I took a few days off from work with the intention of visiting friends that I hadn't seen in a while, but my bodymind had other ideas. So instead I have spent the last three days doing a whole lot of the usual around here, which is thinking too much, and seeing instructor friends and students cross the finish line of the semester with exhaustion, and other common feelings one finds at the end of the academic year. I have been thinking this week about the kinds of things we come to accept and often come to expect in our academic places and what we can do to disrupt those expectations because to ..read more

Like a lot of people on this side of the world this week, I have been thinking about and writing about changes. With eclipses, and daytime darkness, necessarily comes the thought process of what disruption looks like in the different systems we are part of in the different aspects of our lives. These thoughts, coupled with more wonderful conversations with people I know in different ways and from different roles I have had at institutions, or through accessibility advocacy, has me particularly thinking about the difference between what is said on paper, what things like LinkedIn profiles, and ..read more

The title of this post is on motion, but it could have just as easily be called toxic culture of productivity, let me explain. I did a lot of work this week. In fact on reflection I did the amount of work that is probably impossible to do in a week, but somehow it got done, and I am not sure how that happened. And when I have weeks like that, which happen every once in a while it often gives me pause and though I am happy that I got done what I got done, weeks like this also make me sad.  The sadness comes from a misalignment in values. I am always someone who reinforces that it is import ..read more

This week was another week where I was very much about contemplating the interconnected threads of what happens in academe. I know we sort of in principle understand how so much of what we do in higher education is connected. People talk about that interconnectedness in principle all the time in different ways. But I don't think one really deeply reflects on that interconnectedness until asks come in and you have to give yourself a moment of pause and reflect and realize how one sided a relationship is and how boundaries are a thing that need to be respected. This had me in turn thinking about ..read more

This has been an incredibly busy week for me. On top of the work that I do on a regular basis I had the honour of presenting to information and library professional colleagues at UNBC and other colleges/universities from the north on accessible and ethical GenAI considerations. On Wednesday I was part of a great keynote panel at Centennial College's teaching and learning symposium. Then on Thursday I had the privilege of keynoting to colleagues at Canadore College. I also facilitated two workshops on Accessible Assessment, along with a pedagogical reading group. Add to that a very busy back to ..read more

Today I wanted to reflect on something that seems to be a bit of a theme in the discussions that I have been having lately which is energy. Some folk are getting close to, or are starting their spring break periods right now, and it is often a time that folk reflect on energy. This comes up in terms of thinking about the energy they have already put into the courses they are teaching, the relationship building that comes with this responsibility, and the energy that folk in turn feel like they are getting back from learners in different scenarios. As we get closer to places in the term where t ..read more

This week my blog is going to focus on something I have been thinking a lot about and talking about with colleagues and friends, which is the courses that we used to teach or the sessions we used to facilitate, that we don't anymore, and how they still haunt us in different ways. I used to teach a women's literature course, one version at a university, and one at a community college, for around a decade. A decade is a long time to teach a class. In a decade a lot of the ways you teach the course will definitely shift. Your assessments will change, the texts will change, the way you facilitate ..read more

I spent most of today doing what I used to do on Saturdays which is trying to relax and think through things. But because this week was a bit emotionally and cognitively intense, I spent most of it in bed listening to podcasts and trying to avoid thinking about the topic of the blog post this week. It did not succeed, because I have been carrying this deep disappointment in so many people that I used to consider academic international colleagues that I haven't really known what to do with my feelings. I've written poems, but that disappointment still clings and stings. You see I am trying to r ..read more

Happy 2024, folks! Another year and another semester is upon us and so is another round of my biweekly blog posts. I am not the type of person who does resolutions, instead I pick a word and that word becomes the focus of my year. This year it was a real toss up between what word I would pick, but I selected the word comfort. The other word that it could have been was trust, but I decided that it was a lot more difficult to focus on trust more holistically in my life at the moment for various reasons than it is to focus on comfort this year.  So of course being the person I am I always lo ..read more

I am not the type of person to speak in absolutes, especially since the work that I do is the kind of work that always reminds folk that context is a thing. However, the conversations that I have been having with instructors, students, graduate students, and other people tangentially connected to higher education, including parents, suggest that this semester has been the most difficult semester for so many. There are many reasons for this and I am going to use this last blog post of 2023 to think through a bit of these reasons and open it up to your thoughts and ideas. I will put them in list ..read more