I was at a research meeting a few weeks ago with colleagues from universities across the county. One of them pulled out the new MacLean’s Magazine, university ranking issue.  My university is on the bottom, it’s not just the bottom, it’s the bottom of the bottom category, primarily undergraduate universities.  My colleagues teased me, and asked me what I thought about it.  Here is my response…

Sure, we have the distinction of vying for last place on alternate years with another institution for that bottom spot, but let us look at the numbers, really look at them and the story behind them.  The University College Cape Breton came into existence in 1974, but was transformed in 2005, when the trades and technical programs were transferred to the Nova Scotia Community College. Under the name Cape Breton University we are only 12 years old and that makes us one of the youngest players in the field in name at least. It’ no wonder we don’t rank highly in “reputational rankings”. It’s the same for most of the universities on the bottom of that list.

     But on the other hand, we are small, and I like it that way. I don’t think our goal will or should ever be to compete with the bigger universities. Historically the mandate for our university has come from the community, who lobbied for an educational institution that could meet the needs of a changing economy. When most people think of Sydney, the think of tar ponds, but coal and steel no longer drive industry here. Instead just the opposite.  CBU has become one of the first carbon neutral universities in North America through the construction of three wind turbines and environmental sustainability is a concept woven into all of our programs along with innovation and entrepreneurial problem solving. Examples of this can be seen in the Purdey Crawford Chair in Aboriginal Business with arose out of collaboration with local Mi’kmaw communities as well as  Unama’ki College making CBU the university of choice for Aboriginal students for the past 30 years. One of CBU points of pride is to be Atlantic Canada’s leader in Aboriginal post secondary education celebrating more than 500 Aboriginal graduates. The majority of our students are local, whose parents and grandparents navigated the economic downturn with the end of industrial Cape Breton in the 80s. The student experience is tailored to their needs.

     How? From that same MacLeans report you can read that we rank 4th in the country for student teacher ratios, which according to educational research is one of the leading factors supporting student success. CBU is a friendly and welcoming environment where students and faculty for the most part are on a first name basis. We rank 7th in funding from SSHRC and 8th over all in faculty research dollars in the undergraduate category. When this is compared to our total student population of 2904 it means that most faculty have a common complaint: it’s challenging to find enough student research assistants. We are the only undergraduate university in Canada with a Cryo-TEM electron microscope. For a student looking for hands on experience we are rich in opportunity.

     Though our calculated average entering grade is 86.3, we accept students with a variety of grades and experiences, that does impact our retention rates, because students come and try it out and might decide they need a different opportunity. I like to think of CBU as a place of second chances, because if you are motivated departments and schools will work with you to help you find your way. Our current motto is “happen” but I don’t think that captures what we do well. I think it should be Rise, because it’s out of the environmental and economic problems in Sydney the university has risen to work collaboratively with the community and we support the students to do the same. To rise out of their current conditions, to something new. Unlike some of the universities that top the Maclean’s list, you do not have to have achieved greatness already, we support students to come as they are and rise to where they want to be.

In Kugluktuk, the C3 ship passengers had the opportunity to hear from Millie Kuliktana a long time educator. She told the story of her community’s response to a rash of tragic suicides and alcohol related deaths that took place in 1998. With her permission I share her story here (I have recorded this as closely to Millie’s words as possible, though it is not exact):

Every two weeks a suicide was happening that year. On the first day back to school that year the teachers came in, the students came to school and were told yet another student took his life that night. That was the first day back to school. And after that, I happened to be the executive director of school operations at the time and I took my program staff down and I let the teachers go do debriefing with the mental health workers and the RCMP. We took all the student population into the school gym, invited a few more parent caregivers and we locked our doors and we locked ourselves inside the gym and we said, express yourself. Write it, think it, tape it, share it, whisper it, cry about it, just express yourself, enough is enough. So once they did that they said so now what do we do? I said we tell our parents, and someone said I’m scared to. I said you know what, there is strength in numbers if we say it all at once they are not going to pick you out, they’d have to pick all of us out. We took the posters that we made, and we decided to march. At 2 pm the elementary school children poured out, the people from the men’s rehabilitation centre came out, they made banners on wooden signs that said enough is enough. So our youth marched on a rainy grey day, we marched in the town sharing a voice. That taught out community that our number one asset is our youth, the strongest people in our community are our youth. Our children are the ones we have to work through to get the message across. The march triggered various events, it forced the hamlet council to say there was going to be a liqueur plebiscite, we had a playwright come from Toronto, a man who had been sober for 30 years wanted to help. He got the students from the High School to put a play together and they performed it four days before the vote took place. They showed the community through their play, how to vote- because every suicide that year was alcohol related. 64% voted yes, we needed over 60% to put the restrictions in place, 4% never felt so good.

