Nuanced. - 25. Dr. Martha Dow: Sociologist, Professor & Director of CHASI & Sociologist

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

Martha Dow is an associate professor, community leader, sociologist, mother, and Director of the Community Health and Social Innovation Hub (CHASI) at the University of the Fraser Valley.Martha Dow's most notable classes include: Introduction to Sociology, Death and Dying, Sociology of Families, Deviant Behaviour, and Sociology of Sexuality.Dr. Dow’s work emphasizes action-oriented research, community collaboration, and evidence-based decision-making. She completed her BA and MA in Sociology at the University of Western Ontario and her PhD in Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia.Send us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

I think that you have a tremendous impact on students at the Fraser Valley and I've gotten to hear a lot of amazing feedback from students that you might not even have known, brought that back to criminology and talked about, oh, have you taken this professor, Martha Dow, she's one of the best, like, and when I was asking other students, who do you think I should have on from the University of the Fraser Valley? That was one of the comments they had was Martha Dow. Your name stands out amongst all of the great professors at the University of the Fraser Valley, which I think I should have on from the University of the Fraser Valley. Which I think to saying something because there's a lot of talent there. So I'm curious as to how you got into education because I remember reading that you had your grandparents and they played a role in how you choose to approach education. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure, yeah. So I come from a bit of some lineage.

So my grandmother, my nana, my mom's mom, was an educator way back and actually was instrumental back in Ontario in Middlesex County establishing special education. So kind of I knew that and she went off to teach. I mean, certainly during those times, you know, depression and all of that. As she came out of that, education was always sort of her connection to community about making change and making difference. So I always heard those stories growing up. My mom was an educator and teacher as well, as well as being an actor.

And, you know, there's a chance for us to chat about how she brought those together later in life, actually, to teach professors. acting skills. So, and then I have two sisters who are also teachers. So there's four girls all together and three of us are educators. So I think very early, books were always important in our house. It was always important to understand what was going on in the world. Our neighborhood was important and so lots of time on the front porch talking about issues. So I think whether it's formal education or informal, it was always a responsibility in our house to to know, like to figure it out, to ask people that had lived experience. You know, we didn't use all that language when I was growing up,

but I think that was it. My dad was a mechanic, and I always remember he had the newspaper out, and he was reading it cover to cover and would talk about world events, and you just knew there was a responsibility at the dinner table to kind of know what's going on or ask good questions. Why? Because I think that that's where a lot of people who perhaps don't see themselves in post-secondary school, go, why do I need to keep up with the news?

Why do it? Like, I want to get away from all of that. I want peace and quiet and go to my job and come home. So where does that responsibility come in? In your view, what is citizenship really look like to you? Yeah, I think that's such a profound question, and I wish we all talked about it more. So, again, just flipping back for a second to our family, there was a responsibility to your neighbor. And that was citizenship.

There was a responsibility for my parents to their church community. So that was a, you know, that was citizenship. You had to be there. There was a need to know because without knowing and asking questions, you couldn't really do service in their construction of that. So I think, and then when I translate that into what I hear, when I have conversations, and you're right. I mean, and certainly in the pandemic,

people have felt the need to shut it down. And yet there's no time, certainly in my lifetime, where it's been more important to make sure we don't shut it down. I completely agree. So I think trying to articulate and communicate that it's a responsibility. It's not a choice. And some of us have tremendous privilege in terms of our access to being able to engage with our communities.

And, you know, I don't work for jobs, part-time jobs, trying to figure out how to put food on the table for my kids. I have tremendous privilege. came from a family that, well, my parents did not have post-secondary education, that wasn't an option, that wasn't a choice, that that was just which school are you going to. So I take that seriously, but I still think if we can find crevices for people to understand, one, their responsibility to others, but also how that fulfills us, right? There's a need for us, in particular in these times, to work together on these issues. Right. Well, let's start off, I guess, with how you

approach things because I think that that's where the rubber hits the pavement and really makes a difference for people to be willing and open to learning new things. And so before we get into perhaps some of the problems, we can start with what is going well and what do you see? Because you have a very unique approach to your students, I think, that I think deserves to be recognized because I think it does facilitate the environment for people to engage with the material and not feel pressured or judged. And so can you tell us a little bit about how you approach teaching and how perhaps that was informed by your parents and grandparents. Yeah, yeah, thanks for that. I think it's a bit of a stage. So I think you need to embrace that

and not pretend it's not. And I think there's a responsibility with that stage. So I think, again, my mom was an actor. And so she really early said, you know, in a theater, the lights go down, but in a classroom, they shouldn't. And I always, always remember that. And I mean, we're in the age of PowerPoints and all of that. I don't use them. I'm not a big electronic. Many people would call me a dinosaur, I'm sure. So I think that integration of not sort of feeling the permission to say, well, yeah, it's boring, but we have to get through it. And I hear my colleagues talk about content, excuse me, that, you know, well, we got to get them through it so they can get to the good. I'm thinking, oh my God, you're talking about intro sociology. That's one of the most

exciting courses there is or methods or whatever it is. But I think it's that hook about saying, how is it applicable to you? How is it meaningful for you? And I try to do that with my students. So in lecture, and I do use the word lecture, even though I keep being told in the university, we shouldn't be using that word anymore. But for me, lecture is a conversational. Like, yes, I'm delivering some content. And I don't, I think if I don't recognize that, I'm not being fair to my students. I get to pick the textbook. I get to pick. what we talk about. I get to pick what we don't talk about. So I try to approach it and find hooks for everybody in the class. And I'm not going to be successful all the time, but ways that

they can take big, nasty theories and say, oh, that actually fits for what I just experienced in my workplace as a barista. You know, like that, there's a parallel there. And I think if you can just start to pull those threads for students, and I try to do that in the class, it's very conversational, we spend the first part of class, I say you have to come, and I say it's an obligation to know what's going on in the world. So find a news, a podcast, a whatever that informs you kind of in that local, you know, national and international way. And we start the class each week, each class, saying, what's going on in the world that connected to what you read this week? And what I try to do is wherever they want to start, I don't have lecture notes, I have to go

in script. We'll go in that way. That's the entry point for the week. So I think it works. Yeah. So it's like a living thing to you because you're willing to find the door wherever it kind of move, for the most part, wherever it moves and make that accessible. Because if I'm being honest, then I had Jonathan Haidt on the podcast and he's very much into theories.

And one thing I had to confess to him and to you is that I had a certain arrogance when I was in first, second, even maybe third year, that theories were irrelevant. that cool these people thought these things but what does it matter so I'll just get through the course and move on and the more I understand these ideas the more I see that they have direct connections with the everyday impact and once you start to understand those then you can approach it in new ways and you can go what do I want to look at it from that perspective or this perspective and there's you can take like a psychological perspective a sociological perspective and emotional a financial like there's so many different ways to look at things. And I think that that's one of the tools that theories and looking at things from new perspectives gives us. But I'm curious as to hear what your thoughts are, has that always been the case where first and second year there's a little bit of arrogance? Is that more recent? Or what do you see from that perspective? Because you've been teaching for a fair while. You've gotten to see kind of the trends of students approach. And I'm wondering

if I'm unique that I was arrogant or if that's something that most people start out with. I think most people, particularly coming, if you're transitioning from high school into university, you start talking about theories and they're, they kind of sometimes have the feeling that I expressed about some of my colleagues where they're like, well, how does, Carl Marx, why are you talking about? Why does that relate to what I'm talking, what I'm experiencing? So I think that's pretty natural. And I think our responsibility is in the first year to get that turn. So I wouldn't even want to see much of it in the second year. Like I think, you know, you're thinking about crim, you know, I used to say, if you don't come, if you're a police officer and you're knock on a door of a domestic, and you're not thinking about patriarchal structures, you're not talking about power imbalances.

You're not realizing that you're coming to that door with a heteronormative lens, expecting to see a husband and wife or a man and woman behind that door. And what's going to happen when you open the door is see two women or see two men. So that's all theoretically informed. You know, Breshnaf says there's nothing more practical than a good theory. So getting students to realize that practicality of theory is, I think, the hook. Yeah, that's so important. And I think that as you develop through a university, you start to see those tie-ins and start to understand how to move forward. Can you tell us about the courses that you teach and what you're kind of looking for through those courses?

What are the kind of the things that you really want students to take away from it? Yeah, yeah. So one of my favorite courses, you hear lots of times in universities and UFV is no exception where profs don't want to teach intro courses. They kind of feel like they've moved, you know, they do more senior classes. 101 is the most important course. I see it as recruitment. So that's sociology 101.

And in that class, my real goal is to give them a really a buffet, a bit of a sense of what the discipline is. and most importantly, how it connects to their lives and how it can empower what they do. And again, that is in their student job, it's at their dinner table, it's at their home, et cetera. So I teach that one. So kind of giving them an overview and hoping that they'll become interested enough

to start taking some second-year sociology courses. I teach a couple at that level, I Jen. I teach in deviance, so I have a second year and a fourth-year course in deviance. Those courses on deviance, because I taught in Crimm as well, My goal with those is to think a lot about non-criminal forms. We have so much criminal deviants in our faces, whether it's on Netflix or whether it's on the news or in our lives.

And so I try to pay a lot of attention to the non-criminal forms. So body image, you know, modification, mental health, a huge one that we want to spend time thinking about. Constructions of difference in terms of sexual minority status. So I do that at the second and fourth, you know, try to get them. kind of interested. And fourth, all of my senior level courses, I do what's called a learning contract. And it basically gives the students 30 to 40 percent of their mark, depending on the class, to design themselves. What do you want to be graded on? So that's a tool that's been incredibly effective. And I'll come back to that in just a second. And then I teach death and dine

second year course. Informed a lot, I think, from my own personal experiences and interest in terms of how we respond to dying and death in our society. And then I teach policy and program evaluation and sexuality. Okay, well, that's a lot to dive into right there. But before we dive into those specific topics, I'm curious, why sociology? What makes that so relevant?

Yeah, it's, I think back to high school, and I think this hasn't changed enough, is it's all about what do you want to be. So we hear about teachers college. I came out of high school thinking, clinical psychologist. I think back now, why? Because it was one of the jobs that everybody talked about. So it's very job focused. Here I hear a lot of people talking about teaching and nursing, particularly from a gendered point of view. So I took Introsite, I took Introsho at

Western, and I took my sociology class from Professor Carl Keene, and I remember very early thinking, that's how I see the world. Like, it's these big things. It's these big things. It's these structures and I'm I'm a lesbian and I was closeted until I was probably early you know 21-22-ish so to go into university and you know later I was 19 because in Ontario we have grade 13 and I'm a January birthday so to go and start to see my experiences of oppression not explicitly talked about so much but starting to understand how structures tell us if we're okay or not so that resonated really early. And then we read a book, the textbook, and then there was this book

called A Poison Stronger Than Love, and it was talking about indigenous communities and water supply and marginalization. I, again, structures, relationships in terms of those big macro, and it just, that was it. I was like, it's not psych, it's soche. What's a major look like? And off I went. Wow, that's awesome. And so can we elaborate a little bit more on what the details of what you teach are. And you were just talking about a few really interesting ones and the one that's coming to mind is the death and dying because I had Sue Nodon, who's a Chilawak City Councilor,

and she's also the executive director for the Chilawak Hospice Society. And it was amazing to me to have her on because it really made me think about how much we don't talk about it unless somebody we know is in it. And even the responses you kind of get when you mention to somebody, yeah I just lost my dog or I just lost my like family member the response is often like oh I'm so sorry to hear that and then we move on and I think one thing that I was thinking a lot about is why don't we ask people and follow up with the people at least we're close with like how have you

been processing that loss like what has that been like for you and can you tell me some memories of your family member because I think what I've gotten used to is nobody wants to hear about my family or what's going on with me like we get into that mindset where it's like I don't want to bore people with the problems I'm facing. And so we get into this instinctual like, yeah, like I lost them. And then we don't share it with anyone. We don't tell the stories of how this person impacted us when we're having a barbecue or just kind of spending time together to have those dialogues.

And even when I see my friends, we're talking about what happened last weekend or what we're doing at work. We're not talking about the things where perhaps the person stayed up that night, thinking about their family member crying, like reflecting on that loss. And we don't bring that forward. And I've had the pleasure of seeing my partner share the loss of her cat, which was someone she was close, like a cat she was close with since like age four or five all the way through. And so she lost that cat about a year ago.

And she still processes that. Every once in a while, she'll need to take a couple of hours to process that. And she like sees our other cat meow or something and feels that connection and just feels that and wants to go through that. And so we talk about like, oh, what are these memories? And we go through that. But then I realize nobody else really does that. and you don't see that in community. So can you tell us a little bit about that course

and what you kind of see from your perspective? Yeah, and I'd love, I think it's interesting for us to pay attention to people like you and your partner to realize, so why are you doing it? I think it's always, we often look at why we're not doing it, which I think is important. And then it's also really informative. I've always found, why are they doing it differently?

What can we learn in terms of what your partner and you share? So, yeah, death was a big part of my upbringing. in the sense that my mom lost, by the time she was 21, she had lost her father, her stepfather, her favorite uncle, her best friend, and her firstborn. So she would always say that death defined her life. My father also lost his mom when he was 11. So both of my parents lost their parents,

a parent when they were very young and that and that shaped them and and profoundly um marked how they related to each other and I think in wonderful ways they shared that um certainly the loss of their firstborn my brother um of cids shaped them forever um so in our family it was present but we weren't always great about talking about it because as you mentioned most people aren't but you knew it was there. And then we had a number of deaths in my early childhood family deaths. And my mom's side is Quaker. And so we were always intrigued.

There were different customs and rituals in terms of the Quaker experience. What is a Quaker, sorry. Yeah, so you might know lots about in terms of pacifist and a religious belief where there's a lot more communal engagement. And it's so neat that you asked me because I've got these stack of books that I have been meaning to immerse myself in. What I'm most familiar about in terms of Quaker ritual is a Quaker meeting house that we would have the funerals on that side of the family that were Quaker and very communal. So there might be someone who's leading the ritual but not in the way that we think about

an officiant and then people would stand up. It wasn't planned, but you would stand up and you would share and then kind of when there was enough silence. Then we knew that was done. We moved to the next piece and there's communal burial in terms of the symbolic aspects of putting dirt on the casket, etc. But I love that you asked me because it's one of my wish moments to find some time in the world to learn more about that side because my kids are very intrigued by it as well. And it informed us in very loose ways. So, and then I became, when I was going to do my master's, there were two areas I was interested in, palliative care and youth offenders. So I went and volunteered in a palliative care unit and I volunteered at a youth facility, correctional facility. I cried

constantly at the palliative care and wasn't much help to anybody and realized maybe that's not the place I want to do my academic space right now. And so I did it on violent young offenders, my master's degree. So there was always there. So the chance to come back and teach a course, design a course and teach a course on death and dying was really me coming back to that interest that I think I had in my master's program. And the other thing I'd just say about it is you'll notice by my list of courses I like to teach courses about things people don't want to talk about. Sex, deviance, and death, right? So I'm intrigued about the silence and I'm also intrigued and hopeful that we can have more meaningful conversations. And going back to your base about why

we don't. I couldn't agree more. We're uncomfortable with emotions so often from a Western point of view, I think. As soon as I ask you in a really meaningful way, how you are in terms of a loss, I'm opening up myself for a question to come back this way. And I think that vulnerability is incredibly scary to so many. And for me, teaching, it is also a way to process, right? and I, my personal, my professional, my political are deeply embedded and I feel privileged because of that, right? Yeah, I really agree. And I've heard somebody say that you want to be the person at the funeral who's helping everybody through it, the kind of anchor in those moments to make sure everybody's fed, make sure that everybody has everything they need because that's a meaningful role in such a tough time. And it anchors you to something where you know what you're doing is going to have a positive impact. hear regularly like oh like you should be happy the goals to be happy like try and try and do what makes you happy and I think that you working in palliative care really puts that argument and that

claim to bed because it's not happy it's not necessarily a joyful day in the office but it's a meaningful day in the office you're making a difference in someone's life near the end and I think sometimes we think humans are too fragile and we treat them like they're fragile by not appreciating that there are people who do palliative care every single day. That's their whole career, and all they watch is death and dying and help people process that, and then they're gone. And you would think that that person would experience immediate burnout, but these people do it for really long periods of time

and actually find meaning in what they do. They're not joyful, perhaps, about it, but they find meaning and responsibility in playing that role in the community. And those are the people, to me, that I want to lift up and bring awareness to because they're the role models. They're people who are willing to do something where, when you think of the loss of your family member, like when we had to put the cat down, the people at the veterinary place, they were amazing. They handled everything so well. They were so thoughtful.

