Good Monday 470;

I have just completed my first round of reading your blogs; we are an eclectic and enthusiastic group this semester and I am very much looking forward to our work together.

I have a few comments for you about your blogging in general.

Every semester I begin with a conversation about capital letters and grammar, more specifically about the power of grammar as a tool for both oppression and liberation.

In terms of grammar, can you see what is wrong with the following sentences:

• In Canada, there are many thriving cultural traditions of thought and art: European, African, Latin, Scandinavian and more; the earliest cultural traditions are of course those of the indigenous people.
• The Europeans encountered different indigenous tribes as they traversed the nation.
• The British Empire colonized all the peoples of ‘Canada’ – the Europeans and indigenous people.

There was a time in the late 1980’s when students, myself included, began to mis-use, or you could even say we ‘abused’ grammar quite purposefully in an effort to expose the oppressive power of grammar. We have one student who is following suit with her blogging.

I will leave this with this: always capitalize Indigenous and Aboriginal and First Nations – just like you do Canada, and Canadians, and Europeans, and so forth.

I’d like you to take a moment and jump ahead to lesson 4:2 and read the sections on Dialogue, please pay particular attention to the differences between dialogue, debate and criticism – we are aiming to create dialogues – not debates and not criticism:

A dialogue is an exchange of ideas, never a debate; there are no right and wrong perspectives in a dialogue – rather differences are explored with the motivation of finding common ground. Dialogue is not about judging, weighing or making decisions though – it is about listening and understanding – you are allowed and expected to be open to perspectives and positions that are different from your own. Understanding and connecting with a perspective different from your own does not require you to change your position. It is possible to understand an issue from a number of different perspectives, without agreeing with all those perspectives.

We are not challenging each other’s perspectives, we are building from different perspectives. We are not finding ‘the’ answer, nor discovering a truth; we are exploring narrative terrains and pausing to examine intersections — or, common ground.

My engaement with your dialogues will be minimum. I will sometimes posts some phrases that are particularly enlightening for me – and sometimes raise my own questions on this blog in reference to an ongoing dialogue. But, for the most part, I leave you free to dialogue without my interruptions. I will of course continue to share hyperlinks that I find exciting or worth stopping to pause and consider in context with our course.

Lastly for this week: Switch it up! Be sure to visit as many different sites as possible – widen your range of discussions and engage with new blogs each week.

Thank you and enjoy.