Adult Basic Education is a Basic Right is a collaboratively authored by researchers and educators in the adult education field in British Columbia. Our aim to gather and share information about how ABE tuition cuts and adult education policy in BC effects people, programs, depending inequity and socio-economic participation.
Read Lynn Horvat’s paper: “Re-Framing the Conversation: Respecting Adult Basic Education in British Columbia”
From The Tyee:
Faculty Take Strike Vote at University of Northern British Columbia
Salaries a sticking point in pricey northern city.
By Katie Hyslop
The University of Northern British Columbia’s faculty association made history Jan. 15 when it became the first faculty union at a B.C. research university to take a strike vote. The vote passed with 84.8 per cent in favour of a strike, giving faculty members 90 days to take strike action.
The university, located in Prince George, has been bargaining with the faculty association for eight months, the last three with help from British Columbia Labour Board-appointed mediator Trevor Sones.
About 70 per cent of bargaining issues at UNBC have been settled, but faculty association president Jacqueline Holler says a major impasse is faculty salaries, which are as much as 24 per cent lower than salaries at similar-sized Canadian universities.
“What the employer has offered in terms of compensation does absolutely nothing to address the situation,” said Holler. Neither she nor UNBC would disclose specifics of offers on the bargaining table.
Holler said another reason faculty deserves higher pay is the university’s frequent ranking by Maclean’s magazine as one of the top three primarily undergraduate universities in Canada.
But UNBC says there are a number of factors affecting salary negotiations: Government requirements for wages to stay within fixed financial parametres; an overall decline in enrollment; an increase in the number of B.C. universities; and increased government support for trades training.
“I’m not citing those [factors] as the most important, only to suggest that there’s a number of factors that are all at play,” said Rob van Adrichem, UNBC’s vice president of external communications. “And it all affects this situation.”
Unionized last April
The vote comes after UNBC’s faculty association, representing close to 500 full and part-time instructors, became a union last April. The faculty associations at Simon Fraser University and University of Victoria unionized around the same time.
There are six research universities in British Columbia. They include UNBC, Simon Fraser University, University of Victoria, Thompson Rivers University, Royal Roads University, and the University of British Columbia.
The faculty association at the University of British Columbia became the first B.C. research university to unionize in the 1980s. In exchange for the university’s support the union gave up their right to strike. Almost 20 years later Royal Roads University’s faculty association officially became a union. Faculty at Thompson Rivers University is also unionized.
With the exception of Alberta, where law prevents university faculty associations from becoming unions, there are only four non-unionized public university faculty associations in Canada. They are at McGill, Waterloo, University of Toronto, and McMaster.
Salary disputes were the common denominator between Simon Fraser, University of Victoria, and UNBC faculty associations’ decision to unionize, says Michael Conlon, executive director of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia, an umbrella organization for research university faculty associations.
“I think it’s fair to say that salary increases at all the research universities in B.C. have not kept up” with the rest of Canada, Conlon said.
Attracting highly educated academics is a good reason to increase salaries, says Conlon, adding competition for “internationally renowned-faculty” is stiff both nationally and internationally.
“As B.C.’s pay scale falls farther and farther behind, I think it will be a challenge to recruit and retain the best researchers, the best teachers, and the best faculty,” he said. “I think that’s a challenge for the entire province in ensuring we’ve got a competitive and excellent system of post-secondary education.”
The faculty’s previous contract expired last June, four months after arbitrator Vince Ready released a final decision on a 2012-2014 contract, which included two retroactive pay raises of 2.5 per cent.
Ready agreed with the faculty association that salaries were low compared to other similar-sized universities, and said UNBC did have the money to raise the pay of faculty members.
Bargaining continues this weekend
But while the wage increase helped, Holler says it didn’t fix UNBC’s “broken” salary structure and was negated by similar wage increases at other B.C. universities.
Holler said living in the north is more expensive than southern B.C., a factor not taken into account when deciding faculty wages.
“In most fields if you work in the north you actually get paid a little more because they understand that it’s hard to attract people,” she said.
The faculty association still hopes to reach an agreement through bargaining, and has yet to meet to discuss strike options. UNBC undergraduate classes end April 17, two days after the strike deadline.
UNBC’s van Adrichem says the strike vote itself doesn’t have an impact on the bargaining process. “The university has been and is very keen to negotiate an agreement,” he said.
Both sides are scheduled to return to the bargaining table on Jan. 30 until Feb. 1. [Tyee]
Emma-Kate Symons, Quartz, January 7, 2014– The world is rallying around satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the French people today, after masked assassins – uttering the prayer “God is Great” and invoking vengeance for the prophet Mohammed – massacred 12 in central Paris.
But the global solidarity with the heroic cartoonists, writers and editors of this struggling weekly publication, targeted and murdered by terrorists during their weekly news conference, and victims of a fire-bomb attack on their office and years of death threats from Islamists, comes far too late.