They spoke in calm voices. They weren't like, okay, rapid, like they were no loud sounds or anything. They played great music, and they just tried to create a setting where we could grieve. And I don't think we give those people the recognition they deserve when we're in those moments because we are grieving. And then once that's over, we kind of leave. And so I'm interested to hear what it was like to kind of be in that environment and watch people, like, pass away. And obviously it is sad. But what was the responsibility like in those moments?

Yeah. So, I mean, for me, there were important aunts. So I come from a long line of really powerful women. And so watching those. But the most profound ones most recently have certainly been my parents. So my dad died in 2012 and my mom died in 2015. And very different. My dad had pancreatic cancer, and so pretty short timeline, you know, kind of an April to January experience, healthy his whole life until that.

And then my mom very sudden of a heart attack. And so also intriguing in terms of very different getting chances to know, see it coming, talk about it, help my kids process it with my mom very. sudden and the matriarch's gone. So the, you know, my mom is the, as I call it in class, who gets to wear the t-shirt, right? The primary griever. So when my dad dies, my mom's still there, but she's still kind of our mom. My mom dies. You've lost that. We, you know, lots of the literature calls it a middle-aged orphan. You're next, right? So there's no buffer anymore. So those experiences were really different. And I was teaching the course with both of them. So it was very interesting to process their deaths as I'm teaching content, right?

So, and I think, you know, we want to frame everyone in death in such positive ways, in very narrow positive ways. I was writing the eulogy for my dad and my mom said, I don't want to know it. I don't want you to read it, but I'd like to know a bit about it. And I said, you know, so I said some things. And I said, you know, I said, I'm going to talk about dad being stubborn. She said, do you think he was stubborn? you know, maybe he was determined.

And I said, Mom, oh my God, that's a riot. Like, it's okay that he was stubborn. And she's like, yeah, he was the most stubborn person ever. I'm like, yeah, let's like, like, why can't we let people in death be complicated? Because I think the more we do that, it allows us to really experience them. If I have to make, if we all, and we do, tend to, if we have to make everyone perfect, there's no space for us to engage in grief, I don't think, in a meaningful way. So those are this, you know, kind of those journeys have been really important.

We in our house talk lots about my kids' grandparents, right? Well, just last night we're like, oh my, well, that's grandpa. And he's like, you know, and he's like, I know, you know, that kind of thing. So I think that memory making is something I got from my childhood. My parents talked about the people in their lives that they had lost all the time. Yeah. I definitely feel that because I lost my grandmother this year. and she worked at Coqualeza and she ended up meeting my mother so we're not biologically related but she was a nurse at Coqualeita when my mother was in the hospital and she ended up seeing that she needed a lot of care and a lot of support and she knew that she wasn't going to get the highest quality medical attention if she was just put into a home or returned to the reserve and so she decided to bring her into her home and raise her and then when she

30 years later was pregnant with me, she ended up helping raise me. And so I really clearly see the impact that she had on my mother and then me because I likely wouldn't be here doing any of this without her making that decision way before I was even a thought in anybody's mind and being able to appreciate that. But I find that it's difficult for others, even within the family, to understand and really grapple with what that decision meant. Like, because you can compare choosing a job to the decision she made, but I think that they're nowhere near the same decision and the impact and the consequences that have had for me, my partner, my mother, our future children, like all of these people are unknowingly impacted by this one decision. And so I agree

with you, though, that being able to look at the person holistically, because the one thing, she had dementia near the end. And so one thing that I noticed a lot of people didn't notice was the great sense of humor she had right near the end. It didn't go anywhere. That was one of the things that kind of stayed that I just wanted to nurture when I got to be around her and see her, even though it was through glass because of COVID. Being able to experience that humor moment and being able to tell the full story of her and understand her mistakes, but also the great decisions she made. So I really agree with you that I think sometimes we want it to be so positive and we feel like we're doing harm if we mention any of the mistakes or any of the flaws or any of the imperfections,

but that also humanizes the person so there's somebody we can emulate and trying to be unrealistic and say, well, this person made no mistakes. They were great and now they're gone and what a loss for us really misses out on what are the good things that they did that I can emulate and what are the mistakes they made that I want to keep an eye on so I don't repeat them and learn from their mistakes. And I really appreciate you being able to see it from that perspective. Yeah, I mean, I think that's so valuable. And you've hit on so many different conventions about how we grieve, right? You know, and we tend to use language about, you know, better places, which also restricts how much we get to grief, right? So if, you know, one of the

things my mom had said about my dad's eulogy was, um, he's not in a better place, right? Like, his better, best place was with me. Like, we needed more time. And I thought that was so powerful married 61 years, 84 years old when he died. And people would say, oh, it's good. They had a long life. And my mom would say, not close to long enough, right? Like, so we do all this stuff that you should feel less because it was so good or, you know, you know, was there a lot of pain, all those qualifiers that then remind all of us who are living how much we get to feel, how much we should get to talk about. So we do a lot of that in the class, trying to get people to really complicate the conventions, but also look across various cultures about how there

are differences in terms of intimacy with the body, you know, family members being part of bathing, of selecting clothes, of cutting hair, of, you know, different ways that bring us closer to death when so often we want to, you know, to move away from it. You know, if someone dies at home, you know, how quickly we call and have the funeral home come. There's no rush. We feel rushed, but there's no rush. Where do you think that comes from for us? And what cultural differences do you see that perhaps others could incorporate or that you could see would be easier for Western culture to start to incorporate and see as more normalized or look towards something like that? Yeah, I mean, I think there's so many profound connections with the wear of dying. So, you know,

historically, at least from a Western point of view, we did a lot, you know, we died at home. The funeral parlor is, you know, some of that comes from the parlor in our homes, the front living room, as we call it now, and that's where the body would rest. And so people would come and we'd share that. But we also had these strange conventions, you know, might leave a window open or you'd want to make sure you said good things. There's lots of oral history and written history about, I wouldn't want to say anything bad about Aaron because his spirit is moving on, and I don't want Aaron's spirit to hang around too long and be angry with me. So some of that saying positive things come from, comes from that worry, the unknown, the fear of death that is so profound that people experience to such an extent. So I think there's lots of ways we can trace why we do it. And then we moved into hospital dying.

And now you can see more language with hospice discussions and certainly, you know, assisted death legislation where you can see that movement back into the home. is their possibility. There's tremendous privilege in that too, right? Not everybody can. And look at our assumptions around that dying at home. We assume that everyone's going to have this loving, robust family that takes care of them. And so I think there is the lineage of why we tend to do so much the way we do. And yes, there's so many cultural expectations. Students are very intrigued by some threads of Japanese culture historically, whereby after cremation, there were particular family members who would sort through the ashes for the bones. And it was meticulous, right?

It was very attentive. So even that intimacy of body after cremation. So, you know, I think there's so much we can learn also about anniversaries, different cultures, pay much more attention to anniversaries, but it's a time to do storytelling. It's a time to not simply put flowers on a spot. which is important, but it's more than that, and it's different. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more, and I think that the storytelling really gives us a guide, and it's something that I wanted to talk to you about, because culture is very much like a story

we tell ourselves, and then we tell our families about how our culture is and how we should be within it. And I think that a lot of great artists talk about the importance of storytelling. I had Alex Hart on, and he talked about within photography that he's trying to take a picture, but it's a story within that. And so I'm interested in your thoughts on culture and story and how the two kind of relate. Yeah, I mean, the best way that I sort of think about that

is in my own experience with family. And then you can certainly see it from a sociological point of view. But the storytelling that I grew up with and then I encourage my students to do through their projects, right? So those learning contracts allow them to do all sorts of work. that allows them to express the stories of their own, culture, religion, childhood, a familial organization. But stories were important. We'd bother my dad all the time because he'd tell the same ones again and again.

But I noticed later in my parents' life, I brought a tape recorder home when I would visit Ontario and make sure I had those stories that they could, you know, how did they meet? What was, you know, what was it like when my mom was six and her dad died in the car accident? Why did we grow up thinking that it was a drunk driver, but we always assumed it was a different one, but it was my grandfather that was the drunk driver in the accident that killed him. And it's not that my mom ever said it with someone else, but our assumption about how the story unfolded and the unspoken aspects of that all contributed to how we understood responsibility, accountability, all those kinds of things.

So storytelling was huge in our house, both in terms of our family, but also because we came from the theater, right? Like my mom was a professional actor, theater was important to us, and that's all storytelling. And then we would talk about the impact of those stories always. You go to the theater, and then, you know, you go to a play in the afternoon, you'd have dinner, and we sit around the table and talk about it. I think that that is something that's likely missing the most from our idea of movies and, great works at this time is that I don't think we talk about them after enough and I'm I've reiterated this throughout the podcast but to me uh Harry Potter Lord of the Rings the Avengers these are all the stories of our time and I don't think that we're given the devil it to do in

understanding why did people want to read like seven books that were like a thousand pages each like what would pull a kid to want to do that we kind of glossed it over as like oh it's it's in a different world and they're just trying to escape reality and it's like but the story within that is a person who was an orphan who decided to take on responsibility and my partner and i try and rewatch it to understand specifically harry potter because there's never a point in the movie where he ever decides he's going to quit on everybody else and say you know what i tried to beat this person i'm done now i'm going to go home and relax this was too much there's always that willingness to die for others to sacrifice, to lead by example, to break the rules for the benefit of the community.

And the character Dumbledore actually rewards him for being willing to break the rules, despite the fact that you would think from his perspective as being like the head of the school, that he would discourage that, that he would be like, I set the rules so you're supposed to follow them. And I'm curious as to your thoughts on where we're at with our ability to talk about stories and to understand their underlying meanings and how they connect to other things. I'm guessing my colleagues, you know, in English and creative writing are doing a wonderful job, hopefully engaging in that. I think what's, from my perspective, really interesting, it's when disciplines in the university or in communities where we're not sort of expected to,

so if I'm taking creative writing, some of that will be unpacked. How do we allow stories to, and a creative practice, however that looks, to be more embedded in our everyday lives? because then I think we start having those conversations to a greater extent. Part of my impetus for the learning contract was in my Ph.D. I was asked to do, and I was a pretty traditional academic. When, you know, Western, pretty traditional. UBC is a great, you know, SOC has lots of aspects of that traditional approach, both in method and theory.

And we had to read an academic article and then write a poem about it. So I came home and I was cursing all the way home and when my friends and family knew about it, they were laughing because they knew for me it was a haiku. And I'm thinking, what? But out of that incredibly uncomfortable space for me grew my appreciation of the connection of creative artistic expression and the pure academic and the need to blend those and the need to honor both and what they contributes, which I think gets to that heart of storytelling in all sorts of different kinds of ways.

How do we connect the visual to a project? How would you represent what you just read visually so that it could have a greater impact? That's awesome. Can you tell us more about some of the projects you've gotten to see through that? Because for listeners who may not have gone to university, it's always a paper, it's always an exam,

you don't get a choice in it, you just do it, some of its class participation where you just speak up. But this learning contract is unique in that you're trusting and placing responsibility on the students, to deliver something and I think instinctually with that traditional approach to academics all our minds go to these people are going to do the bare minimum possible and try and just skirt by and do nothing and I'm sure that that's the feedback you've gotten from other academics and perhaps students saying like I'm just like what am I supposed to do here and so I'm curious as to what you've actually seen come out of that because you're trusting the students and you're giving them the respect of almost being equals and trusting them with their own education which I think is something that might be. be lacking based on what you say next.

It's like you were in the meetings, Aaron, where I was criticized. I'd have students who would sit on, you know, subcommittees of Senate or other things and come back and say, man, I talked about these learning contracts in a really excited way and I had your colleagues say that you're abdicating your responsibility as a professor to give students 40% of their grade, like things like that, right? And the student came all worried that she'd gotten me in trouble, right? as opposed to, you know, I said, no, that's awesome, right? That's exactly what we're after.

We're going to disrupt the academy. So, yeah, I mean, amazing things. People that don't paint trying to pay to canvas and being vulnerable enough to hand it in. People who were painters, incredibly gifted, do pieces and present it to class. Had someone do a sketch, they had their friend pose, and then they sketch the five phases for Kubler-Ross's Death and Dying,

you know, approach to dying and grief and do those. So they had their friend, they described it to their friend, the friend then posed in a way that they thought reflected the emotion, then the person did it and presented those. Had people, you know, do everything from podcast, had people sculpt pieces

and then relate it to particular concepts in the chorus. I had someone do write an original trumpet piece that did three stages of life and death. And I just wept when I listened to it because as she described it, the trumpet was very excited and happy as the parent was going down

to check on their child in the crib. They found their child dead, which is what the narrative tells. And you can hear the trumpet and they excited in the steps. And then the deep, deep sorrow that comes in that third phase. So I've had people do choreographed dance and dance and then send the video of the dance. all relating it and describing how it connects to the course.

And to be really honest, most times it's very obvious what aspects of the course have moved them. And to your point, students are always trying to do way too much, right? They're like, I'm going to do an original short story for 5%. And then I'm going to do this and I'm like, oh, that is your whole mark. What are you doing? They always want to do too much. And I think it's too bad that we so often assume that students are looking for the quickest, easiest way through, because that's not my experience. When I've given students space to play, they're appreciative, they're scared.

I often also get students saying, I have no idea what you're asking here. And I'm like, well, I know, let's, you know, what are some ideas? Here's some ideas of what other people have done. Do you want to try? I had one student, it was in relation to deviance, take her senior ballet class through Walmart and do. the class in the aisles of Walmart to experience what it is to engage in deviance and then what was the public reaction to deviance, right? So it's super cool. That is super cool. And I do feel like students and faculty can underestimate students.

I think you're right. We are just as guilty of it because I had peers that would say, like, I'm going to fail this exam. I'm not going to do well on this. I'm going to do terrible in this class. And we kind of limit ourselves before we've even done. tried and I think one thing I've been really grateful about about doing this podcast which is I think relates to your work is the sense of I'm going to take a risk on this I didn't have a background in audio or video before I started this it was a huge learning process of months before I started the podcast learning about how does this work what does this do learning how decibels work and all these different things that I never imagined myself being interested in but now I can see how

I can help authors. Like I'm helping Kim Gemmel with her audio book because I have the audio and video equipment to be able to do that. And I can see other avenues of helping small businesses that I really believe in by doing these types of recording sessions where we can bring awareness to the work they're doing. And so that idea that understanding something can be done through a different medium that we don't really expect to begin with, I think is a really crucial tool that university can provide because I think the paramount is obviously learning how to write and communicate. Those are the fundamentals of I think an undergrad is to be able to do that. But if you can come out with a belief that you can write and communicate

through different mediums like video or through dance or through singing or through journalism, I think that that gives you greater tools to go out into the world and offer different resources. Because when I started this, then I started to see well, what is a social media marketer do? What could I use these tools for in other settings? And now, for the native court workers, I'm no longer a native court worker. I'm their social media manager.

