Photo by Jeet Dhanoa on Unsplash

This has been a week of learning and relearning, which seems apt considering I will be spending the next couple of months supporting / coordinating the visit of two international students from Belgium, who are completing their internship at the College. It’s an interesting time in any professional field right now and especially in teaching. New teachers will have to have great capacity to adapt, pivot and be flexible, and know that their professional development will be a life long journey. I’m keeping this top of mind as I help plan their activities for their time here.

International Development Week takes place next week. I’ve been relearning how to edit videos in Kaltura. And then had the laborious work of going over the automatically generated captions for each of the faculty interview videos I made, to ensure they made sense. There were some funny moments (how did ‘Hi Margaret’ come out as High Murder?), but overall, the technology is fabulous; light years away from the challenges of transcribing data for my PhD thesis. I’m also very grateful for our college tech team, who have helped me out a couple of times this week.

This week I also met with some nursing students, as a result of doing a teaching session with their class the week before. It was an opportunity to revisit my learning around the experiences of Internationally Educated Nurses and their immigration experiences, and for the students to critically examine this research in the light of current times / events.

I’ve also spent time trawling through various institutional sites to find different approaches to writing mission and vision statements. It’s hard to find examples that are ‘intercultural’ specific. What’s noticeable, and as one would imagine, the few that do, have a more evolved approach to incorporating intercultural learning as integral to their strategic plans. The best one so far is TRU Intercultural Understanding – Values and Strategic Change Goals . I’ve drafted a some language and keep going back to it each day. I’m noticing a tension between wanting to find a way of approaching the intercultural through an Indigenous lens (recognizing my own limitations in being able to do so, as a white settler), and the fact that mission / vision statements are more colonial ways of framing activities. This seems to be a metaphor for much of what we are doing in education right now. The very systems we want to decolonize, demand a colonized approach to get through the system in order to make any changes.

That said, it is important to know the path you want to tread (mission) and how you’ll travel (vision). I’m focusing on the path through the forest, the map needed in order to not get lost, and the vision of an unending journey.