Charlie Hebdo, which has published on and off since 1969, is proudly anti-organised religion and congenitally politically incorrect.
On a shoestring budget it has been fighting the good fight for freedom of thought and expression and a secular public space for years when many were ambivalent.
For its courage it has run into frequent trouble with local and international Islamofascists, having been forced to move its headquarters several times following threats and a fire bombing, notably after it published an edition in 2011 called “Charia Hebdo”.
Its editors had also annoyed and irritated political leaders in its native France, in Britain, and the United States.
When it bravely republished the infamous Danish cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed in 2006, even as fundamentalist leaders incited demonstrators to violence around the world, it earned a notorious rebuke from president Jacques Chirac who condemned its “overt provocation“.
As I reported from Paris at the time, then Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val hit back at Chirac, saying he was “shocked” the French head of state would accuse the magazine of inflaming passions.
It is not a provocation. The provocation began well before – the fire was sparked on September 11 in New York, and in the attacks on London and on Madrid.
When there were the attacks on Madrid, on London, did we see the Arab street demonstrating because some assassins had committed horrible crimes in the name of Mohammed? We cannot leave it to religious groups to dictate the laws of freedom of expression.
Some in the Bush administration, wary of violence across the Islamic world, joined in the chorus calling for limits on press freedom. The British foreign secretary Jack Straw deplored newspapers’ “insensitivity and lack of respect”. The elite media in these two countries was also far from unanimous in its support.
Even in Paris over the past week, leading figures in the French fourth estate have been condemning the novelist Michel Houellebecq for allegedly bringing extreme right wing ideas into literature with the publication of his incendiary novel Submission.
The book depicts a France in 2022 governed by an Islamist political party. But Houllebecq is now part of this drama having been featured on the cover of this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo. So what do editors like Laurent Joffrin at Libération newspaper now have to say? Should the novelist, like the editorial staff at Charlie Hebdo, have held their tongues and their pens?
Horribly, the scene at Charlie Hebdo is worthy of an excerpt from a novel by Houllebecq, and eerily echoes his reading of the Koran: “The obvious conclusion is that the jihadists are bad Muslims … an honest reading will conclude that a holy war of aggression is not generally sanctioned, prayer alone is valid.”
But this is not fiction and it is too easy to dismiss the role of religion and, yes, jihadi prayer in this horror.
France has Europe’s largest Muslim population, rising support for the anti-Islam extreme right, a growing problem with homegrown terrorism, fuelled by hundreds who have fought alongside Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Syria and elsewhere, and also the strongest commitment to the secular separation of church and state of almost any Western democracy.
It has a huge job on its hands trying to manage all its internal conflicts, and the sheer shock and fury this attack has created. This is a tipping point akin to the violence that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988.
Beyond the immediate political fallout, the “greatest” to emerge from this crime expressly motivated by religious fanaticism are not God, the “avenged” prophet, or Islamist extremism – even if the death cult we associate with IS and Al Qaeda has come to the heart of the city of lights, and the Enlightenment, for centuries a refuge for intellectuals, writers, and artists.
Despite the murderers’ prayers invoking God and Allah, the heroes in this horror are the creative minds of this noble publication. Atheistic agitators, they fought literally to the death for freedom of thought and expression, the liberty to offend, and the right to be iconoclasts.
Their fidelity to the fundamental values of democracy, even as many around the world and in France found their editorial line too “provocative” or “offensive”, will long endure after these killers are brought to justice.
They died as they lived: standing up for their principles, the principles the French first fought for in the 1789 Revolution. Their only “weapons” were their illustrating pens and their words.
The martyred editor-in-chief and beloved illustrator “Charb” said it best in 2012, after years of attacks against his magazine:
I am not afraid of reprisals. I don’t have kids, I don’t have a wife, I don’t have a car, I don’t have credit. This may sound a bit pompous but I would prefer to die standing than to live on my knees.
Read More: Quartz
Jennifer Gosnell, DalGazette, January 6, 2014–“Hey hey, ho ho, misogyny has go to go,” roared a crowd of about 200 people gathered at a rally yesterday afternoon outside Dalhousie’s Henry Hicks Building.
The rally targeted Dalhousie administration’s reaction to a misogynistic Facebook group made up of male dentistry students.
The rally came right after the announcement that Dalhousie University has suspended the clinical privileges of thirteen men in their fourth year of Dal’s Doctor of Dental Surgery program.
These men were suspended as Dalhousie’s ongoing response to complaints against the men’s posts in a Facebook group called the Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen where some of them posted comments about female classmates that included discussions of sexual violence.
The protestors rallied together against a lack of action on Dalhousie’s part and a lack of justice on the part of victims of the posts and survivors of sexual assault.