And I can see where I can record conversations about what is a native court worker do? How does that work? How does that make a difference in the community and record those types of questions and bring awareness to the work that's being done in a way I never thought that I'd be able to before and I would have said,

we need a media company to come in and do this? I'm starting to see, well, I can be that person, and I think that that creates the tools. So have you seen that from any of your students where they do a project, and then all of a sudden they develop a new skill or a new interest? Yeah, I think so. I think with some of the risks they're taking, it's not, wouldn't be as explicit as what your experience has been, where there's this particular skill, because they're often, you know, they're pushing, they're pretty vulnerable in some of these experiences.

but I do think what that's the skill. So they learned, I can push myself, I can go to really uncomfortable places, I can learn, and that will allow me to feel comfortable pushing myself in other directions as well. So it might be a little bit different than what you described,

but I think that's very true. I think their ability to connect what they're learning to a lived experience is a skill. And I think that they, they share that. I have students who check back in after, you know, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and say, I have to tell you this story, right, that connects to that, or that they've put into their own teaching things that we did in class, which is, you know, thrilling, right? So, so I think

in that way, absolutely. That's awesome, because I think the vulnerability part is so important, and it's something I've watched a lot of guests struggle with, is let's just talk about the career and let's why do I need to share about my personal life or what I've been through and it's like for a lot of people for a lot of the listeners I've had on one of their comments is like I felt like I was at rock bottom and felt like nobody understood and I think that that's often how you feel when you're struggling paycheck to paycheck or not feeling supported or feeling misunderstood is that nobody could possibly understand your circumstance and I think when people share that vulnerable this is what I was going through, this is how low I was, and this is how I ended up moving forward

from that, is one of the most important parts of the podcast that I think sometimes when we hear the word role model, people focus on my accolades. And well, remember, I accomplished this great thing, and I've had a lot of people say, like, I received this award, I received that award. And it's like, that's congratulations. But for a lot of listeners, it's about where the toughest position you were in and how you came out of that. Do you have any stories to share in regards to any of adversity that you faced throughout your career as an academic or even previous to that. Yeah, for sure. And I couldn't agree more. I can't tell you the number of times I've had students. I mean, I've been teaching now for 30 years, 28 of it at UFV, and then I taught back at

Western before we moved out here. And certainly growing up, there was no Ellen DeGeneres. So, you know, growing up as a lesbian, you looked around and you thought, okay, so we almost die or we almost just closet ourselves and live a straight life. And so one of the things I learned really early in my career is I came out because I connect my professional and my personal lives is students coming to me saying, oh my God, I just can't believe somebody, you know, there's hope, right? Like somebody is being public about it. And it's not that it's a big announcement. It's just woven in to what I do, you know. So if I'm talking about parenting in a class or whatever, and there's a personal story, well, my partner is a woman, right?

So that's how that looks. So I think the adversity of being marginalized, continue to be marginalized, those experience haven't gone away. We still have structures, the university, that doesn't understand how we're complicit in marginalizing sexual minorities and others. So I think that navigation, I've seen lots of times where students have found value in seeing that someone can be happy and successful and yet reflective on what that was like. So I think that's powerfully important.

I think as a woman, I have certainly had experiences where, you know, you have to be louder and the louder you are, then that's reconstructed as, you know, well, it's a bit aggressive. I wonder if, you know, do we have to really kind of be that, assertive or that passionate or Martha seems a little emotional about it. I'm pretty excited about inequality. Let's get it on, right? Let's talk about it. So I think those experiences have contributed to shaping that. And I hear that from students. My mom was borderline bipolar. So experienced and undiagnosed for a whole lot of my childhood. So I remember talking about that in class 28 years ago when a student came up and said I've never had someone

describe growing up in a house with mental health, with mental illness in a classroom before. And they went on to tell me their story. So I think that's important. But again, I really try to do it in a way, it's not, and I don't think there's ever just storytelling, but it's not for the story, it's for the, how does this propel our conversation?

How might this allow you to see your own life within these sort of parameters, within this theory, within this course content. So that's sort of how I drive to do it. And I continue to run into, you know, I've had heartbreaking experiences where I've looked to my university or my community and they've acted in ways that, you know,

are hurtful and embarrassing. And so I think we've got lots of battles still to engage in. Do you mind sharing a little bit about maybe one of the experiences you had and how that kind of played out? Yeah, well, I think there's too often we're still not truly acting in ways that understand our responsibility around inequality. So you can have words, we can have, you know, anti-racism, month, we can have days, we can have speakers, but what does that mean in terms of our practice, right?

what does that really look like in terms of who we partner with in our communities as an example? And so for me, one of the challenges, certainly in the Fraser Valley, is engaging with respect to sexuality and positions whereby we have, you know, sort of religious affirmation that same-sex couples as an example aren't, shouldn't be afforded the right to marry. We're still having that debate in Canada, even though it's legal. And I don't think there's a space for that. I don't think if we were talking about race and saying those people of color don't have a right to be married, I don't think other people would say, well, you know, it's religion and we want to be, you know, everyone has a right to the belief. It's not about a right to a belief. Of course you can.

But it's bigoted. And that's, those are hard words. So I think those are spaces that I continue to see as incredibly problematic. And I think sexuality. because it's hidden, if it wants to be, has some challenges. I couldn't agree with you more, and I think that I see that a lot in Chilliwack. And I guess my frustration with that type of approach, because we have a few school board trustees that approach things in a way that I think is abhorrent, because I don't think that they are bringing any academic rigor, any level of analysis to what they're saying themselves. I can see the stories within the Bible, the narratives that bring value to our culture

and that have helped shape a common law system, but I can also see nonsense of saying, well, this book is the only thing I believe in. And so if it's not in the book, then it can't possibly be real. And it's like, well, what about cars? What about planes? What about all these things that aren't in your book that are absolutely real, true, and that you rely on? So I have a frustration with perhaps that section because I think that they're just doing a disservice for just doing a disservice's sake.

I don't think that if they critically thought about it, they'd come to the same conclusion. And I think that that's the frustration is those are the, at least for Chilliwack, those are the voice pieces for religion. And I think that they actually do a disservice to the moderate, reasonable religious people who would never hold that same view. And I think that that is perhaps one of my frustrations within Chilliwack is I think religion gets a bad name because the mouthpieces for it are the worst possible mouthpieces for the ideas that the book actually should be bringing awareness to. Because I think the idea of Cain and Abel and having the like someone who makes the wrong sacrifices is a valid story and is really informative when you think about how people choose to lay out their life and what they're willing to make sacrifices for like a $40,000 car rather than. a $20,000 education and I think that I see those mistakes being made and then I watch the people get frustrated why aren't I making more money why am I at this job that I don't like not making money and it's like you chose the car over the education and then I think that that's where they get

defensive of well that's my choice and I need this car to get from A to B and it's like well but that's still your choice and I can't I'm not saying you made a right a wrong choice but that was your decision. And I think utilizing the good narratives of religious ideas would be useful, but I think, as I said, I think we have the wrong people speaking up and saying, I'm a religious person, listen to me, because I think they misrepresent a lot of things and a lot of ideas to a lot of people's detriment. Yeah, and I think we're reluctant to call it out. And I think it harms people. People are killing themselves because they're reminded still in 2021 in Canada that they're not okay and that the family says they're not okay and that their church does.

And I do lots of work with a religious organization. It's not about faith. That's not the issue. It's about, and I think this is where organizations, universities, et cetera, we have to stand up better. How on earth are we, are there not, isn't a more critical dialogue about, you know, you just likely saw Vancouver police and, you know, we still have police chiefs who aren't recognizing systemic racism as an issue.

And in fact, are saying it's not true. We don't have it. The military in Canada, like, what's going on is the harm done to women, the continued harm as, you know, they're outgolfing and don't understand, or actually probably do understand, but really don't care. And there's not a greater consequence. How is the Minister of Defense still the Minister of Defense today, given what the last week has looked like? And where's the accountability around that? So, and I think universities have a critical role to play in providing social critique around what's happening, both through research, but not just research, in podcasts, in conversations, in our classrooms, in what we choose to have our students read, and I think there's lots more room where we could take that responsibility to a greater extent. I couldn't agree more because one of the things that's happened recently is watching what's happening in Cam Loops and the discovery of 215 children.

What I kind of watched is everybody I think I wouldn't want to hear from on such a tragedy being the biggest voices in the conversation. And that's really frustrated me. I don't want to everybody has the right to speak and to share their thoughts. But I think what I've been most disappointed in is the people I'd actually like to hear their thoughts on. and what are the people who've been in the trenches for 20 years looking at this issue. I don't think that we've heard enough from them because they've been seeing the pros and cons of certain approaches and perhaps one of my frustrations is seeing that we've had so many reports, we've had so many discussions and panel events and I have not seen a change within

my community or with several communities. The changes that I'm seeing are economic development. That has nothing to do with your panel event, your report. It has to do with in-community them making a decision to approach things differently. And I see that with a lot of urban indigenous communities like Squyala, like Shiactan in Chilawak, Musquiam in Vancouver. These are indigenous communities that are really representing strong growth. But that doesn't work for a rural community like mine up on low-heed highway that isn't right next door to a university. That isn't right in the center of the community. And so my concern is that there's no talk of how to get financial literacy to indigenous communities

by people who are actually excited to talk about the topic, not about what will send these five people out there. They have the free time to be able to go out and sit there and explain things to people. People who are actually genuinely excited about the idea of making a difference and giving people the tools to start a business, to develop their community, to consider university. And I think that that's where the divide is because I learned that UFE was going to be partnering

with indigenous communities, but then it sort of disappeared. And I was like, if we're going to do this, it needs to be a giant commitment and we need to put all our plans on the table, analyze what's happening, look at what the changes that are occurring, and really push that forward.

And each time we talk about reconciliation, it feels like let's work more on the TRC, Let's work more on this report. And then once this report comes out, then we'll see the changes. And these reports have been out for a while, and they've really done nothing because there's nothing tangible that a small community can start to implement step one, step two, step three. And those are always the leaders that are willing to put in the hard work because they're seeing the consequences.

And my other frustration is, I feel like seeing the pipeline and the environment is clashing with indigenous people's ability to get themselves out of poverty through economic development and through investments in pipelines. And I feel like our culture has kind of put indigenous people in a rock and a hard place where if we support pipelines

to get out of poverty, to get better quality water, to establish opportunities to attend university and to establish enough funding to make sure all students have that opportunity is put against whether or not we care about the environment and whether or not we're taking that seriously. And I really just saw that when we were looking at the Wetsuan people

because their chief and council did decide that the pipeline was the best for their community. They were elected officials. And then it was the hereditary part. And I don't know what the right answer is there, but you can see that this clash is occurring. And it does feel like people who care about the environment are kind of pushing indigenous people into a rock and a hard place where we're in a no-win situation.

If we choose the pipeline, then we don't care about the environment. And if we are against the pipeline, then we're stuck in poverty. And I don't know what the solution is, but that's, again, where I don't even feel like we're on, we're focused on the conversation that needs to take place. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. And I think we're not nimble enough. You know, if I just think about from a university point of view, it's one of the things we've been trying to push with the chassis is being responsive. And that is not what universities do very well, right? We have long games, we have a lot of process that, in some cases, I think we could figure out more creative ways to engage.

We think about expertise and knowledge holders in particular ways, even though I think we use the words of, you know, we do land acknowledgments and we do these things. but I agree. And I'm as an outsider, as a non-Indigenous person, I try to be very attentive to how I position because I don't know what the right answers are either. But I am struck that I think there's more focused, more nimble responses that we could do because we know a lot.

You know, one of the big things for me, I teach policy and program avowal, and we know a lot, usually. You know, when I get asked to do projects or chassis we do, lots of times I say, well, actually, you don't need us to do that, because we know this. But what we could do is let you know how well you're implementing it over here, right? So I think what you say reflects that.

We know a lot. So how do you operationalize it? How do you implement it? How do you be specific to communities in terms of what their needs are? How do you hear the right voices? I couldn't agree more. Could you develop more on chassis and talk a little bit about that, talk a lot about that because I think that that is a really new idea to not only the Fraser Valley,

but I don't know of any other program that's doing something similar. So could you tell us about that and correct me if I'm wrong? Yeah, certainly there's nothing like it at the university, even though it feels like I'm having to educate a lot around that. It doesn't make it better. We've got lots of different centers, but it's different. So, I mean, I'll tell you a bit about how it came about because that's part of what makes it different, I think. It's probably about three years ago.

We had the divisions of family practice in Chilliwack Mission and Abbotsford come to the university and say, you know, we've got this regional university. We have this need around, you know, research but needing to be nimble and be more responsive. Data, you know, how do we navigate working with data? and we think we could partner with the university and then the university kind of dropped the ball you know lots of things and then we picked the ball back up and Fraser Health joined the table

First Nations Health Authority and we started to think about what this could look like and what they wanted was a space where you had community students faculty altogether from idea to implementation of a project and so we have that. We have a really, I'd love to have you at some point come by the hub.

It's a space that I think is conducive. I mean, the pandemic, we opened our doors as the pandemic hit, so that's been tricky, obviously. But it's a space where I don't, we got rid of the offices. I got pushed back from the university. I think you're going to want an office. I'm like, I don't want an office, right? So we get rid of those and we have this great, big, I think,

wonderfully inspiring and collaborative space that has art. And on an art wall where we'll have exhibits that move through that speak to important social issues. And then the other piece that the community wanted was data access. And at that point, really thinking about could we bring data together? Well, with COVID and that for other reasons, that's pretty tricky, particularly with health data. So that morphed a bit more into how could we promote better data access, data sharing. So when a community organization needs to know something, could chassis help in a pretty nimble way say, Here's some key information that I think might inform your decision-making with respect to vulnerable youth in your community and services with respect to shelter.

So we opened our doors in 2020, April 1, and again, as the university was shutting down, we have a core team that is very attentive to knowledge mobilization, so visual representations all the way to more formal reports in terms of product, and that's our real commitment to saying how do we articulate what people are doing in the community and in faculty in ways that's useful, because at the end of the day, that's what we want to be, is helpful. We want to be kind of nimble, and so we've pushed, you know, the university doesn't know what to do with us sometimes, I think, and I think that will continue to morph a bit. And the model is different in this kind of way as well. So universities tend to have individual faculty members who are doing projects and doing research.

And we have centers where they might have a focus, and those individual faculty might be doing some work around that, and they probably have a director. Chassee has a core where we've got faculty saying, hey, there's a call for this. We think there's a really great fit. I don't have time to write the whole proposal. Could you pull together a literature reviewer? Could you pull together a team? Could you get us letters of support from the people you're working with? And without that core team, we're like every other center. We're a room with faculty who are doing individual projects.

So right now we've got eight students as interns in our A's. Three of our students just got MyTax, which are each $10,000 over the summer. Those students are walking away in their pocket and having a wonderful experience, I think. And from what they've said, we've got social media intern student learning about what that looks like. We've got a graphic design student who happens to be an indigenous artist who's had some wonderful opportunities to do original illustrations around particular days or events. She just did some great work with, um, uh, there was a little bit of, um, uh, there was. an indigenous health research symposium that just happened. So she did the logo. So that was all through chassis connecting. And then we've got some other RAs that are involved. So we don't do

anything without students. We don't do anything without a meaningful community partner. And that's not just, hey, Aaron, you asked us to do this. Thanks. We'll get back to you with the results. It's Aaron, you're at the research table, right? So it's meaningful partnerships. I think that that's so important because as a native court worker from 2018 to 2019, I took on this role and I was by myself in Chilliwack Abbotsford serving both courthouses trying to figure out how to navigate it. So I had seen two predecessors kind of fill the role and I read our little pamphlet that says what I'm supposed to do and felt like I wasn't hitting all of those points.

And for me, being able to have this opportunity where I was more on my own, I was able to make the role what I wanted it to be and really hit the points that I thought were relevant. It made me shift my perspective on what it means to have a job because often we have a job and then we're doing the work and we kind of get tired of it and we're kind of putting in half the energy. But I noticed that my momentum within the role continued to grow as I tried to take on more ideas and build the system in a better way. And so within the native court worker role, My role is to assist indigenous people connect to resources, whether it's treatment or counseling, AA meetings, or education, whatever they're interested in. But the other part is working with Crown Counsel, probation, and the judge to try and come to some sort of understandings to help.

And so Gladu is a decision that was made that gave special understanding to indigenous issues. And so what I took, the first step was getting resources and understanding of what it looked like within indigenous communities. So the complaint I had from probation and crown was we don't know what's going on in the community and we don't have a person dedicated to going and looking what all the communities are, what their specific resources are, and how to make sure that they go to the specific resource that they're allowed to utilize or that they should utilize. And so from that, I took on a student from the University of the Fraser Valley as a practicum student, and we worked together to try and connect with all the communities and understand their history. Who to contact if an indigenous person wanted to connect with their indigenous community

and what resources are available and how they approach things like banishment. So that's something that I didn't even think of when I was in university, but banishment is something that indigenous communities do consider and depending on who has the funding, you can be banned from multiple indigenous communities. And so that was something that was important for me to understand, but also to make sure that we don't end up saying somebody's going to go stay on this reserve when the communities actually banished them. And so I was noticing that divide.

