An unofficial AU advocate at large, Jason never misses a chance to recount the merits of an Athabasca education. Jason’s studies began alone in front of a rustic rural fireplace in December of 2003 and carried on through various brick and mortar college classrooms yet always with Athabasca as part of his journey. In 2014 he completed his BA in Sociology and in 2022 graduated with an MA in Cultural Studies. To this end, his columns seek to explore edifying moments of learning how to learn within the challenging ideological terrain of that great bugaboo facing students everywhere: the real world!
The sound of a door locking behind us can be unsettling, especially in an automobile. It’s as though moments of potential are, at least symbolically, closed off to us. One commentator describes the process: “it’s an emasculating scenario when going to dinner with friends: riding in their backseat to the restaurant. When one attempts to… Read more »
As we remember those who fought and died in past wars, we could easily feel like all of this carnage happened in far away places and times, in landscapes sequestered into monastic cells of historical periods where the rest of our life need not tread. Or at least not for more than the morning of… Read more »
The individuation of education need not be a lonely or isolating experience. Distance learning need not imply distance from reality. We get to write our own themes, develop our own mantras, and largely learn at our own pace. AU is like life itself that way. If you reduce life to your annual tax forms or… Read more »
Around the autumn report card season teachers and students are presented with the mutually doleful task of assessing one another. The former sometimes find themselves faced with parents, overbearing or irate, and the latter with a raw sheet of paper printed with assorted means of demarcating progress and personality. Whenever grades and scales are used… Read more »
Monkeys with smartphones, is that us? Pressingly, is AU part of our cultural decline, where we sink to the level of proverbial beasts? Eek! Or, maybe digital devices themselves are the truly mindless animals that draw us down to their level? The internet brings out the beast in so many of us; it’s as though… Read more »
Class discussions express as much about participant egos as they do about the topic at hand. Professors aren’t immune from becoming over-zealous about their pet topics and students, well, even the best of us can be carried away in flights of fancy as we expound our points of view. But where loquacity lets off real… Read more »
We watched in awe as the orb spider leapt into action. With a start, a wasp tried to escape the web but almost instantly it found itself accosted by the spider. Deftly holding its prey in place, the orb—bulbous with a growing egg sac in its abdomen, injected venom. Presently, the wasp’s edginess ebbed away,… Read more »
As a kid in the 1980s and as a teenager in the 1990s, the technological tide brought many changes. Rural BC aided and abetted a Napoleon Dynamite sense of distance from the paved sandlots of urban Canada. Here in the Okanagan Valley, at Princeton—our favourite pariah of a Brokeback Mountain town if you’re from it’s… Read more »
As you read these words in this moment how do you feel real? Words can bore us or they can carry us away; words can push and pull our minds and it’s up to us to decide how we feel about them. Our university education teaches us to think beyond the boundaries of our predilections. … Read more »
History, like life and learning, is about more than big moments. Graduations, weddings, fireworks, and final marks only serve as pointers on the path toward understanding the world and our place in it. So let’s pause and remember that, of 40,000 Canadians who served in Afghanistan, a full 10% are likely to be diagnosed with… Read more »