educational leadership

resources for French

This is a slightly more up-to-date version of the old outils utiles (2010). It was a version of my original 2003 curated collection of resources, and revised in turn through 2012-23: FREN 101 (ARCHIVE, 2013-18), FREN 102 (ARCHIVE, 2013-18), FREN 101 & 102 (2018-19, up to the March-April 2020 COVID-19 onlinising “pivot”), and UBC Canvas course sites (2020-24, access restricted to UBC Vancouver students taking these courses). These reference resources are primarily intended for university French language classes from CEFR levels A1 to B2; there’s some overlap with resources at the C1 level, for writing in French about literature (2017 version here). Thanks to JB, a student from summer 2023’s FREN 202 (CEFR A2) who asked for a version that’s available and accessible in the longer term: long live free open knowledge, mutual aid, and sustainability!

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31 August is Ken Campbell Day: diddling and doodling, the radical education of seekers

It is time for the annual pilgrimage.

(Our Ken is not to be confused with the homonymous Canadian politician, Canadian fundamentalist Baptist evangelist, Canadian swimmer, assorted other sportsmen, a plastic doll, etc.)

This post is a collage accumulating in annual accretion: Campbellian education in action, learning-centred learning, every year another Station continues the post’s rambling Way of Sorrows.

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31 August is Ken Campbell Day: diddling and doodling, seekers, radical education as seeking learning outcomes, and punk

And so the great wheel turns and it is time to celebrate St Ken’s Day again.

Time for the annual pilgrimage that is the start of this Happy New Year for people in the formal cycle of learning, from crèche and kindergarten to university; and for people outside it as learning, a life of learning, and a meaningful life are for all.

For all who are or become “people” because they are #passionately #innovatively #transformatively #sustainably #engaged in the great #creative #ValueInvestment #community that is life itself. Your own life right here right now, and others around and above and beyond and below it, and the after and the before, and whatever and whoever is to the sides and out of sight. All the water in which that great wheel turns: a wild free flow with unpredictable currents.

May our rivers never run dry.

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utopian dreaming (1): equity, diversity, inclusion

While sorting through some old files, I came across something that I wrote in November 2020 that seems relevant and worth sharing. I’ve edited it very slightly. It’s a prologue of sorts to the next posts, on European identity (not in the icky sense that immediately comes to some minds) and haunting, ghosts and glowing.

They will take a little more time: first drafts from January have changed shape, most notably, as you might imagine, in the last few days. I thought that I’d throw them away; what was the point, or the point of anything. Anything that I might write or be thinking was trivial. Fellow humans suffer unimaginably, their world changing day to day, uncertain if they would still be alive tomorrow or have a home to wake up in. In everyday horror. Under daily increasing threat and encroaching invasion. I can try to imagine, and I have a moral obligation as a fellow person to imagine. But I also have an obligation to respect others’ uniqueness, difference, and unimaginability; for humility, to avoid hubris; and to recognise my limits, the limits of imagination, that which makes and keeps it human. We, too, wherever we are, live in uncertainty: here in Vancouver, as in most of the world, we’re in striking distance of an intercontinental missile, we live next to nuclear powers, and some of our neighbours are politically unstable.

But tomorrow could be death. So: write. Anything. Good, bad, indifferent; personal, embarrassing, absurd; useless, useful, disregarding and regardless of anyone else’s use-value it might have some human value in its very triviality. Write to live. In solidarity with Ukraine and Ukrainians. In hope for peace on earth, goodwill to all, life, and love.

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31 August is Ken Campbell Day: diddling and doodling, seekers, radical education as seeking learning outcomes, and punk

From 2020: time for the annual pilgrimage … 

(not to be confused with the homonymous Canadian politician, Canadian fundamentalist Baptist evangelist, Canadian swimmer, assorted other sportsmen, etc.)

It is time for the annual pilgrimage.

As is traditional, this post is a “sticky” one for a whole academic term, all the way to its end and the end of the calendar year. It contains various kinds of “stickiness” played out in four Acts:

I. revisiting 2017

II. 2018 and III. Campbellian education in action

IV. 2019 and learning outcomes.

Like previous pilgrimages, this year’s one adds more Stations to its rambling Way of Sorrows.

2020: “IT’S LIKE PUNK NEVER HAPPENED”

This year’s contextual frame: online teaching in pandemic times. (more…)

reading about teaching online: a collection of links (6)

Here’s to hoping that this is the last such List Of All Of The Saved Links: (1), (2), (3, (4), and (5).

Our Happy Academic New Year starts the week of 7 September, our first full day of classes will be on Wednesday the 8th, and this week is the traditional grande finale of course preparation, intensive and fast and furious. There will of course be last-minute changes; and then changes in the first week, and the second week, in response to practicalities and circumstances and the unforeseen and the unforeseeable. That happens every year. The known unknowns for starters. I worry if there are no looming potential disasters (there are, of course, so I’m fairly cool and comfortable). I really worry, though, if there have been no mishaps by the end of the first week of term. Like many of you—colleagues, fellow teachers and other lifelong learners, students, future students—I’ve been having Beginning Of Term Dreams. They’ve been pretty mundane so far, nothing worth reporting, but if their weirdness improves I should of course share.

Meanwhile, here are links saved on Twitter; as with the previous post, collected over the last month or so and copy-pasted here newest first. Some are threads, some include embedded threads. There’s applied practice, historical examples of virtual education from before the age of the online, a lot of Jesse Stommel, a fair dose of critical pedagogy and some philosophy of education, and the occasional grumpy and/or goofy and gooey pedantic rant by yours truly. There are also some useful links to UBC CTLT online stuff (notes from their summer workshops are via a Wiki) and UBC Arts ISIT (most of whose summer workshops offer recordings and slides online).

May contain politics and sarcasm. Plus some bonus Motivational Inspirational stuff, metaphors, and medieval allegory.

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welcome to TWO new blogs: “The Dendromorphoses” and “Academic Zoomscaping”

Thanks to living in, and with, COVID-19 times I’ve made two new things. The first came to be out of spending more time than usual wandering in our local woods and taking photos there. The second started as a collection of amusing pictures collected online. (more…)