For several years in the late 90s, Kugluktuk had the highest suicide rate in Canada, as a result of this march and other initiatives developed in the community in response to the children’s cry for help, from 2001-2006 there were no suicides. Millie’s story highlights the need for holistic community support for young people in Nunavut. It also highlights the resilience and strength of the young people, when they are able to make their voices heard. Currently the community is running a multi-pronged mental health and family support based program entitled Moving Forward Together. This project is federally funded and is in the last year of funding for Kugluktuk. The programming is doing great things, working with parents, at risk youth, elementary students, running programs specifically for girls, and others for boys, all based out of community centre, but the issue is sustainability. Like many federal programs, although they have built in training to support local control and management, once the start up money is gone, the programs can be lost because they don’t have financial sustainability. It’s a story of too many educational programs for marginalized youth in the north and the south, where programming only survives because of dedicated volunteers and passionate educators like Millie.  Educating and supporting the mental well being of children doesn’t have immediate or direct monetary returns. Nor is it highly visible like building new roads or a medical centre. I would argue it’s just as critical, because healthy educated youth lead to healthier communities. When you see the evidence programs like this make in Millie’s community you can’t imagine not having them. The question I am left to wonder about is how can this be integrated into education to reconceive the role of schools as centres of healing for communities.

     I’ve been travelling with Mary Simon and Inuit leader and advocate for education aboard the Canada C3 Ship the Polar Prince for the past week. Mary is an Elder in both the traditional and modern sense. Her career as an advocate for education spans more than four decades. In her role as the chairperson of the National Committee on Inuit Education Mary and members of the national committee travelled across Inuit Nunangat listening to communities speak about their needs of education in the north and out of this came the report First Canadians, Canadians First: a national strategy on Inuit education. Appointed by Indigenous and northern Affairs Minister Bennett in 2016, Mary wrote an independent report entitled A New Shared Arctic Leadership Model which recommends education as the key to healthy people and social and economic progress. She further states the need to build on the 2011 national strategy on Inuit education for K-12 and extends this to a call for an Arctic University.  On day two of our journey she spoke in Cambridge Bay about her report, specifically the call for an Arctic University created by Inuit for Inuit. With federal funding for universities being cut across the country and enrollment in many universities declining-why would anyone advocate for yet another university when young people can simply go south?
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     My response to that question starts with my own story. I started my education in Nunavut, and left to complete my education in the south, the story of many Inuit young people who want to pursue higher education. I can’t speak to Inuit experiences, but I can tell you mine. As a southerner presumably I had a much easier transition because I was raised with my feet in both worlds.  When I entered school in the south as a teenager believe it or not I was faced with major culture shock, the school was bigger, louder, more formal than I had ever experienced. I was lost in the sea of voices. I left a school where everyone knew my name, knew my family and knew who I was as a person because in our community we were all interconnected. All of a sudden I was anonymous. More than anonymous- I was invisible. I’d been taught to be humble, don’t stand out too much, speak slowly, speak quietly, wait for the elders to speak first. It was easy to pass through days being un-seen, I sat in the back row of all my classes so that I could easily escape the room if I needed to and I didn’t speak, not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t get a word in the fast paced conversations. These are the very same issues that Mary and others have identified for Inuit students in southern universities. With grade 12 graduation rates for Indigenous youth increasing, there are more and more young people entering post-secondary, however many of them are not making it past the first year of university. Those statistics haven’t really changed much despite over 30 years of investment in transitions and bridging programs for post-secondary programming. The programming that appears to work best is based in communities and/or with leadership, teachers, mentors that are able to advocate for their students, that allow for flexibility of family demands and holistic services that offer support on everything from housing to counselling.  Because take a young person out of their community and in essence you take away all of these things- an entire network of support that is provided by the community. So rather than supporting students to transition into a southern system, why not invest resources in letting students stay home where the transition is so much easier?