Jennifer Nowoselski, Dalhousie Student Union Vice President (Internal), spoke of her experiences witnessing harassment on campus.
“I cannot tell you how many students across various faculties come to the Union with complaints of discrimination on a regular basis,” said Nowoselski. “I am enraged.”
“No options to address sexist comments? No options to address sexual harassment? No options to address sexist treatment of women students? Out of justified fear, individuals cannot demand action to make them feel safe on this campus. There is no safe internal process available to our members,” Nowoselski said.
She turned her questions to the Henry Hicks building itself, which hosts university president Richard Florizone’s office.
“Through a media storm, voiced concerns through students and community members, a community-organized rally, petitions, a formal complaint from faculty, threats of losing funding, concern from the government, and with the entire country watching, you created a task force?” Nowoselski asked.
Board members of South House, a student-funded sexual and gender resource centre in Halifax, spoke at the rally. They voiced issues of concern about underfunding for their volunteer-driven services that are often turned to for support by people who have experienced sexual violence.
Various survivors of sexual violence took to the megaphone to discuss the impact of their experiences.
One survivor said she was sexually assaulted by her dentist.
Others shared stories of going to Dalhousie’s offices to report their abuse and being met with blame or disbelief.
Read More: DalGazette
CTV, January 5, 2015–Four Dalhousie professors have gone public with a formal complaint they submitted to the university last month, which called for male dentistry students linked to a sexually explicit Facebook discussion to be suspended before classes resume on Monday.
One of the professors, Francoise Baylis, said they decided to go public because they haven’t yet been assured that the complaint has been properly submitted and whether it will be addressed.
“Students have to go back to school tomorrow morning, and in our view, the university has an obligation to provide all students with a safe and supportive learning environment,” Baylis, who teaches at Dalhousie’s medical school, told CTV Atlantic.
“Our view is that it’s important to have at least addressed the complaint prior to the students coming back.”
The formal complaint from Dec. 21 calls for the university to hand out suspensions to all fourth-year students who were allegedly involved in offensive posts discussing female students in the Faculty of Dentistry. The complaint is co-signed by Baylis and fellow Dalhousie professors Jocelyn Downie, Brian Noble and Jacqueline Warwick.
“The purpose of the Complaint was to trigger an interim suspension prior to the start of classes on Monday, January 5, 2015,” the professors said in a statement emailed to CTVNews.ca on Sunday.
The complaint cites a number of posts allegedly made by fourth-year students in the Facebook group called “Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen.”
One poster reportedly joked about using chloroform to render a woman unconscious. Another asked members which female students they would like to have “hate sex” with. A third post showed a photo of a woman in a bikini with the caption: “bang until stress is relieved or unconscious (girl).”
The formal complaint matches these allegations up to violations under the school’s Code of Student Conduct. It says offending students should be suspended because they “pose a threat of disruption or interference with the operations of the University and the activities of its members.”
Baylis said the formal process was engaged because some of the affected female students either did not consent to, or were not approached about the informal “restorative justice” approach the university decided to take.
On Dec. 17, university president Richard Florizone said administrators were looking into informal complaints by women who were subjects of the offensive posts. He also left the door open to a formal complaint process if the affected women chose to pursue it.
“I ask for our communities to give our students and university administrators the time to complete their work through the restorative justice process and forge meaningful, responsible outcomes,” Florizone said in a statement.
“Our overall response must also address cultures of sexism, misogyny and sexualized violence,” he added.
Baylis said the offensive Facebook posts require both an individual and a “systemic” response.
“All of us believe that we’re at a very unique cultural moment in time where we’re actually able to name the problem publicly, to call this misogyny, to talk about gendered violence,” she said.
Read more: CTV
Statement from faculty members who brought a complaint under Dalhousie University’s Code of
Student Conduct re: the “Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen”
We are at a distinct cultural moment in which real change with respect to misogyny and gendered violence is possible.
Events involving the “Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen” create a complex situation demanding thoughtful, sensitive responses from a variety of perspectives using a variety of procedural tools.
We ground our engagement with this situation in commitments to:
President Florizone has committed to responding to the specific incident within the Faculty of Dentistry and to seeking strategies for meaningful long-term change. Our formal Complaint is an effort to contribute constructively to the comprehensive response required.
Photo by Stephen Puddicombe/CBC
CBC News, January 6, 2015–A group of fourth-year female students from Dalhousie University’s faculty of dentistry have written an open letter to the president of the school, saying they feel pressured to accept the restorative justice process to resolve the Facebook scandal that has rocked the school.
In a two-page letter addressed to Richard Florizone and disclosed to CBC News on Tuesday, the four unnamed students say they are not willing to accept the university’s response to the Facebook page called the Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen.
