By: Charlie Smith
November 15, 2018
In the November 15 Education Feature of the Georgia Straight, teacher candidate Natasha Philibert-Palmer says she hopes to encourage more girls and Indigenous students to discover the joy of science.
Link to full text.
This year LLED has chosen an amazing local non-profit charity that strives to provide books for children in need, Books for Me! Literacy Foundation. In an effort to raise awareness of this organization and have a larger impact, we have received the support of the UBC Education Library! Together our communities will collect gently used/new books, as well as money donations, for this non-profit organization from November 16 – December 14.
In addition, we are reaching out to our education community at UBC in hopes that you will also participate and help us donate books to this wonderful cause.
Books for Me! asks that donated books:
You can donate books at both the LLED office (PCOH 2013) and the UBC Education Library in Scarfe. You can also donate money at the LLED office.
Please help us support this amazing organization that helps to build children’s libraries by donating books directly to children in Vancouver !
If you have any questions or concerns regarding donations, please do not hesitate to contact Liza Navarro.
By: Charlie Smith
November 14th, 2018
Many British Columbians don’t realize that there are more than 70,000 Indigenous students in the province’s K-12 public-school system. That’s about 13 percent.
Yet only about two percent of B.C.’s approximately 42,000 certified public-school teachers are Indigenous, according to UBC’s associate dean for Indigenous education, Jan Hare.
On November 15, SSHRC launches its seventh annual Storytellers contest. SSHRC is once again challenging postsecondary students to show Canadians how social sciences and humanities research affects our lives, our world and our future prosperity.
The contest is open to all students, graduate and undergraduate, enrolled at Canadian postsecondary institutions. The task is to tell the story, in three minutes or 300 words, of a SSHRC-funded research project—their own or a professor’s. Each year, a jury selects 25 finalists to receive a $3,000 cash prize and specialized training in research communications. At the 2019 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a second jury will select the final five winners, who will receive an expense-paid trip for their presentations to be featured at the prestigious SSHRC Impact Awards.
For further details on this year’s Storytellers contest, please follow them on Twitter, watch the #SSHRCStorytellers and visit the website.
Participant questions should be addressed to Storytellers@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca.
It has come to the attention of the Faculty of Education that multiple phishing scams have started to appear in peoples inboxes. While the UBC Cybersecurity team continues to investigate this matter, we would like to ask that everyone remains vigilant to help protect information security and data at UBC.
Report any of the following instances to security@ubc.ca immediately:
Be on the look-out for the following in your day to day emails:
If you have already provided your credentials to a website or opened an attachment that you are unsure about, please also contact security@ubc.ca. This may help the UBC Cybersecurity Team in identifying other victims and to identify any patterns.
As staff and faculty at UBC, it is our responsibility to keep our information and data safe. Please remain on heightened alert given the recent circumstances, and help deter any future compromises by reporting any suspicious activity to security@ubc.ca and sending a copy to Dr. Natasha Boskic, Director, Learning Design, at natasha.boskic@ubc.ca.
Read more about Cybersecurity at UBC
The Yenching Academy offers a highly customizable Master’s program in China Studies for English speakers with varied levels of Chinese language competency, and brings together a cohort of rigorously selected young scholars from around the globe who show promise to lead and innovate in their fields. At the core of the one-year residential program lies its emphasis on interdisciplinarity and its aim to push the study of China beyond the boundaries of traditionally defined Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines, by incorporating the experiences and intellectual training of its diverse student body.
The Yenching Academy’s generous fellowship includes:
Application deadline, November 23, 2018 @ 4:00 pm through Go Global
If you have any questions about the application process or the program, please contact James Leeder, Go Global, at go.global@ubc.ca.
This year, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) will be hosting two regional New Teachers’ Conference. The conferences are a professional development opportunity designed specifically for teachers and teachers teaching on call in their first five (5) years of teaching, as well as teachers candidates.
Friday, April 5 2019
Vernon Lodge & Conference Centre
3914 – 32nd Street
Vernon, British Columbia
V1T 5P1
Friday, May 10 2019
Vancouver Island Conference Centre
101 Gordon Street
Nanaimo, British Columbia
V9R 5J8
Complete the Workshop Proposal Submission Form here.
It has been 100 years since World War One ended and since then we have still seen a constant stream of conflicts around the world. Many soldiers see others killed or lose limbs in battle, which has created a prevailing attitude among them of “why am I to complain about my time in the service? Others have had it worse than me.” This unfortunately comes with the territory of being a solider, since they are seen as someone who can handle anything that is thrown at them. With Remembrance Day approaching, we remember those who have lost their lives, it’s also important to remember that those who return from battle don’t always return whole.