     Because the first year of university is hard for everyone. Young people need to adapt to the new environment of university which is more often than not based on an industrial model that probably isn’t serving anyone as well as it used to. It’s not just Mary calling for educational reform, universities in the south based on traditional models are being critiqued as well. Mary points us in a positive direction. Now is the time to (re)vision what university can look like based on more inclusive values. What if education looked different? What would a university for and by Inuit look like and how would that change graduation rates? ITK will be releasing a report in the fall of 2017, based on the Inuit Education forum held in Nain February, 2017. At the forum Inuit educators and long term northern residents were asked about the challenges and proposed solutions to support student success. Meaningful pathways for next steps is part of that conversation.  Mary asks us to think strategically.  Beyond the immediate benefits for students, an Arctic University poises Canada to become leaders in a new educational model, that reflects all Canadians and could be something the world can learn from. We need more strong Inuit leaders like Mary Simon and an Arctic University would provide an opportunity to create them. 

We have an old bakers table that we use in the kitchen for just about everything. It’s used for family meals, hosting guests, extra workspace and sometimes even baking. It serves as a gathering place for the house. Like many bakers table it has a drawer, probably meant to keep baking supplies, but ours is used for just about everything.   We keep a deck of cards in there, a connect four game as well as a Scooby-Doo themed “who am I?” game left over from a happy meal years ago.  It has a few more junk drawer standards: paper, pens, scissors, glue, paperclips, odd buttons, string etc. and it has a rotating collection.  Years ago, my mother told me to hide random interesting things in strange places around the house to be “discovered” by my daughter. She told me the finding of interesting things in nooks makes them far for interesting than being given things. Perhaps she learned about it from architect Simon Nicolson’s proposal of “loose parts” to inspire creative play (1972). In our junk drawer I stash all manner of things, these are not particularly thought out- they are found items.  For example, in fall it might contain chestnuts and pine cones picked up from a walk. It might have a collection of wrapping paper odds and ends from Christmas in January. Or it could contain a jumble of coins or beads. It’s rare that I purchase something for the collection, its almost always literally junk. But the junk comes alive on the table. I think everyone in the house pulls the drawer open and finds something to play or rather create with.

The big trend at the moment is fidget spinners, but honestly I’m not a fan. I prefer the drawer, encouraging creative fidgeting, with playdough or the construction of something from the miscellaneous items while talking or listening to whatever conversation is happening at the table.  Most Reggio inspired classrooms use this technique. These classrooms are equipped with shelves full of miscellaneous building materials that can be used and re-used for imaginative play and building.  Good loose parts collections  have three key features: they have no predetermined use, they are accessible without permission and they change regularly so to there is always something new to imagine.

So throw away your fidget spinner and open your junk drawer- you probably have a world of creative play in there.

Family Book Club
Literacy rates in the east coast range from average to below average when compared to international standards. This is part of the reason for the massive educational reform that is ongoing in Nova Scotia at the moment. Literacy, The ability to read, write and understand what has been communicated is critical to school success and it starts at home.

Reading is the glue that brought my family together and keeps us together. When I met my partner I was living in Germany.  We were roommates and he spoke very little English and I spoke even less German. In short we were both illiterate in each other's language. We decided to form a book club to teach each other our respective languages. We bought our first books in two languages and alternated reading chapters to each other. We laughed, we learned, we fell in love over “Die Kleine Hexe” (The Witches) by Roald Dahl. It took us three months to read this short children's chapter book, but learning was the goal, not finishing. Ten years later we are no longer illiterate and our book club has expanded to three members. We have changed the format to insure the smallest reader in the house is an equal and active participant. This meant we had to re-think our club. How do you share a book club with a non-reader? How can you pick a book that everyone can enjoy and contribute to discussing? How do we make sure it stays fun?  With this little book I want to share our formula for a successful family book club for a busy family. Our book club time has become a cherished part of our day and we are not only improving literacy skills for everyone we are making memories.