The page was created by some male students in the fourth-year dentistry class and contained misogynistic and sexually explicit posts, including a poll about having “hate” sex with female students and comments about drugging women.
The women say in their letter that they “do not wish for the sexual harassment and discrimination perpetrated by members of our class to be dealt with through this restorative justice process.”
“The university is pressuring us into this process, silencing our views, isolating us from our peers, and discouraging us from choosing to proceed formally,” says the letter.
“This has perpetuated our experience of discrimination. This approach falls far below what we expected from you, and what we believe we deserve.”
The women also say they are concerned about their future at the school.
‘We have serious concerns’
“Telling us that we can either participate in restorative justice or file a formal complaint is presenting us with a false choice. We have serious concerns about the impact of filing formal complaints on our chances of academic success at the faculty of dentistry, and believe that doing so would jeopardize our futures,” they wrote.
“The reason we have not filed formal complaints is also the reason we have not signed our names to this letter.”
Read Letter: Open Letter to President Richard Florizone
… We are writing this open letter to inform you that, after considering the information that was presented in that meeting, we do not wish for the sexual harassment and discrimination perpetrated by members of our class to be dealt with through this restorative justice process or under the Sexual Harassment Policy. We feel that the University is pressuring us into this process, silencing our views, isolating us from our peers, and discouraging us from choosing to proceed formally. This has perpetuated our experience of discrimination. This approach falls far below what we expected from you, and what we believe we deserve….
Read More: CBC
Lilia D. Monzó & Peter McLaren, Truthout, December 18, 2014– Racism is exacerbated by a capitalist production process that teaches us that some people have a God-given right to pursue their economic and social interests without regard for other people’s right to thrive, free of fear for their own survival. The antidote is red love.
The Slaughter-Bench of Race
It seems that it is an everlasting open hunting season in the United States and the kills are Black men. The senseless killing of unarmed Black young man Michael Brown by a White police officer and the grand jury’s decision to allow the officer to walk without facing a trial through a faltering prosecutorial process (that aims to defend when the target of indictment is a police officer) has brought Ferguson, Missouri, and other communities across the country to their feet in loud and incendiary protest.
Approximately 50 protesters on a 120-mile march from Ferguson to Jefferson City decrying the shooting death of Brown were met with counter-protesters all along the route. Especially stomach-churning was the reception given to the protesters in the sleepy hollow of Rosebud, where the caterwauling and public scouring was most intense as 200 residents screeched at the protesters to “go home and get jobs” along a route littered with 40-ounce beer bottles, watermelons, Confederate flags and fried chicken, and where at least one concerned citizen was wearing a makeshift white hood, redolent of the vile knights of the “Invisible Empire.”
While the corporate media has suggested that the violent response by some protesters – property damage and looting in some instances – diminishes the authentic call for “change” – i.e., a demilitarization of the police, improved police-community relations, urban job creation, increased sensitivity training regarding race among police force recruits – it is hard to ignore the storied observation by Frantz Fanon that violence is oftentimes the only possible response by communities that have lived through centuries of violence – slavery, joblessness, poverty, police profiling, the school-to-prison pipeline and a military-industrial complex that thrives upon the deaths and killing of Black and Brown young men.
In the wake of this blow to the Black community, we have seen a string of similar White police killings of unarmed Black men and an unwillingness to indict them. These include the killing of Eric Garner who was caught on video repeating the words, “I can’t breathe,” 11 times as a New York Police Department officer had him in a chokehold that has been banned by the NYPD for years; the killing of Rumain Brisbon in Phoenix, Arizona; the killing of a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun in a park and shot within two seconds of police arriving on the scene; and the killing of Akai Gurley, a young man who was fatally shot by a rookie NYPD officer in a dark public housing stairwell in Brooklyn. With the growing confidence among White police officers that Black men are fair game for killing without consequences, how many more of our Black children’s lives will we lose?
In the cases of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Akai Gurley, the police did not make any effort to assist their dying victims. In the case of Gurley, the officers who shot him – in true “cover your ass fashion” – decided to text their union representative while ignoring calls from the police and medics. Six and a half minutes went by before they finally radioed for assistance. It wasn’t until a detective and FBI agent arrived at the scene of the Tamir Rice slaying that the victim received any first aid. In Eric Garner’s case, numerous police officers stared at his unconscious handcuffed body for seven crucial minutes instead of performing urgent CPR or frantically seeking professional medical assistance. In the case of Michael Brown, we know that his body lay lifeless on a Ferguson street for four hours before it was carted off to the local morgue. While some have attempted to justify police killings of Black men as a function of the job demand for quick decisions and their own survival instincts, this unconscionable and merciless failure to attempt to save these men’s lives, points to something much deeper.