And so we ended up writing up a document that explained all of it and made sure that people within probation and Crown had this information presented to them so that they could approach things better because one of the issues is Stolo offers great resources but there are certain communities like Chihuahawthal that isn't actually a member of the Stolo system. The funding dollars are actually separate. And so that's the case for many indigenous communities. We have 22, but I think only 11 or 12,

are actually a part of Stolo's proper funding. And they range throughout, like Stolo was working with Le Camel, which is super far away over in Mission. And so how does that all lay out for making sure that everyone understands what's going on? And then through that experience, I ended up doing, wanting to do more with Gladu, because now I've got this resource, but when I'm presenting it to the judge saying, this person's going to attend counseling, this person's going to do this, they're like, well, where is this? What does this look like? Where's the building? How do we know they're going to attend? And so I tried to come, I worked again with another student from the UFE to put together Gladoo letters. And so the goal was to have something where you have the standard information within the letter with a questionnaire that We ask the individual before we go in for sentencing or for a bail hearing. And so we do a little intake process of what have you been struggling with? What are some of the historic harms you've been through?

Do you need counseling? What would you like to see in terms of treatment? So they were contributing to what we're going to do. I have all these resources. You pick them and we'll offer that to the judge and to crown and propose that. And so what that ended up doing is I think it gave greater confidence in the individual because I'd print them out a copy with the agreement. exact same information and say, here's your story, here's what you've been through based on what

you told me, here's the plan to address these things, and here's the photo of the location you'll be going to for your counseling, so you don't have to feel hesitant on what is the building looks like, what am I looking for? Because that was a huge thing for clients to kind of struggle with is, oh, it's down the road on like Reese Avenue to the left, and then it's the green building. Well, that's not a very encouraging way to start your process, feeling like which house, that one's kind of green. that one's a little ivy which one knocking on the door a little bit nervous like you don't want that when you're investing in your own well-being and you want to feel confident yeah that's the photo that's this is the

person i'm supposed to talk to when i get there that feeling of this is my plan and when i started doing that i noticed the clients feeling much more calm and secure when i was presenting the information because they had a coffee and so did crown and so did the judge and so it created this quick environment where bail hearings to me were really quick because I could do that questionnaire, go use the computer printed off, and have it together in 20 minutes because all of those underlying pieces were put together and everybody kind of knew the plan, what the building looked like, so there was less doubt from the judge or from Crown, and that was something I was hoping to roll out larger, but never had the opportunity because I ended up choosing to go

to law school. But those are the ways, I think, to your point, where you can tie in resources and understanding and community, but also academics because I was writing papers. I was writing informational pieces and trying to tie in Gladu and see these overlaps to really help other people. And I think that's

what Chazzy is doing is creating that environment where the community can utilize all this knowledge and from my experience is working with some non-profits, they have the right intention of educating their staff and getting webinars and stuff like that, but there isn't that funnel of how do we help homeless people? What are some of the things

they've tried in the United States, in the UK, in these other locations? What are some of the things that have worked? And we catch these coined terms and then we don't really know what to do with it. So harm reduction is something I really support, but I feel like it's a step one in the process and I feel like the step two, step three, step four got lost because everybody was trying to push harm reduction. And it's important because there wasn't a lot of, I think, momentum for something like that. But now we've kind of received it. And now I feel like we're a little lost on what step, what was step two?

Because I got to see, I was giving harm reduction to users and I didn't know what to do next. And when I'd ask the team, it's like, well, our role is to give out harm reduction. And it's like, but is that all our role is? I feel like I could be doing more or offering something or providing knowledge or creating a mentorship system that would actually help people want to do better and see the opportunity to do better. And that's something I'm interested to get your thoughts on, is do you think that this is going to kind of change that and have an impact on getting a more holistic approach from programming and stuff?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great point because I think it reminds us of the immediate and then the structural, like the bigger issues, right? So if you're going to do, if you're going to talking about harm reduction, we need to understand harm reduction within our broader political, social and economic sort of norms and relationships and structures. So I think what we try to do with Chassee is when we've got a client or a partnership on something specific, we try to bring that lens. It might not be central to the particular project, but an example is we did one of the first

projects out of the gate was actually with the National Indigenous Fire Safety Council. And they were really interested in looking at stats can data, so already collected, so secondary analysis, looking at risk, some risk factors in terms of residential fire safety in reserve communities. And immediately we're like, oh, risk assessment, because that's a very important sociological space to play in a responsible way, right? Because as you know, too often, marginalized communities are described as risk communities, whether it's AIDS in the 80s and homosexuals, if it's indigenous communities in terms of all sorts of factors we've decided are their fault.

So the organization wanted the analysis, the data analysis. We were always using language and writing the report in such a way that kept in mind the context of and caution about constructing risk, particularly with indigenous communities, as a non-indigenous partner. And we wouldn't have done the work if it weren't for an indigenous organization that had asked for it and had asked for assistance. So I think that's an example where we can bring this broader lens to very particular immediate issues so that we're always kind of trying to keep our eye on those bigger issues, right? So, I mean, racism and policing, if you look at the

incidents, one thing, well, you've got to always keep that bigger structure in play, right? So I think that's, you know, powerfully important. I don't know if you heard the story. This to me is an example of that micro macro that we try to pay attention to. It was in Alberta. They just had a review of it, asked an external body to come in and see what had happened in a hospital. One physician put a noose on the operating door, targeting a colleague who is a person of color. So they ask for an HR assessment to come in many years later. And the report that she just wrote said she didn't see that this had anything to do with racism. And so to me, there's a great example of you've got someone

who clearly doesn't have a broader understanding of the context within which we need to look at race and then looking at a report and basically saying to the offender, the person that did it, why'd you do it? Well, I didn't do it. It had nothing to do with race. I was just trying to intimidate the person. Okay, thank you.

So it had nothing to do with race instead of understanding systemic, implicit, you know, bias, all of those things. So that's kind of a lens, no matter what the issue is, that chassis is trying to bring. Always thinking context, always thinking interdisciplinary, always thinking about how are we helpful, but also not just in the immediate. What's the bigger long-term picture? That's so important. And so what research is being done right now and who's involved?

Yeah, so we're thrilled to say we just added a bunch more faculty associates. So that's basically where profs at the university can be a plan. if they're interested, two chassis. So why that's important, it just remind us of the interdisciplinary. So I think we're up to around 25 different colleagues who have said, I want to be a part of that. And so nursing, kinesiology, biology, a school of computing, social work, anthropology, geography, you know.

So that's great for us because that's, you know, wonderful. And an example of why that's important is actually another project for that same organization. They wanted to, they needed to figure out where to put, what are some options about putting fire safety offices in indigenous communities? Using the data we had already given them, but sort of mapping that out, well, that's not what I do. So we contacted one of our associates who's a GIS person and he's like, I'm in, I'm excited. He does all of that. We do some of the write-up to make sure that there's the social science lens. off we go. Just partnered with a person, one of our colleagues, Dr. Shabani, who does a lot of social robotics

and he wanted to put in an N-C letter of intent, but it needed to have both STEM and social sciences, so we immediately pulled a chassis sort of team together to assist him with that application. We've done work with respect to substance use. I'm meeting this afternoon with White Rock. City of White Rock has contracted us to look at a community scan of their services for, for older adults, trying to get a sense of impact of COVID on what those experiences have been. We have a couple of our chassis people working on a project here in Chilliwack in terms of channeling youth voices.

It's looking at marginalized youth and their experiences in terms of service access, that kind of thing. We're working on a couple of CHR projects in terms of temporary farm workers and COVID knowledge mobilization. So those are two big federal grants that, working with Dr. Cindy Jardine, who's the P.I. on both of those. So just a bit of an idea of, and then a really strong emphasis, Greg Lacek, who works in chassis, wonderful,

he's our knowledge mobilization specialist, knowledge mobilization specialist. And so that's really important to us. Like, how do you bring what we're doing and what community partners are doing alive in such a way that it's useful? And so I think that's where I'm excited for students to see that, right? And not just see it.

They're doing it. they're doing the work and having a tremendous experience, I think. I think that that is fantastic and I'd really like to dive into those because my partner actually works with the Chilawak Building Youth Voices. She's the social media coordinator for that and so she's trying to get out some of the messages that are linked to channeling youth voices. And so I'm curious what are the problems that these are addressing? Because I think that youth right now are in this very, very, very,

very, very strange time that I don't think we've ever really been in before where it's so expensive to leave the home. And I think we've taken for granted for so many years. I've heard people say, I left home when I was 17. We had to get out of there. It wasn't a safe place. My parents or my grandparents or my uncle or my cousin weren't treating me well. So I had to leave and I ended up renting a place and like that's when I got my start. Now we're starting to see problems of you can't even move out your couch surfing for years and years and years moving from job to job to job. And so can you tell us about some of the problems that you're seeing occurring and why these are helping address it? Yeah. So from our point of view, that project

came very much from some of the things you've just identified. So the team that's on that made a couple of really intentional choices. And one was how are they going to hear the issues so that we can actually have the conversation to say, well, what would be helpful? And so the approach is a participatory action research approach whereby the youth are the ones that are centrally involved in the research questions and how the data is collected and ultimately a product that will be both a research product but also a documentary that they have tremendous power in. So the how, I say that because the how for us is really important as well. And yeah, these are incredibly difficult and strange times for youth. I've heard people

talk about we won't see sort of the emotional intellectual impact for, you know, a decade or so when these individuals are in their 40s about what the pandemic has meant and whatever is next. So, and I think also the great differences in terms of access to couch surfing or whatever it is. I mean, my oldest just graduated, so she and her boyfriend are home for a month until they figure out what their next adventure is. Well, I get that that's not available for everybody, right? So I think we're seeing uncertainty. I think we've got base issues in terms of simply food security, shelter, all of those kinds of things. I think relevance, right, that idea of education and immediacy. So I was a big fan and I tell students you

shouldn't know what you want to do. You know, and I get they're getting in their ear, and I get there also many of them have lots of jobs, and there's all sorts of pressures that are on them. But I think there's a sense of what's the relevance, what's the immediacy. I think there's a hopelessness that we're seeing that's very difficult. So how do you, how do you instill that there's possibility? And then how do you do that with youth who are incredibly privileged, because they need it to, to youth that have day-to-day challenges in terms of their safety? And you know, basic needs. So I think this project is very focused on that end of the scale in terms of individuals with those greater challenges. But I think that will inform, which is

another important part I think of chassis, is how does that translate into a broader spectrum of youth as well? I completely agree. And I think one of the most important things that I spent a lot of time trying to think about like how to address these issues, but what are some of the reasons that we don't talk about enough as to why. And I think one of the good reasons that we should try and address temporary foreign workers and issues they face is because they're taking care of their family and their community in the best way they can. They're coming here from other countries, working incredibly hard, getting no appreciation from the community, no appreciate like when you think, oh, shop local, you're thinking of a nice little store owner who's at the

front desk saying, oh, here are your apples, and yes, we just got in new cucumbers. But behind the scenes, there are people from other countries giving up a lot of their seeing their children develop, seeing their family develop to help support our economy and support what we desire in Canada. And same with indigenous issues. I think what we're missing out on is the fact that we're missing out on people's potential when we leave these things to the side. So you can make an argument that it's unfair or that it's negative or that it's wrong. And I think that all of those are correct. But there's another lens to view it through, which is we're missing out on great people. And I think about all the indigenous people who don't go to post-secondary and don't go into trade schools and don't do these things. We're missing out on what they can provide the community.

We're missing out on the carvings. Like one of the things I, when Diane Jansen was running locally, she brought up that she'd like to see a friendship center. And I thought that that was a brilliant idea. But my condition on supporting it personally would be making sure. that there is a real space with tons of woodworking equipment tons of wood available, partnerships with a wood company

making sure that we have metal working equipment available because I think when I've entered those friendship centers it's got the community element but it doesn't have the opportunity to put your creativity to work and I saw that actually

in Hope when I was working for Hope and Area Transition Society one of the managers there Brian he had his own laundromat and he'd allow certain clients to be able to use the space to continue indigenous artwork to carve to paint to do these things and that brought immense passion to them and gave them that almost nine to five work schedule for themselves that they weren't being forced to be there but they had this access to this space that nobody was going to bug them or stress about what they were doing or make sure they were using the equipment in a certain way they were just able to

go there, utilize it, head out for the day, go sell their pieces, and he just created this environment. And when I got to see what that did for people's self-worth, for their sense of value to the community, it made a huge difference because I think we do start to treat people who are struggling with drug addiction and who are struggling with mental health issues as if they don't have something to contribute. Once we get them housed, once we get them off things, then they can contribute. And I think that that sometimes misses out on the fact that they're using those things because they don't always feel like they are contributing and they don't know what else to do in their day and so they end up in these circumstances where they don't they're not enjoying their day and i think that that is one way to give them the tools to at least have options of having income of their own where they can feel like i sold this carving i put a lot of work into it and now i get to sell it to somebody who really likes it and who's happy to have that in their home and i talked to um past staff and people in the community who are like yeah i've got one of jo's things in my house right now and it's hanging up and I'm so proud of it and every time I see Joe I tell

them I still got that painting up proudly and I think that that's where when we're too focused on addressing the health issues that we miss out on how playing a role in their own development can make such a different. Yeah and as you were describing that I think that's there's a real parallel to some of the challenges whether it's in community whether it's in the university where spaces are measured using the wrong measures. So we're getting, you know, chassis gets, well, how many grants have you gotten, how many have you written, what percentage are you successful, et cetera, numbers. And to me, I'm like, ah, how about the fact that our eight or ten students are telling their friends about how connected this is, how excited they are about their studies, who are telling

their parents, are community partners who are seeing the university in a space in a very different way than they've ever seen it. And your comment about having the wood, having the materials to me is akin to we have so many empty spaces where we've established a center for, whether it's to target indigenous youth, whether it's a different cultural center, whether it's a research center on a university, and it's simply a space. It's a room. It's not alive. There's not a spirit. There's not activity, which is, to me, has all sorts of byproducts that are less visible. but just as critically, and in many cases, more important than what, you know, as you just said, the health piece. Well, let's think about health much more holistically, and then let's look at what carving does in terms of those individuals that you've described.

And I think that's a real challenge with so many of our institutions to see what's, like, does it make sense to do it in this way? And if we're going to do it in this way, let's do it well. Let's make sure we have all of those pieces. I completely agree. And just going off of that, when you think about, like, when you say making sure that indigenous people can have a space to express their culture, I think that that often gets turned into a gimmick. And I think saying indigenous culture is often a gimmick to people

because it's like let them play with their toys. Let them do what they've been doing for food and dress. And it all feels very staged and not sincere. And that's where I wish we, like I had the research paper that shows when people have the opportunity, people who are struggling have the opportunity to express themselves through creative works like carving, what are the outcomes for those people over six months, a year, five years. And I think that that's what you're starting to create, is this environment where we have the proof of what we're doing linked to it. So when we're talking about, wouldn't this be great?

We're also saying, we know it would be great because we have this evidence. So here's an example. Like, let's say you came to Chassie and said, there's this opportunity that my community is looking at in terms of building a friendship center. But in order for the funding, we need to build a bit of a case grounded in effective practice. Can you help? And we'd say, Erin, how can we help? That'd be great. Let us pull together and know you can't give us any funding in the moment.

But you know what we're hoping is we're building a relationship with you and this future friendship center so that when you have a grant you want to go after, et cetera, you think of Chassie. So that's, relationships are at the core of what we want to do. It can't just be every project. So in that case, we come back, give you the ammunition, and we've been asked by community organizations to do that. We need a mental health worker, but we're being asked to make the case for why this type of worker will make a difference. How can, and then so Chasi can hopefully provide some support to that.