I will confess the family book club concept is not mine. I thought we were being original until I searched on the Internet and found out lots of families have book clubs. There are a lot of strategies out there, but none of them worked for us. I’m not a super mom. I work, probably a little too much, my partner too and honestly we figure we have had a successful family day when we manage to get supper on the table before 7pm, and can all find clean socks and towels. Balancing work and family time is hard for us and we needed a club that didn’t add more work. Something that didn’t involve extra preparation, special planning or even dare I say it a lot of reading. Unlike many of the websites and articles you see discussing family book clubs by creating a special event around the completion of the book, we needed a way to make a family book club into a daily routine that didn’t involve costumes, cookies or special locations. I admire the people that can do that- those ideas look amazing!  But from my many failed attempts at Pinterest projects I knew we needed something simpler. This is that. Simple.

Here are the four key features of our family book club:

1. It's everyday not an event
A traditional book club has all members of the club reading the same book and discussing it at a set period, generally once a month. This doesn’t work for obvious reasons. Therefore, in our family book club- everyone chooses their own book and they are all different based on reading ability and interest. The fun is in the choice-everyone has control over choice. We do this daily. Members can bring the same book every day for months, or pick new books daily regardless of completion. Its not important to complete a book, but rather to enjoy picking it up.

2. Everyone reads together
In the early days, the accomplished readers, read the book to the emerging readers, but they also read snippets of their own books aloud to others. It’s a family read aloud, that lasts anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour based on schedules and temperaments. Not everyone has to read from their book, but everyone has to be there, sharing in the book. This is a good time to look at reading skills, running your finger under the words as you read which highlights the connection of text to sound. Or taking turns reading words or sentences that you know the young reader can accomplish easily. Another thing we do is look at the roots of words- and try to figure them out. For example- exit and external both start with ex, because the prefix ex  means “out of”. We look for these parallels to help understand new vocabulary. It’s not necessarily about teaching reading-the hard work happens at school- this is a time to foster love of reading- so playing with sounds, pictures and voice. At the first sign of resistance- we stop and one person will read, while the others can relax and listen.

3. All books and readers are equal in discussion
After reading, and sometimes during reading we stop- we discuss, pictures, characters, their motivations, their facial expressions, the plot. We discuss why we like the book, or why we didn’t. Regardless of the level of the book we discuss it’s content equally. I have had some very serious discussions about SkippyJon Jones, while my daughter has shared in the debates about culture and the environment from Braiding Sweetgrass.

4. Books hold secrets
We highlight that it is OK not to understand the story at the first read. We talk about the obvious meaning, sometimes this means clarifying what that might be and how we figured it out. But we also talk about the “secret” meaning. Does the book have a moral? Is there another message- we try to decode this message and discuss what that might mean for us individually or as a family.
 
Now what does any of this have to do with science? There are two ways to foster scientific literacy while reading. The most obvious is that knowing how to read is critical to success in science, but the less obvious is what happens in those conversations around words- looking for patterns, sounding out complex words and analyzing their meaning is incredibly helpful for a young scientist to make progress in the language of science.
Alternatively, the content of the books we read can both illustrate scientific process or knowledge. For example: “Whose Tail is on the Trail at Grand Canyon” is a book that reminds us of our trip to the Grand Canyon, but teaches animal identification skills while “Violet the Pilot” illustrates trial and error learning. Through these books we discuss the fundamentals of scientific inquiry- the moral of science as it were. Alternatively books like “Inside Your Outside” or “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” explain biological concepts through poetry and rhyme which will help students remember. When reading these books rather than looking for morals of the stories, we might spend greater time identifying the science content and questioning how realistic the concepts are- do the pictures make sense? How are the books true to real life/science and how has artistic license been applied?