Astonishingly, we are now hearing backlash against protesters that Black men must be suicidal since they are acting in ways that are surely to get them killed. It seems no matter what the circumstance, the narratives shift in order to maintain the sanctity of the White cop. The institutionalized and pretentious discourse of conservative talk show hosts now includes remarks to the effect of: “If Garner can say ‘I can’t breathe’ 11 times, then he can breathe” (obviously these self-proclaimed “critics” don’t realize that being pinned down by police may prevent lungs from re-expanding, forcing out the functional reserve capacity of air while the expiratory reserve volume – which is not oxygenated and basically exists as carbon dioxide gas – still permits vocalization). This vicious insensitivity from the frenetic ranks of these racist prodigies have ripped away any cosmetic prostheses hiding the seething subterranean animus of the White population who have inherited a historical proclivity to blame Blacks for their own suffering and who continue to do so with an increasingly smug impunity.
Given the rancid history of racial violence in the United States, should we be aghast at the audacity of White police officers who continue to shoot first and show little restraint prior or remorse after, and at the imperviousness of prosecutors and grand juries that see only through the dominant lens, justifying the growing epidemic of Black killings by White cops as a “natural” reaction to fearing for their lives? Protesters are demanded to show restraint in a country that has shown no restraint in killing Black communities and other communities of color – physically, psychologically and economically. While we do not advocate for violence, we understand how centuries of pain and humiliation can result in a pent-up rage that eventually explodes.
More recently, African-Americans face the grim new reality of moving from the super-exploited sector of the working class to being even more marginalized as capitalists switched from drawing on Black labor in favor of Latino/a immigrant labor as a super-exploited workforce. As a result of increased structural marginalization, African-Americans are subject to what William Robinson describesas “heightened disenfranchisement, criminalization, a bogus ‘war on drugs,’ mass incarceration and police and state terror, seen by the system as necessary to control a superfluous and potentially rebellious population.”
Racism is not a natural phenomenon, but one that has been produced within each and every institution of our society. Racism is exacerbated through a capitalist production process that teaches us that some people have a God-given right to pursue their own economic and social interests with little regard for the right of every human being and other living organism to thrive in the world free of fear for their own survival and with dignity and freedom. Racism stems from a world that has lost its ability to recognize its social nature and absolute need to love one another. While we must work to make people safe today, we must also consider the long-term goal of anti-racist struggle, which in our view is one and the same as class struggle, such that a new world order, one free from class and founded on love, interdependence, social responsibility, equality and freedom can thrive.
Read More: Truthout
This symposium will examine accelerating trends in higher education: neoliberalism, the politics of evidence, and the audit culture. In an age in which value is often equated with accountancy, we will examine the place in the academy for public intellectualism, community-engagement, Indigenous epistemologies, and how the impact of our scholarship is, and ought to be, justly assessed. Invited presenters will provoke lively discussion, but going beyond discussion, and blurring the lines between presenter and audience member, participants will be invited to engage actively with other presenter/participants in attendance for the purpose of effecting changes at their home institutions. Opportunities will be available for reconsidering and strategizing academic issues such as faculty criteria documents, measurement rankings, traditional impact factors, and other academic matters affected by the politics of austerity, neoliberalism, and new management technologies. Action will also be encouraged through submissions to a special issue of in education (the University of Regina Faculty of Education’s journal), potentially collaborating on an edited book, TED-style dissemination videos, producing a list of recommendations, developing examples of inclusive faculty criteria documents, possibly developing a community impact factor as an alternative to journal impact factor metrics, and further actions as collectively discussed at the symposium.
Questions to be explored include:
Special Issue of Workplace
Guest Editors: Karen Gregory & Joss Winn
Articles in Workplace have repeatedly called for increased collective organisation in opposition to a disturbing trajectory: individual autonomy is decreasing, contractual conditions are worsening, individual mental health issues are rising, and academic work is being intensified. Despite our theoretical advances and concerted practical efforts to resist these conditions, the gains of the 20th century labor movement are diminishing and the history of the university appears to be on a determinate course. To date, this course is often spoken of in the language of “crisis.”
While crisis may indeed point us toward the contemporary social experience of work and study within the university, we suggest that there is one response to the transformation of the university that has yet to be adequately explored: A thoroughgoing and reflexive critique of academic labor and its ensuing forms of value. By this, we mean a negative critique of academic labor and its role in the political economy of capitalism; one which focuses on understanding the basic character of ‘labor’ in capitalism as a historically specific social form. Beyond the framework of crisis, what productive, definite social relations are actively resituating the university and its labor within the demands, proliferations, and contradictions of capital?
We aim to produce a negative critique of academic labor that not only makes transparent these social relations, but repositions academic labor within a new conversation of possibility.
