Hello Everyone!
Collins, Zac. “My Face at the Beach.” 2020, JPEG.
And welcome to my Blog. Here, I will be updating my journey through Canadian Studies: Oh, Canada… Our Home and Native Land? This is an upper level English course where we will be reading Thomas King, Edward Chamberlin, and many others to get a sense of the effect that colonial narratives have on our understanding of stories and literature.
I have some background in writing. My first degree was in Philosophy, where I learned about how people communicate and think about communication, and how to interpret the many ways that people come to see the world. I learned about how language can be used to better our understanding of the world and provide depth to the ideas we take for granted; but also how it could be used to dismantle, confuse, distort, and damage our understandings as well — something that has never felt so relevant.
Why would you leave such a lucrative field as philosophy? you might be asking me, well, as it turns out, the world has enough philosophers. Besides, I wanted to work in a space that had a sense of community built into it. I decided to enrol at UBC’s teacher education program, and after 11 months in that program, I became a fully certified elementary school teacher. For the past couple of years I have been teaching at schools in the Richmond School district, working with English Language Learners, and students that need resource support. And what I have learned is that I have a lot more learning to do.
My hope within the next few years is to have an intermediate classroom and earn a Masters related to a critical approach to social justice and activist education for intermediate and high school students.
I hope that this class will help me develop a better sense of how stories exist in the world outside of literature, and how they may still coexist. I hope to be able to recognize the colonizing narratives that may come into play in the stories I share with my students, and use these narratives to address the larger social impact of colonial storytelling. And I hope to broaden my sense of where important stories and lessons can come from outside of colonial Literature to be able to share sources of meaningful non-colonial work with my students.
Collins, Zac. “My Two Cats.” 2020, JPEG.
“Bachelor of Education Program.” UBC Teacher Education Office, teach.educ.ubc.ca/bachelor-of-education-program/. Accessed 17 Jan. 2021.
Cohen, Daniel H., “For Argument’s Sake.” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 5 Aug. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTN9Nx8VYtk.
“The Truth about ‘Post-Truth’.” Ideas from CBC Radio, 19 Jan. 2017, www.cbc.ca/player/play/858449475803.