Times seem to be changing as we look at the wellbeing of our veterans, not just physically but emotionally and mentally. As we grow, we are starting to move from a mindset of soldiers don’t need psychiatric help during or post service to a place where we are actively creating programs that will get them the help they require. We are starting to recognize the immense toll that war and military service can have on those who choose to devote their lives to the protection of people around the world.
Helping to usher in this new world of understanding and change is the UBC developed Veterans Transition Program. First created by Dr. Marv Westwood, out of the Centre of Group Counselling & Trauma (CGCT) at the Faculty of Education in UBC, the program helps men and women returning from military service transition to productive civilian life. Having now treated one-thousand military veterans over the last 20 years, the CGCT is helping to craft a new narrative about our returning veterans and how they can be helped with stress injuries, most commonly known as Post Traumatic Stress or PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress can cause depression, anxiety, shame and an increased risk of suicide for those who are affected.
The program that has been put together consists of a series of group sessions help on weekends over a six week period. This approach to post-service counselling has shown to get through to veterans in a way that traditional one-on-one counselling has not based on feedback from its participants. Alongside the group counselling, veterans are made to take an action-based approach of the Therapeutic Enactment exercises. The veterans use actions as well as words to describe the traumatic experiences of their time in service. This is to help the veterans work through the events as in most cases the trauma that they have experience has been caused by actions they were part of or witnessed. There for some traumas can’t be repaired by just talking about them.
Tim Laidler the executive director of the CGCT is himself a veteran who has gone through the Veterans Transition Program. Mr. Laidler served a tour of duty in Kandahar in 2008. Coaxed into the program by a concerned friend, it helped him get his life back on track and inspired him to do a Master’s degree in Counselling Psychology.
“Marv and his colleagues have refined this work over twenty years, always listening to the feedback offered by the vets themselves,” says Mr. Laidler. “So much time has been devoted to helping vets come forward to ask for help. Now they’re coming forward. That tide has turned. The challenge now is having enough trained clinicians to help them.”
Mr. Laidler refers here to a growing waiting list for the program which now contains 435 veterans who have signed up for the course but must wait for spots to open.
With the proven success of the CGCT’s Veterans Transition Program and the obvious need for expansion of the program, Veterans Affairs has granted further support for the program by awarding a $250,000 grant to help the open a new clinic and extend the amount of help that can be provided.
With the new clinic, the CGCT hopes to bring down the number of Veterans on the waiting list to a more manageable number and getting veterans the help they require as they move back into their civilian lives.
We would like to congratulate the CGCT on this recent funding and we look forward to seeing how the program expands as it continues to support our veterans across Canada.
To learn more about the Veterans Transition Program please visit their site.
Note: Interested applicants please contact Robert Olaj in the ORE by November 23 to discuss proposal development support.
The Trans-Atlantic Platform’s 2018 Social Innovation Call for Proposals, supports international projects that can contribute to increasing our understanding of societal transformations and the role of social innovation.
The call brings together funding organizations from Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Poland and the United Kingdom. It is open to teams with members from at least three of these countries. Teams must include partners from both sides of the Atlantic.
Research partners will receive funding from the national funding agency from their country of origin for projects that can last up to 36 months.
Collaboration through this call will enable researchers to:
· address social challenges, such as the digital divide; urban and rural developments and cohesion; access to public services and infrastructure; ethnic conflicts; human rights and legislation; the current state of democracy; and equality and social, political and human values;
· learn from the experiences of multisectoral collaboration for social innovation practiced on both sides of the Atlantic (e.g., innovative forms of economic organization, new digital technologies and accessibility; global and local environmental issues and sustainable development; strategies for social cohesion; integration of health and social care services; and improvement of education and overcoming of linguistic barriers);
· apply and adapt approaches from one locale to another; and
· generalize and/or scale up local experiences.
The deadline for final applications is February 14, 2019, at 2 p.m. (Central European Time). Learn more about the competition and the application process.
SSHRC will be offering a webinar about the competition on November 22, 2018. Consult the Upcoming Webinars page for instructions on how to participate.
Congratulations to Liam Doherty, LLED PhD candidate, for being awarded a 2018/2019 Mitacs Accelerate Grant. His project, in collaboration with the organization, Education without Borders and Indigenous Storybooks, is titled: “Stories without Borders: A Canadian/Mexican study of translation, identity, and Indigenous language literacy”.
Well done, Liam!
Learn more about the grant at https://www.mitacs.ca/en/programs/accelerate