We are calling for papers that acknowledge the foundational work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels for labor theory and engage closely and critically with the critique of political economy. Marx regarded his discovery of the dual character of labor in capitalism (i.e. concrete and abstract) as one of his most important achievements and “the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns.” With this in mind, we seek contributions that employ Marx’s and Engels’ critical categories of labor, value, the commodity, capital, etc. in reflexive ways which illuminate the role and character of academic labor today and how its existing form might be, according to Marx, abolished, transcended and overcome (aufheben).
Contributions:
Joss Winn (jwinn@lincoln.ac.uk) and Karen Gregory (kgregory@ccny.cuny.edu)
CBC News, October 24, 2014– Idle No More was one of the largest Indigenous mass movements in recent history, sparking hundreds of teach-ins, rallies and protests across the country. On Friday night in Saskatoon, a group of educators and grad students learned about how it all came together.
People involved in the movement addressed members of the Canadian History of Education Association. Lynn Lemisko with the Association says there’s a history of teach-ins, like Idle No More, being used as a resistance movement.
“It’s a powerful example in the way in which resistance can be done in a peaceful way through dancing and just gathering together and demonstrating,” Lemisko said.
Lemisko says mass social movements can be successful even if they don’t result in clear, measurable outcomes, such as legislative changes. She says they heighten awareness and help develop critical thinking. And she says educators are interested in how the Idle No More Movement changed the social and political landscape in Canada.
“Is this something that we can borrow and use in our own lives in our own ways that we want to support social justice resist and reconcile?” Lemisko asked. Lemisko says a similar effort could be hard to duplicate. She says some mass movements just happen because there are forces that come together at a particular moment in time for whatever reason.
Read More: CBC News
The new UBC Masters Program in Critical Pedagogy and Education Activism (Curriculum Studies) has the goal of bringing about positive change in schools and education. This cohort addresses issues such as environmentalism, equity and social justice, and private versus public education funding debates and facilitates activism across curriculum and evaluation within the schools and critical analysis and activism in communities and the media. The cohort is organized around three core themes: solidarity, engagement, and critical analysis and research.
The new UBC M.Ed. in Critical Pedagogy and Education Activism (Curriculum Studies) is a cohort program in which participants attend courses together in a central location. It supports participation in face-to-face, hybrid (blended), and online activism and learning.
A Perfect Opportunity
Mayor of iPopU
Edutainum Infinitum
Let’s face it: Evaluation is silly. Reviews of programs and units in universities in this day and age are even sillier. Units put the Unit in Unitversity, so what’s to review? No one really believes the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education when they boast in the naval-gazing Self-Study Guide that “undertaking a self-study is a major enterprise” or “self-study cannot be done well under rushed conditions.” Says who? These academic proverbs sell booklets with a wink wink and a chuckle.
That is the gist of the administrative genius of a major innovation in evaluation at iPopU. We drilled down to what is the core of the Review process and then inventoried trends to find that the Rating widget solves every problem of evaluation.
There are three types of evaluations, Conformative, Normative, and Summative, or what I’m told is better known in the field nowadays as Corporative, and the Rating widget solves all three at once. Yes, I hear you nodding, quite the little workhorse that Rating widget!
Yet, it took iPopU to repurpose it to the depth work of admin.
When we announced that it was time for Reviews, the yawning started and then came the dragging of the heels, for years. Check, we hear you when you say evaluations never change anything. Check, we hear you when you say you have better things to do. Check, we hear you when you say self-studies can be completed by a grad student or staff member with a Fillitin app on their phones. Check, we hear you when you say accreditation is a carry-over make-work relic of the medieval scholiastics. Check, we see you when you ask there must be a better way.
In one School, we have fourteen senior administrators who are already bumping into each other. Assigning a few to oversee a Review just adds to this. Remember, a bustling administrative office is like hot air when heated with a fan, electrons expand and collide with each other. In the old days, we dragged out Reviews for years, from one to the next, thinking that the best review was the prolonged review. We had two Associate Deans of the Office of Review. When we reviewed our 65 programs some time ago, comic relief faculty lovingly referred to this as a three-ring circus and then posted it on iPopUtube as a keystone cops episode. So we made admin offices bigger to avoid that. But, I listen to you wondering, are these admins underworked? I answer to that, better to have many than few. Am I right?
So iPopU introvated and in 2013 did all Reviews with the Rating widget.
Read More: iPopU: Innovation in Evaluation
iPopU is cataloguing its mold-breaking outside-the-box ‘you won’t find these on the shelf of brick and mortar’ innorenovations. So this is a chance for U to contribute to the iPopU Topdown 100 countdown. See the Innovation in Evaluation nomination for No. 11 in iPopU’s Topdown 100.
Contributions to the iPopU Topdown 100 for Workplace should be about 500-1,500 words in length and yield to iPopU style. Submit all iPopU Topdown 100 innorenovations via the Workplace OJS.