What we have to convince is that is the university as well, that this is a profound opportunity for the university to serve our community, right? So that sustainability argument, because that's the kind of work that you want to do. Because we don't need to go do the study. Now, what you might say later, we've built it and it's operating, we'd love to do a longitudinal study to see about impact. And then, you know, Chassee comes in and helps, Spencer comes in and helps set that up. Exactly. And I think that that's such a great point. And I'm really interested in your relationship with the university because I think you likely bring a lot of unidentified, misunderstood value to the university.

because there is this culture within the university of need to write research, need to get published, need to write a book, need to do these things, need to prove to everyone that you've been in so many publications or had your name in so many pieces of work that connecting with students and your evaluations and this connection that you build and this, it's almost impossible to understand the value that you've brought to our community because if you think of every single course you've taught with all the students and all those students, who might be operating in the world now based on a class you took and that impact on their education, which again, students have told me your specific impact on them today and likely you haven't talked to them or they haven't reminded you of that recently. And so you're playing this role in the community that's having this vast impact of, I had a lot of professors, but I can only name a handful that really helped me get here today. And those professors always put the responsibility back on to me, the students, to contribute. So like Mark Lalonde, I had the pleasure of having on because he was like

write a 20 page paper on a global issue related to like the various levels of how it impacts not only Canada, but the other countries and how that all plays out and then do a second paper and make it double the size. And so now it's 40 pages. And so it felt overwhelming. But he was like, do it on whatever issue you see and really break it down. And so it put a lot of pressure on me, but I developed as a consequence of that pressure, and I was actually interested in it because I chose it. And so I think that that's the role you play, but we don't always understand what a professor does in community.

We often think, well, you taught students, but those students go back into the community and they become our politicians, our future professors, our tellers at the bank, they become our, like, all these different areas in our lives that we don't always link it back to that name, but we're all networked together if we've graduated from you. because those professors did have impact, and I know a few police officers who have spoken very highly of you. And so you can see that our concerns about how police are walking to the door is being impacted and informed by great professors like yourself. And so I'm interested to understand more your understanding of the university framework where we're at now, because I think

we've been talking about that type of issue for a while. Where are we at now? And what more could we be doing? Well, first, thank you. It's lovely to hear some of that positive. And anybody that says it doesn't matter is not telling you the truth. So thank you for that. Yeah, I don't think we're where we need to be. And even for a place like UFV that is, you know, smaller and regional, so we don't operate even under the same legislation as, you know, UBCs and SFUs. We still talk too much in my view, about peer reviewed as a very narrowed idea of peer review. I mean, that's not been my path, right? My path, my career path has been community-based research and community engagement.

So, you know, not just research as in terms of proper, but how do you work with communities even just to help navigate particular situations or policy analysis where they're wanting to be more inclusive around something? So, you know, my CV is not going to impress those who have that narrow idea of what it is to be an academic. But I don't think that's a helpful definition. I think we have to have all of it. I think even when we're reporting, we still are asked to, is it a peer reviewed or not? And I think, how am I supposed to tell my community members, whether, as an example, working with an indigenous organization, you know, we've had these three projects with this national group.

So when these indigenous leaders are sitting around the table, describing what they're looking for, providing context, reading what we do, providing feedback, they don't count as peers. Like, their expertise is not valued in a very traditional idea, which is still used so often. We, universities generally celebrate single authorship still. Because if you and I write something together, Aaron, maybe Martha D. didn't do very much. Maybe it's all Aaron and how will we know? So even though we talk to our students about collaboration, teamwork, community, partnerships, the institution still values single authorship, first authorship, journal publication, those kinds of things. And academic publishing is important. I'm not single, et cetera. I think we need to bust out of that

much more. So no, I don't think we're doing as well as we should as we could. I mean, the reaction to some of my approaches tells us that in terms of giving students more autonomy and more power around that. I don't think we measure. I'm not a fan of teaching evaluations. I think I try to check in with my students on a regular basis about things that work and don't work or how we can make things better. So I think the university is still, has so many of its roots in spaces that we could create much more productive

engagement with our students, et cetera. And so, yeah, it's an uphill battle for lots of people that are trying to push against that. I don't think I'm understood very well sometimes by some of my colleagues, by some administration. I'm not into hierarchy. I embrace that I have power in the classroom because I think it's really, wrong not to. I mean, I do. I grade. But, you know, when I'm navigating, I want, who should be at the table? Students should be at the table. If I'm trying to do something in the university with chassis, I'm not going to sign something I'm not supposed to. But I'm kind of put off when,

you know, what level are you at? You know, Martha, why aren't you doing an administrative route? Like that kind of thing. I love teaching. I couldn't imagine my life not being in the class. soon. COVID has been incredibly hard. I get that I was privileged overall, but really hard in terms of those of us, you know, who all of a sudden weren't able to be engaging with our students, so very selfishly. Absolutely, though, because I do think that that's where students connect and really grow as a consequence because it's tough to connect over Zoom because we're both kind of putting on a facade of I'm all dressed up and like, you saw some people weren't even wearing pants during their interview so you know that we're dressing up for the part that was supposed

to be seen and you see that people let things go if they're not being seen fully and so I do think that is the case but I think on top of that I think we miss out on the idea that individuals have a relationship with people that allows them to grow and develop and that's why I actually really support rate my professor because of course and I talked to Spencer about this of course There's going to be those nonsense reviews that are, they made me read a book, and so it was so unfair that I had to actually do the readings or something like that. But then you get these insightful comments about how great professor worked really hard, just didn't tailor it for me, or those comments where you kind of see where the professor's lines go up

and where they draw distinctions. And I think trying to create that environment is so important because that's what I think builds real leaders. And not leaders in everybody listens to me. but people who are willing to start the conversation and that's what I saw a lot of in my undergrad was nobody wanted to start the conversation so we're in a group we're all sitting and we don't know who's supposed to talk first and who to defer to and when you're a real leader you're just willing to not be in charge and direct everybody on what to do but say what do we want to do guys let's get started I'm really excited about this aspect so you guys tell me what you're interested in

that's that's being a good healthy leader because it allows other people to play to their strength still without putting in that top down approach of saying you are doing this you're doing the editing and that's it and I'll do the artwork and you don't do like that relationship of telling people what to do and so I'm I'm interested to see what comes of this because I see that Spencer has a lot of those positive characteristics of wanting the students to really benefit and seeing the value and not just being a researcher but being an educator and sharing information with people because that is what the podcast's about and that's my favorite professors and the people who had the biggest impact on me always created the space to have the discussion and not

to shy away from it and I think that that's something that you're right the university does struggle with but what are some of the tools we can use to combat that what can the community do because there's far more of the community than there are of the university and so what can the community do to really facilitate that relationship and to show our support for the professors like yourself or for like Spencer who are willing to have a more interactive involved approach because I think that that's what discourages indigenous people, people in poverty from going to school is the elitism, the how many how much have you published? What are you about prove to me that you're educated and show the peer reviewed evidence? Yeah I mean really

sounds self-serving but I think one of the ways is the community can and really and support and partner with chassis. I believe we're doing something different. And again, every time I say that, it feels like an uphill battle and sometimes where people think that sounds like I'm saying we're better, we're doing something different and we're really trying to honor community. So I think it'll be interesting for us to see how community partners,

they're starting to describe that relationship to the university. So they work with Spencer on something that are like, wow, this whole chassis approach, and I had this great relationship with Spencer or Leah or Esther or whoever is in there, and we've got to keep this going, you know, or the last, you know, the board members or whatever. So I think, whether it's chassis or other organizations on campus, the community being vocal when we do things well and when we don't, right? Like coming and saying, yeah, you guys drop the ball on this one, right? So I think that's really important because I think the university structures are still really hard.

Like, the accessibility is not great. We do, I sit at some tables, and we sound horribly elitist, and we use concepts and language that its sole purpose is to alienate people, right? And that's never been my, I've tried really hard to make sure that's not the space that I move in. Yeah. I talk, when I'm, when we're at the dinner table at home, is very, is the same way I talk in my classrooms. So, and I think that's important. I agree. The other part I've asked multiple professors from UF.E about is this, to me, the most important part of the university is the professor, is the educator within it. I think the United States went in the wrong direction. One of my fears is that we can follow suit because we often do in regards to mandatory, minimum sentencing, in regards to drug offenses, we just follow suit with what they do

and pay the consequences about five to ten years later. And one of my fears is that we need to recognize the value that the professor brings. Because when I talked to John Haidt, he was like, I don't know where I'd be if I was trying to practice, trying to be a professor in the United States, because what I'm trying to do and what I'm trying to offer isn't valued. The administration is sort of the most important part of the university now. And so me being a professor, I don't provide and I'm not as recognized as I am at UFB and so I want to make sure that we kind of protect that the importance of the professors within the university but what I see is not enough from the prof like I'm not seeing enough from the professors in terms of being willing to interact

with the community being willing to do a podcast being willing to start their own podcast being willing to create a Patreon page or a YouTube channel where they just talk about what they know because I think that that's one of the big limitations. We talk a lot about getting people in inner cities and people in poverty into universities. But part of the reason they don't is because they have no relationship established there. And so doing a camp,

like I remember when all the universities came to start a secondary and they were trying to pitch us. But they were pitching us on like the most uninteresting aspect of what you could offer at a university. We have the most elite people in the, and being somebody who didn't know if I was going to go to university, university, that didn't help. Knowing that you're very successful and a very accomplished university wasn't going to convince me to go because I want something accessible, something I could

see myself being in. And I felt that when I got to go with my uncle to UFE and look at the space and check it out and understand what was going on there and what all the different buildings were. And so I'm interested to know what professors can do or what you think we can do to make sure that professors are recognized for the value they bring to the community. and creating those relationships between the professors at the university and the community, because I think that Chazzy is playing that role as well. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I think there's a few different ways into that conversation. I think universities need to appreciate that faculty are the core,

and that's because students tell us that faculty are the core, right? So why you pick or why you stay or why you enjoyed comes back to faculty. It's unlikely to be about food services. And that doesn't mean they're not important to the culture of the university. So I think the university has to do better in terms of profiling faculty. And then, yes, I think faculty need to be thinking about how they can intentionally engage with their community in terms of knowledge that they hold and knowledge that they want to gather, research that they want to do. And all of the instruments you suggested are great ones.

And so I think that's one of the ways that Chassie's trying to mobilize around social media. And I do talk about it because we're pretty proud of it. Because we do think we responded to a need. We were asked to do it. This wasn't my idea. It wasn't our idea. Community's idea. And I think we are actualizing what they saw.

And we're working really hard to do it. And it's an uphill battle because it's all the things you just described. And those are not as measurable and as explicitly value. I think they're implicitly valued. I think that, you know, we talk about their importance, but I don't think we've figured out a way to demonstrate their importance in terms of, you know, coming out of COVID, like support. You know, how do you make sure some of these initiatives keep going as we come out of it?

So I think that's profoundly important. And I do also think we can learn from other places. You know, my son's going off to the U.S. to school in September. And yes, the school he's going to is small and private. But they've got, like they just sent, and I haven't had a chance to ask them which book. I know it's about anti-racism. I don't know which author it is. But every incoming student was mailed the book from the university, either in hard copy

or international students received it electronically, and the expectation is they're reading it because there will be events organized through the fall to talk about it. Well, that's not lip service. That is, because, and even if they'd mailed the book, that would have been lip service. But they're organizing functions. They all are, you know, their seminar series, engaging first year students into the responsibility to be a university student. We could do that kind of stuff at UFE. Yeah.

We could be more intentional about retention. Our retention is not great. We believe. Like, we were a business. Wouldn't be great. And we're not alone. Like, lots of universities have retention problems. There's so many ways that I think we could by doing that and reaching out to students and saying it's not just about that course because the books, so my son has two books now he has to read during the summer. There's no course. He's not getting credit for that. He's just being told if you want to be part of this community, that's the expectation. There's no credit.

I'm very interested in what is meant by anti-racism. Yeah. Well, and I mean, I can tell you what. I'll be curious. I'll be curious. When he and I get a chance to finally connect, I can't wait to hear what they're reading and how it's framed. And certainly, you know, when I think about how I use that language of anti, and I actually frame my anti-discrimination because then I think I use the same when I'm thinking about anti-homophobia work, where there's, there's, we demonstrate action in terms of responding to the discriminatory forces that we're talking about, whether that's around, whatever that's around gender, sexuality, race, in ways that are activists as opposed to simply diversity-based, and which I think goes back to what your comments you were making about, you know, indigenous spaces where it's about food and, you know, dance, et cetera, without a deeper understanding of that. So, so I think, and you're right, I mean, those are buzzwords on campus these days. So, I mean, for me,

It's at its core. It's about willing to be activist in nature about it. How so in activists? Yeah. So, I mean, for me, when I'm asked to do work, looking at diversity in an organization, often, you know, I work in public safety organizations that tend to be, you know, pretty hyper-masculine as an example.

So going in and saying, it's not about educating everybody to recognize it. It is about, in fact, setting up structures that dismantle the structures that are perpetuating whatever the discrimination that it is. So, you know, when people talk about, well, you hear a lot in policing these days. You know, a white young guy can't get a job in policing. I promise you they can, right? So should we have quotas?

Should we have targeted recruitment? My answer is yes. Yes, you go out to communities and you bring people in actively and people are screaming that that's not appropriate, that we should just let the best person who comes to the job, nope, because what's our construction of best? So, activist in that nature is redoing your criteria, reassessing the instruments you use to filter people out as not inclusive, right? So it's changing the apparatus instead of simply doing diversity education.

Hey, we should all be better to each other. some language you should think about when you're talking about, you know, whatever it is, you know, identity pronouns is a big one right now. It's more than that. And it's not just, you know, walk your talk stuff. It's dismantling structures, changing those very things that perpetuate these inequalities. So how would that look? Because University of the Fraser Valley, their criminology program is one of the main funnels for at least BC in terms of the Fraser Valley where we get most of our police officers from and I had a positive experience there

so I wouldn't have a negative comment so I'm interested to see how that connects because maybe I'm missing something. Yeah, I mean, for me to be honest when we're thinking about policing you could have the best individuals go into it but the structures are systemically problematic. I would, you know, if you were my student

and you said, I really want to be a police officer, say, Aaron, please don't. Like, don't. I'm going to make it different. No, you're not. Like, you're not. It's not going to happen because the structures are so emboldened, right? The extent of the problems don't happen without witnesses. Like, everybody, we all know it, we watch it. I see it in my workspace, right? So when do we speak up or not? So, and it's interesting because lots of police forces, they change who they hire. There was a time when they didn't want crime students. They wanted anything but crime students, right? And it wasn't UFE, I don't mean, just generally, crime students. At one point, they were going to demand a BA and it didn't last, right? So it's an interesting one, requiring that you can't be a police officer until you have

a degree. And then they backed off that because, again, it's hard to find recruits these days, right? So I think any program has a responsibility to look at those structural aspects of inequality so that those who are making decisions to move into those spaces, understand that they have an activist responsibility to dismantle the apparatus. I can definitely see that just because I know a few police officers who feel that they're voiceless within their position, who don't feel that they are the, since they're new, since they're earlier on, that once you hit 10 years, then you get a vote, then you get to sit at the table and get your perspective heard where I think within my position as a native court worker, I got to see how

quickly I can relate concepts from school and I brought all my criminal books and learned about Gladu and sentencing and bail and how a court process works and what's required, what's mitigating, what's not, those types of things. And I was able to pull that in like that. But if you're a police officer and you have these great textbooks and this great knowledge, whether or not your superiors are interested in what your opinion is on the solution is probably going to be pretty low because you've been here six months. You don't even know. And I think that our when you're in a profession, law, police, perhaps medical fields as well, I'm not sure,

but you're in this environment where experience on the front lines is more valuable than education. And I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that because it's kind of a weird dichotomy of we need you to have this education like police officers have been pushed for a while now to go get VAs. But then when you have that, and it's recent, it doesn't matter, it's not going to affect what we do here

on the front lines. And there seems to be this disconnect between, I've got this knowledge to this organization about what we just learned. There was just the study released. I just learned about it. I just finished my undergrad. Now I'm here to work for you, and you don't care. And so I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, I think what you've described is the veteran-centric aspects, which are unhealthy. So fire is similar. Corrections is similar. Military is similar, those who have pecking, you know, next in line that are based on seniority. You know, I've done some work in fire and, you know, I was doing tables and we were talking about diversity and hiring and some of that was around this veteran-centric aspect. So, you know,

these young people with all these skills and knowledge that, you know, coming in. And they're like, yeah, we'd love, you know, of course they'd be welcome, you know, to be part of, you know, on scene and thinking about training and then when guys spoke up he said come on you guys we're that's not true if you start talking before five to seven years in we're not interested and in fact there'd be stigma it's not just hey no thank you it's we'd start to make decisions about who you are that you think you could even offer those suggestions and then people hear that and say well no I know a firefighter and he's really a nice guy or I know what you know that whole thing well that's the problem and that goes back to that anti-approach.