Following these steps I became a fluid German reader, so arguably one could say the book club has literacy benefits for all family members but the big gain we have found is fostering an interest in reading and the quality family time it brings. There is nothing like curling up with a good book in the company of those you love.
 
 

Has been the call across Cape Breton the past few weeks and we decided to give it a try this year- because Nova Scotia winters are long and the trees seem to be the only living things that are showing any signs of spring so far.  I wanted to find a reason to be outside and the teacher inside of me thought that this would make a great lesson on the interconnection of science, traditional knowledge and the economy right in our own backyard.  It also become an excellent problem based learning opportunity for the entire family, with aspects of technology, chemistry and physics. 

It all began with the discovery that the trees in our yard were all Sugar Maples. I learned that in Nova Scotia a lot of older homes are surrounded by Sugar Maples, because not only does the tree look nice and shelter the house from the elements, but traditionally many people made their own Maple Syrup. How do you know your if your tree is a sugar maple?  Most people can identify a maple as a maple and to be fair all maples will give some kind of sap, just not as sweet as the sugar maple. Sugar Maples are identified basically by their distinctive bark and leaf shape it only took a minute to figure it out once I read this: http://garden.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Maple_Tree_Identification

The second step was to figure out if the sap was running and how to tap it.  The Mi’kmaq refer to March Si’ko’ku  which directly translates to “Maple Sugar Time” so that gives an approximate start time but how do you really know?  One clue is the weather- warm days and freezing nights cause the sap to start flowing-there is an interesting biological lesson in there related to the pumping action of tree roots- and osmotic pressure but basically it was a watching game. When we had consecutive days of above 0C and below 0C nights we tapped the first tree to see what came out. When we started getting a steady flow we tapped the other trees.

We purchased all the tapping equipment for under $20 at the local hardware store. The equipment consisted of tree spouts and clear tubing. We used all manner of things to collect the sap, including cleaned milk jugs and kitchen pots. We quickly learned during peak running- milk jugs were too small.  So we had to increase efficiency so as not to waste any sap, which when we started felt like magical drops of gold in a bucket. You need to be careful about where and how many taps are on a tree to ensure the health of your tree. Here is a quick reference: http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/tapping-maple-trees-zbcz1502

The tricky part of the project began with sap to syrup process. We learned that the ratio of sap to syrup is 40:1, so that is a lot of liquid to reduce. This is where experiments in technology, chemistry and physics really kicked into high gear. Any of the problem solving we had done around collecting sap more effectively dulled in comparison to this new challenge. First we built an outdoor wood stove using an old metal barrel because boiling off that amount of water in the house would have created far too much humidity inside. After we fired through half our woodpile we got a little smarter- adjusting the fire height, pot size and insulation of pot to reduce heat loss. This involved conversations about surface area and heat transfer that involved many friends and family as we stood around the fire in the evenings. We also learned from Mi’kmaw tradition that if you pour out your Maple sap in large shallow troughs mother nature will do much of the work for you overnight. The water will freeze and rise to the top of the trough and you can lift the ice off in the morning leaving a more concentrated syrup underneath. We also learned that Maple water doesn’t taste half bad, and according to the Mi’kmaq is good for health. This was great news because our capacity to collect far surpassed our capacity to reduce the sap.  After 3-4 days of intense work, we had produced about 20 mls of syrup. So how are local syrup producers able to make syrup that doesn’t cost a million dollars? We certainly felt the time an effort we put into our product made the syrup we bought (and previous found expensive) look like a bargain in comparison. Apparently the secret is osmotic pressure - commercial syrup produces reduce the sap using reverse osmosis.  So next year we are trying that. It seems that good old osmotic pressure is the secret behind all things maple Syrup.
 
Lessons for kids and adults:

1. Heritage plantings around your house probably have a meaning beyond ornamental and are based on scientific and agricultural purposes that have been replaced by modern technology.
2. Biology: tree identification, the life cycle of a tree and it’s vascular system
3. Chemistry: boiling, sap reduction and heat transfer
4. Physics: surface area
5. Technology: trial and error construction
6. Mi’kmaw knowledge and seasonality
7. Agriculture: from forest to table.