Via the CoCal distribution list:
*Call for Submissions*: *Teaching Poor: Voices of the Academic Precariat*
The career of college professor, giving back to the society that provided for them through education, was once a respectable path to the middle class. That class position is now slipping through the hands of the very people who helped create it, thanks to the erosion of tenured and tenure-track positions in favor of short-term contract positions without security. What should be rags to riches stories about the power of education to lift people out of poverty by providing a pathway to better jobs have become, for many academics, stories of stagnation, downward mobility, and outright impoverishment under the burden of massive debt uncompensated for by the very academy that helped contract faculty incur it.
*Teaching Poor: Voices of the Academic Precariat* will be a collection of voices from the world of so-called adjunct or contract college instructors who now teach 60-75% of all college courses in the United States and are paid wages equivalent to Walmart workers. In the tradition of Studs Terkel’s *Working*, *Teaching Poor* will honor both the difficulties and the triumphs of this new class of impoverished white collar laborers in the academic trenches, detailing personal struggles with the resultant poverty produced by low wages, crushing student loan debt, lack of healthcare and retirement provisions, and the professional and cultural costs this system levies on individuals and the students they teach.
I welcome creative non-fiction, biographical essay, short stories, poems, comics and, in the spirit of hacking the academy through digital humanities, may eventually expand to multimedia and a permanent archive of work similar to Story Corps. Length can vary wildly, but around 7500 words for prose is the average we’re looking for. Longer pieces will probably be reserved for the online archive.
This project is in its very early stages and I’m looking to see what kind of interest there is both in contributors and publishers before defining it or looking into other funding/publishing sources. I have publishers in mind (AK, Haymarket, Soft Skull, Atropos, Verso, ILR), but also welcome suggestions. I do want this to be more than a self-published ebook though, and perhaps something truly groundbreaking if we can make a collaboration work. Send your queries and submissions to Lee Kottner at teachingpoor@gmail.com by Jan. 1, 2015. That, too, is a very soft deadline, but please at least query by then.
James Legge, The Independent, October 19, 2014–Pro-democracy demonstrators returned to the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday night, undeterred by two days of violent clashes with police.
Some came equipped with helmets and home-made foam arm protectors to defend them against police batons. “I will continue to stay here until C Y [Leung, the city’s chief executive] resigns,” said Lap Cheung, 40, who left his IT job in the United States to return to Hong Kong for the protests. He added he had no hope of a breakthrough tomorrow at planned talks between student leaders and the authorities. The negotiations will be televised live.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, officers used pepper spray on demonstrators in the shopping district of Mong Kok, parts of which have been closed to road traffic by the demonstrators since the end of September.
The protests were sparked by anger over Beijing’s proposal for electing the city’s next chief executive in 2017. The plan, set out in August, dictates that all candidates require majority approval from a committee of mostly pro-Beijing members of the city’s elite. But Mr Leung suggested yesterday one area where the protesters might find concessions is in the make-up of that screening committee. He said: “There will be plenty of room for us to talk about how we can structure a nomination system so that we have genuine choice of candidates come 2017.”
He maintained that certain things remain off the table, reiterating that civic nomination, under which Hongkongers would put up their own candidates, would run contrary to the Basic Law – the mini-constitution under which Hong Kong is governed from Beijing but maintains greater freedoms than the mainland.
During the two-hour talks, Carrie Lam, the city’s chief secretary, will lead the government team, and five members of the Hong Kong Federation of students – including Lester Shum and Alex Chow – will represent the protesters. Both Mr Shum and Mr Chow have become well-known spokesmen for the mostly leaderless occupations, which are focused on the city’s political and financial power centre.
This is the third time both sides have agreed to meet for talks, but looks like being the first meeting actually to take place. The first was called off by protesters after violence from a counter-protest, and the second was cancelled by the government after it accused students of trying to use the meeting to rally more demonstrators.
On Sunday in Mong Kok occupiers attempted to grab territory on the arterial Nathan Road. Scuffles erupted before police surged forward with riot shields, forcing the protesters back. Dozens of people, including at least 22 police, were reportedly injured in the two consecutive nights of clashes going into yesterday morning.
The police chief superintendent Hui Chun-tak said the crowd included “activists from radical organisations as well as trouble-makers” and that four men were arrested.
He said protesters “charged the police cordon, trying to occupy the road junction. Repeated warnings were issued to stop charging the cordon. However, they were all ignored.”
Mr Leung said authorities would continue trying to clear the streets “in parallel” with the dialogue. This two-pronged strategy has fanned protesters’ anger further, with many major voices in the movement claiming that the continued attempts at clearance call into question Mr Leung’s sincerity in offering the talks.
In Mong Kok, protesters appeared defiant and also angry that the city government was portraying their campaign as increasingly radicalised and violent. Igloo Novas, a student, told Reuters that Hong Kong leaders must tell Beijing the “truth”, that the majority of Hong Kong people wanted to choose candidates in elections freely. “This is one compromise I can accept from the government,” she said.
