“Remember, remember, the 5th of November…” I know that likely only makes sense to someone British. It’s from a rhyme about a 16th century plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Oddly, it seems somewhat fitting at the moment, given the apparent threat to democracy in so many places around the world right now. Education is fundamental to democracy and only if we continue to strive for diversity and inclusion, to make sure all voices are heard and that everyone who wants access to education, has it.

I’ve signed up for a webinar in a couple of weeks on ‘Hyflex’ environments and am curious what I’ll learn. I’ve also identified the sessions I’d like to attend at the POD conference coming up. There are several interesting ones – “Advocating for Equity and Inclusivity in the Remote Teaching Shift;” “Equity, Decoloniality, and Social Justice;” and “Changing Pedagogy: Bringing Indigenous Student Voices to the Center,” to name but a few. I’m intrigued by the session on, “Facilitating Multi-Modal Storytelling for Critical Reflection and Dialogue Across Difference,” as that ties in with the outline for the International and Intercultural Toolkit I put together for the CiCan Application.

Working on a Program Review website has been a welcome distraction from world events this week. I love WordPress. I’ve still got a lot to learn obviously, but mostly I find it fairly intuitive. Now that I’ve created drop down menus with sub-categories, multiple times, I’m getting quicker at seeing how to move the pieces around. It helped to begin by creating an outline on poster paper with stickies – an old-fashioned approach but necessary for the visual and kinesthetic learner that I am. For now I’ve deliberately included some repetition in the site (e.g., the Guides available in a couple of places), as what seems intuitive to me in terms of where to find a resource, will likely not be, for someone else. Once all the information is in the site, it’ll make sense to get a few different people to play around with the navigation to make sure it’s broadly intuitive to most people. Creating this site is also helping me identify where there are gaps, in terms of the resources we currently have. There’s still a lot of work to do on this, but I feel like it’s coming together.

This week I’ve also spent time on finalizing details for the External Review Virtual Visit coming up. As far as I can tell, we have the ‘expected’ covered. Let’s hope the ‘unexpected’ decides to take a couple of days off. There have been enough ‘unexpected events’ for CTLI  this week (thinking of you Terri and hoping you’re starting to feel better!).