dizzy.”
After the guerrilla told him to aim well, Mr. Terán said, he “took a step back towards the door, closed my eyes and fired.”
The presence of mind and the generosity of Guevara in these moments are startling.
—
I doubt I will want another man’s image in my own obituary. But there could be no other way here.
—
* Other sources phrase Guevara’s last words a different way: “I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man!” The phrase “Shoot, coward” seems like an addition provided posthumously, as does, to my ear, the phrase “only a man.” Each addition would coarsen Guevara’s display of humanity.
The new term
My term starts on Monday (delayed a week because of Omicron). I can’t wait. This has been too long of a break, considering. I had to cancel a trip to Portland because of an eye operation, and then a visit from my partner and her daughter because of our crazy weather. It would have been a complete bust without a stack of books to read!
This semester’s classes are both for third- and fourth-year students at Kwantlen Polytechnic University: ‘Advanced Professional Communications’ and ‘Technical Report Writing.’ Very oddly, it seems, this latter class has become hugely popular in the last year or so; thirty people are on the waiting list. Technical Report Writing is no breeze!
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.
Related
Back in 2016 a woman in my Dialectical Behavioural Therapy class told us she was “practicing not having Costco-size emotional reactions to 7-11-sized situations.” It became my motto.
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.”
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.
“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
A Bargain!
I didn’t know until last week that there was an Indian edition.
It was a fun project written with a dear friend.
New Chalk
I begin my sixteenth year at Kwantlen Polytechnic University today. This summer I’m teaching a couple sections of Advanced Professional Communications and one of Technical Report Writing. These are healthy, hearty classes! I am looking forward to meeting my new students. This gig has been such a blessing.
[Addendum – this came in from my university’s administration a couple hours ago: “Surrey RCMP have alerted us to an unsubstantiated threat against KPU, specific to today. The threat is not specific to any one campus. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution and with the highest regard for the safety and security of our students and employees, KPU is evacuating all buildings immediately and closing all five of its campuses for the remainder of the day. All classes at all campuses are cancelled for rest of the day and our buildings will remain closed while security reviews the situation.” No update on this yet.]
Responsibility Project/ Father’s Day
This is an updated link to one of the greatest short videos I have ever seen. Love and pain and memory and family. Beautiful.
The video won the Silver Lion at Cannes. Ernie Schenk writes, “I did the story and co-wrote the screenplay with director Laurence Dunmore. Shot this in 2 days in Devore, California. Does anyone have any idea how cold it can get in the San Bernadino Mountains. My toes are still numb.” Here is more of Schenk’s fine work.
“pure capitalist intent”
This tweet by Kwantlen Polytechnic University colleague and marketing instructor @AndreaNiosi is my April favourite:
Showing my students the dark side of marketing. Cultural appropriation, mis- & under-representation, stereotypes, & the pure capitalist intent lurking behind (some) cause marketing campaigns. I’m now writing an open book to go as deep as I can into this.
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