Read More: The Independent
CBC, October 12, 2014– Hong Kong police began on Monday to remove barricades erected by pro-democracy protesters who have occupied several sites around the Chinese-controlled city for two weeks, according to protest group Occupy Central.
At the main protest site, around government offices in the downtown district of Admiralty, scores of student protesters faced off with police who were massing in the area, a Reuters witness said. The Hong Kong government has said the demonstrations are illegal.
On Saturday, student leaders issued an open letter to Chinese President Xi Jinping, urging him to consider political reforms in the city and blaming the city’s unpopular leader for the demonstrations.
The letter, issued by two student groups leading the protests, said Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying was responsible for a civil disobedience campaign that has seen tens of thousands of people throng the semi-autonomous city’s key thoroughfares over the past two weeks.
Thousands of demonstrators showed up in the main protest zone on Saturday, two days after Hong Kong’s government called off scheduled negotiations with students who are demanding voters have a greater say in choosing the city’s leader in 2017 elections.
The protesters have vowed to keep up the demonstrations until the government responds to their demands.
“Students walked out of classes and are occupying different places now because Leung and others have repeatedly ignored what the people want,” the letter read. “If the central government is confident, it should not be afraid to let Hong Kong people elect their own chief executive.”
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Friday that he was confident Hong Kong’s government can preserve “social stability.” He did not directly mention the protests, but stressed that Beijing won’t change its “one country, two systems” approach to running Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, a Chinese state-run newspaper blamed the United States for being behind the protests — a claim the U.S. State Department strongly rejected.
Read More: CBC
Daniel Schearf, Voice of America, October 12, 2014– Pro-democracy protest leaders in Hong Kong have vowed to continue their occupation of city streets after the Chinese territory’s leader soundly rejected their demands. Hong Kong’s chief executive also called their movement “out of control” and said it could not last very long.
Protesters Sunday voiced defiance after Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying said there was ‘zero chance’ of meeting their demands.
In an interview with TVB, Hong Kong’s Beijing-approved leader said China would never rescind its decision against open nomination of candidates for the chief executive post.
Leung also dismissed protester demands that he resign for allegedly failing to uphold Hong Kong’s constitution, the Basic Law.
Criticizes decision
Lester Shum, deputy secretary-general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students and a protest leader, said, “What C.Y. Leung, the chief executive, said, showed that the Hong Kong government still refuse to take the responsibility to face the political issue made by, or caused by, the Hong Kong government.”
Hong Kong is to hold a much anticipated first direct election for chief executive in 2017 as part of the Chinese territory’s unique “One Country, Two Systems” status.
But China’s National People’s Congress in August set out a plan that allows Beijing-leaning officials in Hong Kong to choose the candidates the public would be allowed to vote on.
The limitation on the former British colony’s democracy sparked students to boycott classes and lead the occupation of city streets, now in its third week.
Talks canceled
The number of protesters had declined in recent days, but got a boost Friday night when thousands answered a call to rally at the main demonstration site next to government offices.
Authorities had canceled a dialogue on constitutional reform with protest leaders Friday after calls for a new wave of civil disobedience.
Despite the boost, Shum acknowledged they are struggling to maintain the momentum of the movement as it is challenged by those disturbed by the barricaded streets.
“Yeah, I believe this movement has come to face a very difficult problem,” Shum said.
“It’s that … the government use every tactics to wish to delay our movement, to wish us to come home or give up our occupation. So, what we are going to do, or what we are facing is how we can convince the Hong Kong citizens and students to support us, to still support this occupation movement,” he said.
Groups of people opposed to the occupation, including taxi and truck drivers, have demonstrated against it. There are also sporadic arguments and fights with protesters.
Protesters add tents
Nonetheless, demonstrators over the weekend added new tents to the streets around government offices in a show of defiance and determination to develop a genuine democracy.
The protest became known as the “umbrella revolution” after protesters used umbrellas to peacefully defend themselves against police tear gas and pepper spray.
People hung notes of support shaped like umbrellas to a large, wire sculpture of an umbrella and added post-it notes to those already plastered on a nearby wall.
Frankie Lam, who brought his two children to see the demonstration, said Hong Kong authorities should stop making excuses for not allowing them to directly elect their leaders.
“They can do it. Just whether they are willing to do so. So, I think, for now, the Hong Kong people will try to … cooperate with each other, to try to fight … (against) this unfair treatment,” Lam said.
When asked whether he thinks the protesters will succeed, Lam replied, “I don’t know. But, if you never ever try, you will never ever know. Just try our best to do something for our … for the next generation.”
Lam’s elementary school-aged son posted a note that read “Do Not Give Up” in Chinese characters.
Read More: VoA
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