It's the system. It's the structure. The fact that we have, they can't find someone to lead the Canadian military right now who's not under investigation is not because there's a few bad apples, right? Everybody knew that that's what goes on,

the lawsuits and the RCMP. Like, it's endemic. Now, I'm not, it's not being anti-polites, right? Like, there's all sorts of creative ways that we can see how police can be supportive and maybe get back into their lane a little bit, right? And you'll see your more progressive chiefs say, you know, what am I doing in, you know, in this part of school intervention? Shouldn't we have counselors more of that? But, you know, that's where lots of funding is as well. So going back to your, you know, your question about experience is valued more.

I don't even think it's, they may think, they may say that's what it is and maybe even think that it's what they're. valuing, they're not. They're valuing hierarchy, seniority, a way of doing things, a culture of doing things that doesn't have to do with me saying, you know, yeah, I'm going to let Aaron go first because he's got more experience. Yeah. It's not that. I think that that is a real issue and I think that that is what offsets people to the idea of wanting to go to school because it's hard to see what you're going to be doing once you get the education. And I think that that's one of the tools, I think it's probably like a mind virus that people get where they're like, I don't even know what I'd do with it or what is like what a waste if I don't end up using it for my

specific thing. But yet it's a tool in order to interpret and bring information. And I think that this this development over time, hopefully, where we'll see more and more people being able to voice their understanding of things and have that put up with the research that shows the consistency would allow us to look forward because I did work with a lot of indigenous people who would say the police abused me and then it's like good luck trying to dispute that and good luck well who are you going to call yes well and like even the complaint process yeah really is designed to discourage people from making complaints because the process is so your face is the main aspect of the process and so it really discourages people from speaking up and I think

that further complicates issues because these people are working crazy shifts, doing ridiculous hours, and then being put in circumstances where they misbehave or that they have an incentive to misbehave, and then they misbehave. So I do see a lot of that because I know friends who are doing these four hours, like 12-hour shifts, and they're just, they're exhausted and they're not thinking clearly because by the fourth day, if you were doing a night shift, your circadian rhythms are all types of messed up. And so I'm interested to know what your thought. on community policing versus an RCMP approach. Yeah, so kind of municipal versus RCA is sort of, yeah.

I think it's pretty hard to imagine, and I think, well, not imagine, I think the RCMP has demonstrated that it has, it may not be capable of fixing itself, right? So I think that's an issue, right? And particularly if we frame that within reconciliation, and there's lots of people that know much more about that and speak from an experience that is much more valuable than mine who would talk about the need to really think about what it would look like not to have the RCMP, right?

What does that mean? I think the argument that, well, you know, you want local because then they know their communities. I mean, when the RCMP goes into Surrey, it acts a lot like a municipal force. It still has that hierarchy back to Ottawa, which you've heard people talk about. So that does, you know, that shifts things a bit.

But I think we need to rethink the actual language of community policing and what that means and what that looks like. And what we want police to do and what we don't need them to do, right? So, I mean, people have talked about different functions of policing. In Canada, you know, traffic police. Could we imagine where we partition off some of the functions of police to allow them to more highly specialized? And we're seeing that a bit with regional, like I hit,

as an example, where you pull together. and have more regional policing. And I think there's value to that. But I don't think we're in a place in Canada where we couldn't do much more of that. You know, what kind of training do you want to have when you're doing safety checks on, you know, when you're doing traffic stops on the highway, et cetera,

as opposed to investigating serious crimes? Are those different people? Yeah, are those different skill sets? Very definitely. Are there a lot of functions in police that could be done by civilian members that are not currently done? I remember talking to a municipal officer who,

who graduated from the CRIM program at UFV a long time ago. And he didn't have any computer experience, but then he became highly involved in terms of sex crimes and therefore had to learn an awful lot about computers. And he would often reflect on the fact that maybe if we had someone who had those skills coming in, do you need to be a police officer to do those things? So I think there's a lot of critical questions that we could ask about organization, like any organization, not just policing.

to think about why are we here, and if we're here for this, if we can all then agree about the what, then how do we want to organize ourselves to achieve those impacts, those results that we've just all agreed on? But I'm not sure we've got this agreement yet. Yeah, that's really important. And I think I hope to see more changes because one issue that I've always had is police being overly involved, regular officers being too involved in giving tickets. because I think that that create an automatic when you see a police officer up ahead

you're not thinking aren't I in a safe community where there's police officers around that I could contact if I had an issue you're thinking what could I possibly be doing wrong that would cause them to pull me over is my seatbelt, does it look like I'm wearing it is one of my taillights out

like that relationship has always concerned me because it creates a divide before there's even an issue and this feeling that a police officer's there to catch you doing something wrong rather than protect you is one of the things I think you see the difference between being a firefighter and being a police officer. Is everyone feels supported and beloved

when you're a firefighter, but that's different when you're a police officer. And then at the bottom of that is corrections. You know, you often hear that even more misunderstood and kind of outside the public eye in terms of sort of that stigma of that role. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we could have those kinds of conversations

where you kind of pull some of those pieces apart. But that sort of threatens the identity of policing as being this very holistic. We got our space in all sorts of different areas. The schools, gang intervention. You know, I've had police officers and chiefs say, I don't know if that really works, right? Like what we're doing.

Wouldn't it be great to find out? Yeah. I agree. I'm interested because you've been involved in non-governmental organizations. You've been involved in the upper levels of government. you've been involved in panels. I'm interested to hear what that's been like for you

because it's a part of the world that you really only get through like academia or being in politics or having some sort of relationship there that I don't think at a local level many people get to understand and learn more about like I have peers who haven't gone to university who truly believe that the United Nations

is some sort of world government organization there to enforce and is eventually going to take over. Like I have people who sincerely believe that And I think that the real world is much more boring than that. I think it's a lot more processes and much more like that. But I think understanding from your perspective, working with these government organizations, working with the various levels,

can be really informative for people who feel like it's all bureaucracy and that there's maybe a few Jeff Bezos's pulling all the strings behind the scenes. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, I think a bit of your friends being right in the sense that it's process. So whether you're at, in my view, reading a United Nations report and brief or you're reading a local municipal report and brief, there's more similarities than we might think, right? When you think of an organization like the United Nations. And to that point, there's a lot of similarities in terms of what process to get any action out of a report. So that's one of the things that I have tried to hang on to is that people think, oh, let's say, you know, it's a WHA. No, it's the United Nations, it's this, it's that, as opposed to.

But the bureaucracy, the decision-making, the who's at the table, who's not at the table, all of those things are incredibly similar, no matter what level you're at. What I've always tried to do is listen and leave every table that I'm at, no matter what level it's at learning and making beginning relationships that I try to sustain. Every panel I do, I try to do follow-up. You know, I've got a list of them I've still got to get to kind of over the last six months. But I try to say that wasn't a one-off. Like I hope that, you know, we'll stay in touch, right?

To me, it's about relationship. So no matter what level. I think one of the other things is the doability quotient, you know. So when you're at tables, are the things being talked about, is there a lens of what we can do? because I'm a pretty, you know, I'm a pretty glass-half-full kind of person, right? So always trying to think, what's the possibility here? And unfortunately, at too many tables, you don't see much of the possibility, right? You tend to start to feel really early.

This is going to be another report, and this is going to be another report that sits on a shelf. So I try to be selective. I try to be intentional about the tables I'm at. I try to find out really early if this is going to be actually. oriented or not. It was part of a really cool project at the BC legislature, the speaker, Daryl Placchus, who is a colleague and you know. And so he had asked me to do a project. It was three years. And it was really trying to how to make the ledge more accessible to citizens, right? That was kind of, I think, his question. And so the first year, it was kind of problem identification. The

second year was kind of possibility. And then the third year was him trying to sort through, what are some things we could do? You know, what is some achievable outcomes? And I loved that format. I thought it was a really smart way to organize the event. I completely agree. And that is something I'm really passionate about and something I'd like to talk to you about, which is citizenship. And what does it mean to have this right to vote? This, to me, responsibility to vote. And what role do our politicians play? But do we play? Because As I said, I have a lot of family and friends who have this mindset of what is voting, why does it matter? My one vote, it didn't change the election, so what does it matter?

Why am I doing this? I don't want to have to read up on these people. I don't want to have to do these things. And I think, as you kind of said, it's not really a choice. You have this obligation as a citizen to be involved to try and get the ear of your politician. And I am living proof that I can have on city council. I can have on politicians from various backgrounds, and they're willing to have an open three-hour conversation

that puts them at risk of saying something that they might regret saying. And I think that that's important for people to be able to develop and understand the importance of playing a role in the community and seeing it not as an obligation, but as an opportunity to help shape your community in a meaningful way.

And so I'm interested to hear your thoughts. You worked, and you know Daryl Plekis. He was our house speaker for a while. What is that like? to you and what do you view citizenship as? Yeah, so a few pieces. I think one of the things that came out of this particular project, particularly from the youth groups that we invited to the table, was a broader range of how we think about our political responsibilities. So, you know, lots of times we pay attention to, you know, what proportion of the population is actually

voting, right? And a lot of youth say we're incredibly politically active, but we get to choose how. Like, you don't get to tell us that voting is our primary way to be political. And I was really struck by the varied way that they described that. And their pushback was to say, in fact, youth are instrumental in the political landscape of Canada. You just need to think more creatively about what that looks like. And I thought that. And so that really resonated. So what are all those ways?

You know, it's everything with social media to podcasts that they're doing, that they're engaging, that they're demanding accountability, that they're participating in the Speaker's Forum that Daryl organized. So for me, one of the key pieces of citizenship is trying to be incredibly broad with action as a focus in terms of how we understand it. So to me, my classrooms, my key responsibility is to educate to citizenship. That's what it is. And that is to be a social, political, economic citizen. And that means that we need to understand the structures within which we activate our citizenship.

But that is going to look in as many different ways as we can possibly imagine, and there needs to be some openness. And there needs to be a recognition than when we feel the need to focus on, you know, voting or marches or, you know, organized dissent versus micro-level. we need to understand what brings people to different ways to express their citizenship as well. I agree and I think that we get to see a lot of that through social media, through communication lenses like that and I think that a lot of the time voting and involvement in the community in that way is often seen as like a forced issue that you shouldn't be excited about but

the fact that I have Sunot is a Chilwaukee City Councilor and one of my concerns right now that's just, I don't know why it's just really taken over my mind, is the fact that Chilliwack has chlorine in the water, and I got to listen to a podcast where a lady was explaining all of the deleterious effects, including getting cancer, from putting that chlorine in the water. And so I totally understand and accept that Fraser Health would say, we need this in order to make sure that there isn't other diseases and stuff in the water. My question is, is there a way to take it out after it's done what it needs to do? And is there a way, perhaps you can't do that on a macro level?

but is their way to get water filters and cleaning purification in communities that would never go out and buy that for themselves and create that as a more social norm because water is what we're mostly made up of it would be great if people had the level that helps them and then because I always grew up having when they put the water and like I'd drink a jug of water but then I'd have like a stomach feeling of like I'm like it's all sloshing around in there and it's a very gross feeling and that when a way when I started drinking alkaline water and understanding some of the benefits, but then I started thinking, how often is this getting to indigenous communities or people in poverty and trying to address that? And Sunot is completely supportive of the idea of trying to find a way to reach communities with these types of resources that allow people just to do a bit better. Sleep is another one that always comes to mind because it's something where it's easy to take, like for granted your Casper mattress and understand that other communities, like when I was growing up, We didn't, I didn't have other mattresses where I could be like, you know what, this one's a little bit too hard now. I'll upgrade. We didn't have that money. It was, I'm just going to keep sleeping on this mattress until some money falls from the sky and I'm able to upgrade eventually. And so trying to bridge those divides and create that sustainability. And I really like seeing companies and organizations starting to see the role they can play because I think that that was forgotten during the like 1960s and 70s was this idea that corporations can also help the community and play a play a play.

positive role. Now, obviously that can be taken advantage of an abused, but I think that the idea there that there are ways about working collaboratively between business and community and through politics is also important. Yep, absolutely. And, you know, it's interesting, you mentioned Jeff Bezos, but I've been struck by the attention and I feel badly I have to refer to her as his ex-wife. But I've heard some of the commentary as she's giving away. I think she's given $4 billion away in the last sort of few months. And some of the people that have received it have been struck by how she's giving it, which is this.

You know what's best. Here's the money. So you think about that corporate connection and the corporate citizenship and responsibility. You know, she's not asking for her name on a building. She's not, you know, asking that it's directed at this because this is my pet little project. You're the experts.

go. And so how we define a corporate responsibility and what that partnership looks like and and, you know, how you take some of the bad, because there's a greater good and how you navigate some of those, I think are such interesting questions. And we're going to have to deal with them more and more as we look for more, you know, started to see it more over the last 20 years, but these really strong public-private partnerships. Are you seeing that a lot with Chazzy or? Yeah, I think, you know, that would be the goal. Yeah. I think that's the one spot the pandemic has hurt us a bit because the goal, I think if we were open all at last in our first year and people corporate, you know, donors, et cetera, could come in and see the student like an inaction. I think they'd be so impressed and excited by the possibility. So that's what we hope for the coming year is that we'll have a greater ability to get, yeah, absolutely, some donors excited about it.

And, yeah, when you have a corporate interest attached to something like that, you have to be careful, you have to be transparent, you know, all of those kinds of things. But I think there's great possibility to do it as well. One part that really interests me because I think it's something that the university unfortunately struggles with is getting the word out. I think that that has always been something that the university has never been particularly skilled at. even when I see some of their social media, it's like, who is this for? Who is your target audience when you're posting about this? Because to me, you're not being very relatable if I'm just a community member who knows nothing about UFE, not even being that relatable, and I went to UFE.

Like, I think that they miss out on certain tones and certain ways of hitting the community. I think you're inside the university environment for so long. You think your message is landing because everybody in the building totally gets it. And I think sometimes the why and the how start to get lost. And so I'm interested to hear how you're going to approach that with Chazzy because to me, even journalism within a local level is struggling a little bit. I don't think we're having the level of analysis that we could be with great journalists willing to dig deeper into issues.

To me, sometimes it's a very gloss-over and local issues are kind of treated like puff pieces and not treated as what are the real issues going on in our community. that we should address and that's something I felt is missing from local journalism so I'm curious as to how you're going to approach that we we think it's so important that we sort of constructed the position as part of that responsibility for the visual project specialist was trying to think about our communication strategies and so to that end he has a small student-led communications team paying lots of attention to social media I think we're, you know, we're just getting started, but we've, they've been organizing, and they want

to start a podcast. I hear they're going to call it, given what we know. I guess I say that in class a lot. So, could you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I say a lot, Spencer would have told, yeah, if you were here, but, you know, given what we know, what should we do, and most of the time, we don't do it. So we know lots, like, about all sorts of issues, harm reduction, poverty, racism, sexism, what a good education looks like, right? We know so many things about what's wrong with our K-a-12 system in terms of how classrooms are set up. Look at the university. We have three-hour blocks, people sitting in horrible chairs, horrible tables, like it's not conducive, and yet we build brand new spaces that are exactly the

same. Like I know when I sit in one of those chairs, I'm like, oh my God, students, I'm so sorry. So given what we know, we should be doing so many things so differently. So that's what they're going to, and what they want the focus to be is about talking to people about how different things could look. And, you know, learning lots from just sitting here and talking with you about hopefully what they'll be trying to do with that particular component of our messaging. We've got a blog that we're looking at, you know, trying to get more activity on once we're. people are back on campus and they can drop in and get a sense of what we do, do pay attention to social media and try to think about visual aspects. One of the things we're super proud of is the original illustrations, so around particular days where, and there have been some really

Selena Coupes is the artist's name and just some amazing things that she's done. So, and again, I think some of those go to your point, which is it's not just announcing a panel or an event or retweeting necessarily without context of why chassis cares about that issue. We're being really attentive to what we're having on our social media and what choices we're making around those things and how they're framed. We're giving student voices on there, so we're highlighting our students on our social media, hoping that that sends a message that they're highly valued.

