Brenna Clarke Gray’s Blog
It’s April, cats and kittens, and that means that for many of us, conference season is quickly approaching. We are paying fees and drafting papers and reminding ourselves of where we’re committed to and when and then panicking about conflicts. Or at least, that’s my usual April. Not so much this year. Most of the […]
What follows are the remarks I presented today to a working group of British Columbia’s Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future skills. This group brings together the Vice-Presidents Academic (or designate) for the colleges and universities across BC. Thank you for the invitation to speak today. For our team, this is wonderful timing, as we’ve […]
There’s a poster in my office on campus that means a lot to me — I’ve been out of the office for some time, obviously, but coming back today I was struck by it. Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead people to join you. Ruth […]
Who does our thinking for us as teachers? Increasingly, it seems like both educational technology companies and our own administrators are interested in outsourcing the judgement part of our teaching to algorithms. I have written about these algorithms before, and my most significant concern with them is this notion of outsourcing something which is, for […]
We can and must do better. I am going to start this post by pointing you to someone brighter, smarter, and more coherent today, because Tim Fawns theorizes everything I am about to rant about in his thoughtful “An Entangled Pedagogy.” Honestly, you can read Tim and skip the rest of what I have to […]
I was going to blog every day, and now I have missed six [since drafting this, it has been several more — whee]. I am going to try to write back into that space over the next few days, but I want to meditate a bit on the last few days. The short answer to […]
I’ve spent a lot of today thinking about a viral article about how to make your kids “successful.” The definition of success was, of course, wealth, which is so depressing. The woman who wrote it can tell you all about her CEO kids and doesn’t spill a single word about whether or not they are […]
All of my grandparents served in the Second World War in some capacity, especially on the Home Front in England. But when I think about Remembrance Day, I think most about my paternal grandfather, perhaps because as an academic and the only Canadian in the bunch, his experience in an alien war on foreign soil […]
One. Laptop / phone / technology bans. This conversation happens on Twitter a minimum of three times a year and every single iteration goes exactly the same way. Someone says they want to ban laptops in their class because, I don’t know, attention. Someone else (rightly) says, hm, seems ableist. Then the first person says, […]
… I do not have an answer to this question that anyone finds satisfactory. Least of all me. Today is three weeks. On a podcast I was listening to the other day, one of the hosts said that the thing he has noticed about experiences of grief is that somewhere around the three-to-four weeks point, […]