Yeah. So try not to be too corporate, but also trying to be really responsible about what's on there. I think that that is such a great thing because the one part that I thought a lot about before starting the podcast was realizing that this medium is built for everyone. Whether you're into cars or whatever you're into, I really like the long form element of this because then there's no need for sound bites. And I think one error that legacy media made was treating their audience as if they were stupid. And saying that that's kind of just a business model that we need to follow.

because I think one thing I learned before I started this podcast was how many truck drivers listened to podcasts. And when people thought about truck drivers, they don't give much credence or respect to that profession that I think it deserves. But then on top of that, realizing that these people who probably didn't go to university, we're listening to three-hour podcasts on biology, chemistry, mathematics, these different topics where we've often kind of just pushed these people aside. And so when I hear about you, and these ideas of needing to address these issues, I'm actually optimistic to see media that's being created that allows people to get a full education without ever needing to set foot in a university. And I'm really worried about what the universities are going to do when they start to see that become more and more true because someone like yourself could likely do a podcast that would do incredibly well because all of your past students would want to share that with all of their friends, which would very easily gather you a following larger than the 30, 40, 40 students.

in your classroom and I don't know whether or not they're going to respond to that with support and optimism or this is our bread and butter these are our buildings we've got so much invested this isn't something that we want to support because it removes the need to be in this building and do it this way and so I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that because I hope that you guys start a podcast because I think there is a hunger within BC that we don't have a lot of podcasts that are locally made that are bringing awareness to local issues. So a couple of things, I mean, I quickly couldn't agree more.

My son is a big podcast listener when he's stocking, he's a stock in shelves as his summer job and he come home and say, I listen to three and mom, this is really cool, you gotta listen to this one. And so that's how I've been really introduced to podcasts, is hearing him talk about, and long ones, right? Like really interested in these political conversations. On the flip side, though, I am a real believer in face-to-face education and I, Absolutely think there's a place for online, both formal and informal, the podcast being the

informal university being in terms of remote and access, right? So I mean, the stock and the shelves and the grocery store and listening and having that. But I do believe there's a magic in the classroom. And I worry what universities are going to do coming out of the pandemic in terms of having more online content than we've ever had before and it growing to the, the point where we lose that. And I'm not saying it happens in every classroom. And I'm not saying that I'm always great at it. But I do believe when it's done the best university education is the lightning that happens.

When people see themselves, they hear their voices respected, and they can feel the relevance of what's happening in that moment, and it gives them hope. Yeah. I've definitely seen that as well. I see a lot of students who thrive in the environment of being able to speak up and share their thoughts and develop fully. One part that I hope the universities keep is the recording of the lectures.

Because I think everybody just implicitly assumed you're able to hold in three hours worth of content in a discussion where oftentimes you can remember maybe one, maybe two details about that lecture. If you didn't write it all down and if you're writing it all down, you're not paying attention fully because you're focused on regurgitating information rather than understanding and grappling with it.

See, isn't that an interesting one? I don't, I don't like recording. And I think it's because of that organic nature of it. And so for me, to be honest, it's interesting. Because of what happens in my classroom, I'm not fill in the boards, there's not slides with content and information. It's, I think my students would say it's about applying.

So, you know, I'm not regurgitating the chapter. I'm just, you know, hey, we talked about this idea. How do you guys think that that might relate to, you know, disenfranchised grief? Let's talk a little bit about COVID and that concept and that idea. I wasn't, you know, in student raises, I wasn't thinking about COVID. I was thinking about this. Okay, well, let's run with that for a second.

Well, let's circle back, et cetera. So I think what happens in the classroom is about them. If they're prepared, then they're not going to be worried about it. There's not this mad note taking. It's probably more like, oh, that's kind of interesting. or a doodle or whatever. And then they've got the content later. But that's my approach.

So I certainly saw on COVID where, you know, my kids and their friends, you know, 80 PowerPoint slides with no audio or video just, like, I don't understand that. So, yeah, I think there's going to be some critical questions about what education looks like moving forward. Because to be honest, like Social 101, which I think is that face-to-face, experience. Well, let's face it, if is Disney or whoever, Pixar decided to do a 101 lecture, they could do a pretty great job. And why would every university have to have their own 101? They could just sell it to every university across North America, at least.

That's what I'm seeing. I don't know if you've seen the explained videos. They've done money explained. They've done COVID-19. I feel like I've heard that, but maybe I'm confusing it with another, but it's kind of that idea. Yeah, it's something I'm really happy with because they did a stocks explained at the stock market explained and to me that's the type of information I really want to get I want to get to indigenous communities because they're the communities that aren't that's not even on anyone's radar to get into the communities how do you invest money what is investing in real estate what does it mean to have a TFSA or a RRSP what are those like those are the things where I feel like I really want to encourage people to go to the university of the Fraser Valley

not for like I need to go get a degree but if you're a business owner take an accounting course or a management course on how to lead and you might only get one thing out of it but it's $500 and you have the opportunity to perhaps pivot your business better because I know a lot of really well-intentioned business owners that I think have plateaued and don't even know how they would get out of that plateau or that they are in a plateau like I see it because I'm like I've seen you for five years now and it's it's the same it's not there's nothing but there's no growth where's your second location third location where's your online platform and so that's where I think the university can fill a gap is not we've gotten to a bad habit of thinking that education is

from your 18 to 30 and then from 30 to 65 you're working yeah and I think that the error there is not realizing that you're learning and growing throughout your life so rebecca and I one of our hopes is once I'm done law school is to take courses, take a financial planning course, just I understand saving is important and I understand how to save, but do I understand all the methods? Do I understand how to approach things, how to make things easier? When I'm working for Alpine Legal Services, Chanel has me working on creating an Excel spreadsheet. I've used Excel twice in my life. So it's a whole new journey for me and he's really, really good at it. And then he's like, but there are people way better than me. And it's like, well, could I be

like those people? What could this serve and how could I use this as a tool to succeed? And that's one of the areas where I think people who responded to the Spencer podcast and who I predict will respond to this podcast are people not your 18 to 24 year olds necessary, hopefully them as well. But there are people who have kind of said, no, university wasn't really for me. That's not where I saw myself so I didn't go. Now maybe I kind of regret it. But there isn't that encouragement of year 30, who cares? Take a course, get an experience, and maybe bring that into your workplace

and offer to your boss, hey, I know more about social media or I know more about personal finance or I know about tax deductions based on this accounting course I took and creating that long-term value to the community and to yourself where you're constantly growing.

Yeah, and I think one of the challenges and opportunities at the same time is creating situations where they're able to have the conversation where we don't leave the classroom and go, who can I talk to about that or who else is interested, et cetera, and that's where I think the power of a university can be.

And that's where I think, again, URFI has so much room to grow is in terms of that on-campus sort of experience, right? Where you're going to the pub or you're going to the coffee shop and you're having that conversation so that the relevance, because I just, keep coming back to that for me. It's like, oh, yeah, I just was talking about that, or I just

used it, or, you know, I can imagine how I could use it, or I heard about this job that I didn't even know existed because somebody was talking about it. So I think, how do you create those situations where people have milliers to keep talking? I agree, and that's one thing where I was grateful for the criminology department, because we had a big table and it would be like 15 to 20 of us would all range through the room over the course of a day or a week. And we'd go there every single week to do our studying, but also to talk about what we learned in the classroom. And that's where when I left UFE, when I graduated, that dropped to zero. And that's where I think that the opportunity is missing. And I like the idea of an alumni association, but the things that I think

students would look for within an alumni association aren't the things that they're promoting. Because Again, they think that they're offering something to the students that they're looking for, but they don't know that students are actually the part that they enjoyed the most was the discussions and the analysis and discussing because I had a lot of students challenge me and say, because I believe that there's the overrepresentation of indigenous people in prisons is complicated. And it's far more complicated than I felt some of my colleagues and some of my professors were understanding because the part about the data that it shows is it's violent crime. It's not always low-level offenses, and that's where the instinct is to be like, oh, if it's an over-representation, let's just let these people out. They've done nothing wrong. Let's just fix the problem, bring it down to whatever their proportion should be. The problem for me was always, these are violent crimes.

These aren't clear-cut, let's just release them, and the problem will be solved. You release them, then the community is now back in jeopardy, and the problems weren't fixed, and having the opportunity to work and hope and learn about some of the internal stories that I don't think make the news is that there's a sexual assault that goes on on reserve. That person's arrested, sent to jail for a year

and then back in the community with the same chagrin on his face as when he committed the crime that everybody was aware of and everybody felt hurt by, it's being able to understand that this is complicated. And that's where I feel like

sometimes with social issues, we want it to be simple enough that we could fix it and see the solution. And that's why I enjoyed being a native court workers because some of my clients committed the worst crimes that I could ever imagine, but it was an opportunity to, okay, this is what you've been through in your life.

So it makes, I can see the problems that have arisen. But the other part of that that I've always tried to stress is you hear this coin saying, hurt people, hurt people. But that's actually way less true than people realize because the amount of people who are sexually abused who don't repeat is actually way higher than the people who do repeat.

And so there's optimism in the fact that that ends up occurring over-generation. So, yes, we may have an over-representation now, but I want the narrative to be, watch indigenous people turn this around. Watch us, take the lead, start, come out of the gate swinging, and make changes and make a difference and become the leaders in the community. And so that's really important to me. And I think I can come across the wrong way about it sometimes, but it's because I don't want my culture and my community to be the lowest on the pecking order.

forever and I don't want to believe that that's going to be true so when I think of addressing these issues I think that one day we won't be the overrepresented in the lowest educated the most incarcerated the most impoverished I don't want that to be the story for my kids I want them to not feel those weights and I think we've carried those weights for over 100 years now so there's some moves that I think are here now with podcasts with the ability to communicate that are coming about that allows us not to see ourselves in the lowest ring on the totem pole type of feeling, but I think that scares some of my community members by saying that I don't think we're going to be here forever, so the problem's like solved. And I'm not trying to say that. I'm trying to say that I can

see a future for our community and for our society where we're not here anymore. And that means that we have to help whoever ends up being in that position in the future. And so it takes a longer approach and that's why for me I have said things like I hope that the native court worker role becomes like a court worker role not because I'm anti-indigenous people but because I believe that this role is necessary for anyone in the bottom 10% really struggling and that's where in this I think political climate it can be hard for others to voice that opinion because if you're a Caucasian person saying why not just a court worker role people will be like, well, you're disregarding indigenous people.

And I think that it's important for me to share that I hope that it isn't always indigenous people in that circumstance because I hope that we find a way out of this and that we're able to thrive and find a way to put this in the rearview mirror. Because for my experience, my grandmother went to Indian residential school. My mother was a part of the 60 scoop. So I've got all the trauma I need in order to identify that way. But I have hope that I'm coming out of this. I've got a law degree or working towards a law degree.

I've got a podcast. I'm able to be a role model for others who might see all of the terrible atrocities in the past and think, what future can I have? I want them to be able to see. There's so much potential. I'm having Inez Louis on to talk about what it means to be a singer, songwriter. She was nominated for Juno Awards, and that's a person who's not showing off the worst parts of the atrocities. And so I guess that's kind of my perspective on that. Yeah, and I think, you know, it's, if I hear a bit that walking of where people worry that with hope that negates the history. And I feel like that's a bit of what you're describing. And I think that's a real challenge, right?

And so I also think, though, that joint community university spaces can really further that conversation. Because there has to be an honoring of the past, as you're describing. But that doesn't mean that there can't be this sort of very engaged approach to what the possibility is. And it also, that caution about, well, Aaron's doing really well, then too many people want to unfortunately turn that into, well, then everybody should be because Aaron's got all sorts of reasons not to be doing well, and yet he is. So that whole pull yourself up by the bootstrap mentality, which is harmful. So I think that's one of our most important challenges. is to navigate the individual and the collective responsibilities and impacts and outcomes

that come from these kinds of really systemic sorts of issues. I agree, and I've had the opportunity, and I try and talk about this on the podcast, the impact of community on my development, because it wasn't me and my mom in a box by ourselves. It was relying on places like family place. My mom went there for educational courses on how to be a good mother and how to support me, and she's, I'm so lucky to have somebody who really viewed my only goal in my entire life is to raise this child properly and to the best of my ability. And she had her own limitations that put impediments to her succeeding at that,

but she never let those get in her way and she never let me feel like I was the issue, despite teachers and educators saying that I had all these problems and that I was not going to succeed or I didn't seem like I was on the path of success to have, Someone believe in me despite all of that made a huge difference, but also having community members and community organizations help lift my mom up and me up made that difference. And so it's not about just the bootstraps. It's about understanding that this is all working kind of together like Chazzy to create an environment where a person can thrive, despite being in a food insecure household, despite not always feeling secure in terms of like the heat in our home or these types of issues to know that the community had our back. and that there were resources we could go and utilize like food banks and soup kitchens and stuff like that that I developed a true appreciation for people in

poverty that they aren't evil people they aren't the scum of the earth or how sometimes I think we portray them these are people with their own incredible community because we had people with not much more than us willing to give us stuff to help support us and so that really built community and when there were injuries in downtown often it was the people that you would think are the outliers or the misfits being the ones right there saying I'm calling 911 I've got this like don't worry like we're going to try and address this and so I think that that's the other thing with substance use that we often forget about is that there's actually this community

going on there that we don't understand and that was that's probably one of the biggest complications because I was asked about how do we address homelessness from my perspective as a native court worker and one of the biggest issues I ran into was having some me being able to say I've got you a great place at the treatment center or at this housing facility you'll be able to go there and they're like well what about Joe what about like Tim like I can't leave them on the street and it's like that's first of all amazing I don't want to discourage that that's not something to say oh come on this is about you let's get you in the place it's about okay well how do we redesign these centers to make sure that community can be fostered and so

that they don't have to abandon their other people in their community that they watch out for while they sleep, I stay awake, and when they're eating, I'm going and grabbing food, or these types of relationships that are built, that we kind of, why do you care about them? Like, don't you want to be well? Don't you want to have a nice, warm, cozy place? And it's like, not if it means abandoning all the people who have been there for you. Like, we should not be encouraging that as a society. Yeah, and yet, and you're exactly right.

And yet it goes back to, you know, some of the things I was talking about in the very narrow idea of the Academy in terms of we focus so much on the individual and individual as success, et cetera, and really worry that people aren't doing the work on their own or those kinds of things. And then you have these wonderful examples where there's this collective responsibility that really models to the rest of us about how we could be thinking about issues really quite differently. So I think, you know, as you were talking as well, I mean, to me, a lot of what we're describing and exploring is inspiration. And so, you know, your mom sort of when I think about role as faculty members, role of community members is, you know, to inspire that whole possibility.

So how do you profile that? How do you make people see or help people to see themselves in that possibility? Which I think is one of the most exciting things about what I love to do, which is teach. That's very interesting to me. May I ask, because I bet for some students you are likely that that motherly role that they don't have at home. And I know a lot of my friends and family don't have good home lives. And so a great professor sort of fills that role of like at least like I didn't have a father growing up. And so influences like Mark Lalonde, Yvonne Dan Durand, John Haidt, were these kind of like, John Haidt, the thing I always got out of his class wasn't what he taught. But it just felt like I wasn't reaching my potential and he was looking at me like I wasn't reaching my own potential.

And it wasn't in a rude, judgmental, disrespectful way. It was like, I think you could be doing better than this. And you're just not. And so that really pushed me to want to develop. But that's also like, I don't know, maybe a fatherly role to be like, you could be doing better where I always got that mercy from my mother. I always got that understanding that I could talk about anybody disrespected me and maybe I was in the wrong, but she'd always see it from my lens and support my perspective

where John was like, well, this paper wasn't very good. So that's why you didn't get a good grade on it. Like, that's how it is. And so I'm interested to know what that's been like because I do think that a lot of people look up to you. And I've, again, not gotten to hear people's personal stories of how you've impacted them. And I do think that that plays this familial role for them to be able to trust and have a positive connection with somebody. And so what has that been like for you to perhaps build these relationships with students that end up being long lasting and being incredibly meaningful? Yeah, I mean, and I think, and it's interesting how your, you know, your analysis of that was interestingly gendered, right?

Like, so kind of the soft, the motherly, and the, and I mean, as a woman who, you know, helps lead a two-mom family, a lot of my work is degendering. You know, when we decided to have children, as an example, and it's my roundabout way of getting to your question, you know, people say, well, what happens if you have a son? You know, I used to joke and say, well, we'd give them back. Because what would two women know to do it? Like, are you kidding me? Like, who changes your oil in your car? I'm like, the mechanic. What are you talking about?

Right? Like, you know, who's going to mow the lawn? Who cooks dinner? Like, those kinds of things. And I'm like, the person that gets home first, who gets the groceries? The person going by the store. Like, in fact, the research on mum-led families is about egalitarianism, right? Because you're not doing things because they're gender.

You're doing things because they make sense, right? So, you know, when I think about my role in the classroom to your question, I think I bring that lens of degendering, you know, kind of what my, so for some students, I'm sure, like I've sat with students and said, like, what's going on? Because, like, what I get in a classroom is not this paper, right? So, you know, oh, well, actually, my child was sick all three days, and I just tried to put it. I said, well, take it and take some more time with it. Are you happy with it? Do you want to?

And in some cases, right? Students say, I don't want to because I've got so much stress or I'm like, fine, no worry. But it's that ability to call, be that person that reflects themselves. So they don't feel threatened by it. They don't feel like I'm, as you said, it's not someone trying to call you out. It's someone to say, well, is this what you feel? I'm going to sneeze, sorry. Is this you feel comfortable with your work, right?

And I think in other cases, it's seen someone who has been marginalized, and so they see possibility. And I think that's been a really big part of what I do. And yeah, I think if you do it well, there's vulnerability. And so students share things that you wouldn't have thought people would share with a professor. And so you want to navigate those in a respectful and professional and, you know, I point people a lot to support. that I think might be helpful that have expertise that I certainly don't. So I think it's all of that. And I think there's vulnerability.

I was talking to a student who's now a Sessional, a bit about, and she was just last night, she was saying, you know, I think what happens in your classroom is that there's this ability to see you be vulnerable as you navigate the content to the course. And then that gives people permission to be vulnerable as they're engaging with the course material to allow themselves. more places to see themselves and to find its relevance. And I think that was great to hear because I think that is a goal of mine.

When I was thinking Sosh, when I did my own academic journey, I desperately needed to see myself. Yeah. That I think is just amazing because I think that that is something I try and bring to life in the podcast is that vulnerability, is that element of who is the person really? Who is underneath the business and the organization and the career accolades and those types of things is who is the person at their core because I think that that's what the university bios really miss is who like your research is great but who are you and why do you care about

these things and why is this something that leaps out to you and I think that that's so valuable to give the student the opportunity to reflect on what they were doing because my first real experience was with that was more as a native court worker when I was on my own to really evaluate my own work based on my own opinion I didn't really have that in my undergrad of like, is this up to my own standards? I try, but I wouldn't evaluate it based on, it would be like, okay, this is kind of what the professor's looking for, this is what I'm going to do, this is how I'm going to approach it based on what I think they want, not on I think that this is good in and of itself, which is something that I think brings a lot of meaning for the podcast, is this ability for me to be like, I did my readings, I did my best to research you, I did my best to write up insightful questions and to ask interesting questions. questions during the interview and to do that to the best of my ability. And so if I could do something better, I'm always open to hearing that.

But I know that today, after we wrap up, I'm going to be happy with what I did today and how I prepared things, which I think when you're working at jobs that don't facilitate that, don't allow you to look back on your own work and feel accomplished when you're having an exterior person judge you most of your life, whether it's my high school teacher, than my university professor, now my boss. It's always external. And so the judgment's always external. So there's no sense of self-improvement for your own sake.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. And while I have changed my grading in COVID times, I just wrote on someone's paper a couple of days ago, this is not the assignment, but it sure was interesting, A. And I wouldn't normally do that. But I think there's more permission right now to be gentler. And the person had clearly misread the assignment.

but they wrote a really good piece, right? So I will be curious how they received that, you know, as feedback. I think students are such pleasers and think that's so often what they're looking for. And so, and I mean, we do tell them, like, try to get a sense of, you know, what it's like, who what your professors are looking for, who likes what, you know, all of those kinds of things. And then, you know, because grades are important for particular for people off to law school or grad school, or whatever. But I think we could do better in terms of that flexibility and that, you know, allowing

students to structure an assignment so students have more opportunities to find themselves in the assignments they have to do. That's amazing. Can you tell us a little bit about your family life and what that's been like for you from your parents and growing up and just a little bit of your personal background? Yeah, for sure. I grew up in London, Ontario, and as I mentioned, my dad was an auto mechanic, he was a bus mechanic, and did never take a sick day, so that work ethic piece was a, you know, for all its warts as well, was a piece of that, and then, you know, there were five women in the house, right? So my dad would constantly talk about his girls.

So there was this interesting, he worked full-time. My mom did, so I watched those gender dynamics. They had great respect and love for one another, so that was great. I have three sisters. And we came out here, actually Darryl Plochus called me, well, Paul Maxim called me, who was my supervisor for my master's, and said, you're going to get a call from a guy. who's going to offer you wants to fly you out to BC for a job interview. And I said, I didn't apply for anything.

What are you talking about? He said, just say yes to everything, he says. So Daryl called and, you know, I want to come in. Could you fly out this Friday? We'd like to interview. We've heard great things, whatever. I said, no, I've got all these, you know, I'm working. I've got things going on and I can't.

He said, well, it's a free trip. Just come out and we can meet. And I said, oh, I wouldn't feel good about that if I had no intention of taking a job. So he flew out to London the next year. We had lunch. and then I applied for the job the next time because my family all was from London and stayed in London. My sisters are all there.

So it was a big move for us. So my partner and I came out here. And one of the best things about that was BC was much more progressive and visible in terms of gay community. And so we decided to have children, which we hadn't ever talked about before. And I feel incredibly lucky.

What was that process like? Yeah, I mean, Fast. I want to write a book. Some time, and it would be about the elevator ride. To me, we worked with a clinic in Vancouver, and as a gay couple, it was our first choice. So we were excited every time we went in. Giddy. And on this elevator at 7 a.m., everybody's going up to do blood tests. And heterosexual couples, this is not their first choice. Society tells them that they're flawed because they're having to get assistance, right? So I was always struck by this mood, us vibrating with excitement and them feeling ashamed.

Yeah. So that I think was fascinating. It was interesting, you know, my oldest, our oldest was born in 98. So lots of people said, you know, are you sure you want, you know, have you thought about this? And I'm like, yeah, we've thought about it a little bit. And so it was interesting reactions to that. I did a lot of activism work really early when the kids were young. We had our twins in 2000.

So as a sociologist, how cool is it to have boy-girl twins, right? My own little sociological experiment. So, and the kids remind us of that. We had very androgynous dress as the kids were little. They're like, seriously, what were you guys thinking? I'm like, yes, nature, nurture. But at that time, like lots of questions about, well, just the ones I had mentioned earlier, right? and people just thinking wasn't fair to the kids.

When we had our children, my name couldn't be on the birth certificate for our oldest. That wasn't, didn't come tell a little bit later that they made those changes. What caused that? Like, what drives that? Yeah, I mean, tradition, right? Like, just not, you know, and it started to shift. I mean, I think that was 2000 when you could. And then marriage was 2003 to 5 is when it started, you know, we saw that in Canada.

So I think it was just all of that resistance, adoption, similar kinds of things in terms of same-sex couples. So, yeah, it's so we've, I've got three who are grown up now. And we always thought, I don't think they'll ask why we had them, because I think they are loved and they are magnificent kids. I mean, we love our kids always, but I think it's a real gift to. to like them as much as I like my kids. And so, but we did wonder if they'd ask why the Fraser Valley, because, you know, there's particular challenges, but they're everywhere in those times, right? I was just telling the kids last night about when the twins were born.

One of them had to go up to the NICU pretty quickly, and the nurse who had been with us all day said, don't you think the dad might want to hold your before we take them up I'm like who the hell is who are you talking about and we had a friend who really wanted to be part of the process who sat in the corner drinking tims and reading men's health and they thought that was and and so they were and that was in Vancouver you know women's hospital so it happens everywhere like where people we in that moment and you can't ever fix that moment that was the birth of our kids and as the non-birth uh birthing mom

Nobody gets to fix that moment for me when someone asked that question and negated me. Yeah. So I use this as powerful reminders of the possibility and the opportunity that we have to make change. Yeah. And so the kids have been really important to that experience. We've experienced homophobia. We pulled them out of the Abbotsford. Hannah was first in kindergarten.

At the end of kindergarten, we decided not to go back to Abbotsford. and kept them home for a couple years and then drove to Langley every day. And that was because of systemic, our experience of systemic homophobia. What is that like to have to choose where you go and what you're going to, because that's a lot of your life that you have to, and I don't think that people just understand the pros, like when I, when Rebecca and I go for walks, we try and think of places where it's going to be peaceful and there's not going to be a lot of people. And so that's a cognitive thing that we have to do, but to have to worry about just basic friendly respect and that process, what is that like to have to go, is this the community that works for me because of the approach that this whole community has, because that is a very sociological way to look at it, is to see that the Fraser Valley has this struggle and to recognize that, and I agree that it's probably elsewhere, but to look at a community and go, this is where I'm choosing. to live, this is where I'm choosing to put my roots, and I'm going to face an uphill battle

at certain points that's going to really be discouraging and not what you want to do when you're just trying to raise a family and enjoy the internal mechanisms of being a part of a family. Yeah, I mean, it's exhausting. And you are, every time you load the kids in the car for that journey, you're reminded there's a reason you're driving down the highway every single day for your kids. And, but I also realize, you know, that, you know, in the same breath, I'd get a note from a prophet UBC who said, look at this flyer I just got, lives in point gray, just got a flyer with basically the same thing, banning books at that time.

So, I mean, I think it's a real recognition that it's everywhere. And I think as long as you sort of recognize that, then, I mean, some might say that must make it feel worse, but it doesn't. It just realizes that there's great solidarity and all the work we need to do together. Yeah. And, you know, that's always, that's always been a characteristic. When our kids were born, they became political beings. That's just a reality, and I'm not going to deny that.

And that was a conscious choice, and they know it. And our daughters are artists, and I think their politics informs their work. And we have a great sense of humor in the house, and I think that's powerfully important. We recognize the intersection of our privilege. You know, my son is a white guy who needs to understand that he has privilege because of that status. He also comes from a lesbian-led family, which is going to create issues and he has sisters who are going to experience sexism. And he needs to understand the land that he, you know, the space that he occupies. And so we try to do a lot of that.

The kids would say likely that they had to take away the remote control. early in our lives because we would stop I'd stop a movie and say now look at the gender happening and you know it's Nemo yeah like mom let it just be Nemo so things like that but yeah I've always taken that responsibility as a parent pretty seriously I'm really happy to hear that because coming from my experience of just having one mother who tried really hard I saw a lot of my like I thought I had it bad and then I see be it over to a friend's house and watch that friend literally get beaten by his father with me in the other room being able to peek around and see that and be like I don't have a father I don't have that problem I have other problems and that really helped me

put things into perspective because I had another friend and his his parents his mother wasn't that great to him and was abusive at times and didn't really see a relationship there didn't see that same laughing, enjoying communal experience with their mother. And so understanding that just because it's a two-parent household or the traditional whatever it is doesn't mean that it's healthy on the inside. And I think that that's the arrogance that a lot of people make when they were talking about those issues and trying to debate these topics is they don't understand that anyone who's going to love a child

is probably the best person to be around that child because that's going to be what the pillar that allows them to go and flourish is going to be. Yeah, and yet, absolutely, and yet, you know, that biological imperative that people feel that defines family is still so powerful, which is, I think it's interesting to watch, you know, so much attention to ancestry movements

and, you know, and databases and all those kinds of things, and I think that's great. But I also think there's a flip side of that that it reifies. It reminds people. about the importance of biology, when I would argue as a sociologist, that it is less important than society needs to put it on. I mean, even when we qualify and say, well, it's not my biological something, or it's my adoptive something, or it's a whatever. And I'm thinking, when do the qualifiers get to go away and why do people hang on to them so tightly? So I think those are always,

everything is, you know, when I teach 101, one of the first things I say is that I'm going to wreck things for you. I'm going to wreck movies. I'm going to wreck TV shows for you. I'm going to wreck a lot of stuff, right? Because I think the gift of a sociological lens is that it just makes our world so much more interesting and complex. As you talked about in terms of over-representation of indigenous people in correctional settings. I completely agree. And I think even knowledge as a concept is a blessing and a curse because you see all the problems.

And when I see a news article, I'm like, they didn't consider this or that or the other thing. and like what about this and what about that perspective? And it really becomes like I can't just put on the news and just absorb the information and go, oh, okay, because I'm having all these questions. But that makes you a fully developed person when you're burdened with the fact that you understand things from different perspectives.

The last thing I'd like to ask about is who are some of your role models? You talked a little bit about Daryl Plexis, but I'm just interested to hear who's set that example for you in your life that's allowed you to approach things from this way. Yeah, I mean, I think some different people in different ways, but I mean, I would just quickly say Daryl modeled for, I think, many of us, what it means to be student-focused in a way that people can't touch very well. So, but for me, I mean, my mom, I think the strength of women is something I'm powerfully attentive to. And to be honest, I mean, at UFV, Jacqueline Nolte, who is. the departing Dean of Arts I think is one of it well for me a leader at

UFV and I don't use leader lightly like I think I've had two sort of people that I really identify as leaders at UFV in my 28 years so I use it perhaps a bit differently than some and and Jacqueline is a great example and students will talk about but just grace and wisdom support, like it's very much a how do we help, how do we move something forward, something you've talked a lot about this morning, like about action, like what can we do? And she does it with great humility. And I get, I find that really helpful and informs me. So I think she's been powerfully important. But I've had some really strong women in my family life growing up that

were, you know, really pretty critical. And I'm really inspired by my students. Their story. their strength. You know, I think what I love being in the classroom, it's very relational. So I learn so much always. I'm really grateful to have been able to have you on to share this because I think that it gives an idea of how teaching and learning can be done differently. And as I've mentioned, I know people who don't feel like UFE or any university is an accessible place to go because of all the ideas they have in their head about how things are approached and to their credit that are still approached that way by many other professors and so to be able to bring light

to someone like yourself in a long form way where we can talk about all the great things they're going on at UFE and the projects that you've worked on and your mindset when it comes to educating students I think it makes it all more accessible for individuals who are more skeptical of going to university I think that creates the environment where we can all see ourselves in a university setting and seeing those opportunities where maybe it is a full degree but it's a couple courses and it's by people that we truly believe in and I hope that your name gets more and more notoriety and more respect because I think you are setting an

amazing example and contrasting the legacy approach of how things are done with a more modern, more understanding, more holistic way of doing things that can allow more students to consider university as a viable option because even with people in trades I think that they should still overlap with some social sciences. I don't think that it should be one or the other. I think that that approach really discourages holistic people, being able to see things from various perspectives and just have the tools in order to learn new things and bring that knowledge back into their community. And so I really appreciate you've been a huge influence on Spencer and he was a terrific person to sit down with. But I know that a lot of his knowledge and a lot of

his approach was informed by you. And so seeing you already informing the next generation of professors, is really meaningful to me, but also to be able to be the person who hears amazing things in the background, and here's things when I was in criminology, I heard your name, more recently I've heard your name, and then now I'm hearing your name. And so to see that progression over time, nothing changed, the reviews that I heard didn't change. And so those are the people I'm always looking for to have on the podcast, because there's an indication there.

There's a hidden message within somebody repeating your name, various people repeating your name that really gives credentials that the university just, I don't think they understand, are credentials to meet and is something that's worth admiring, understanding, and hopefully emulating. I hope that students do attend your class based on this, and I hope that I can continue to raise awareness of great people like yourself. Well, thank you so much. If a small fraction of what you said is too, I feel incredibly privileged. So thank you. It's been such a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you.