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!
Like a kitty walking invisible circles before settling its paws down upon a pillow, we at AU have to situate ourselves not only in a comfortable study nook but in a good place psychologically. Material conditions and emotional ambiance are key to our success, but so too are the more ephemeral facts of our mental… Read more »
Where an empathic desire to help others is built into many students desire to study psychology, it’s easy to miss key epistemological blind spots in the discipline. A scanty half century ago a feminist writer named Germaine Greer eviscerated the core of psychiatry/psychology. In The Female Eunuch she wrote that “psychiatry is an extraordinary confidence… Read more »
The ignoramus may be the only dinosaur that never went extinct. Its DNA is in us all whenever we feel superior and better-informed than others. Ironically, education itself can exacerbate this chronic condition where we become dinosaurs by resting on our intellectual laurels. Many classes teach their disciplinary bias as though it were universally applicable… Read more »
Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream (1893) is paradigmatic of the sudden piercing realization that something is askew in one’s life. Maybe we feel like we don’t belong where we are or that the world is all wrong. Perhaps the painting represents a visual answer to Hamlet’s famous line: “the time is out of joint” (Shakespeare). … Read more »
‘Entitlement: Old as the Hills’ etc Nobody wants to be called entitled, even if it’s true. As university students we’re at risk of becoming branded with this pejorative term regardless of our age; protesting our innocence may seem of no avail. After all, only an entitled person would complain that the label was unfair! And… Read more »
Distance education can seem like a marathon: a lot of work over a long time with the end goal seeming to recede ever-further into the distance. Like snowshoeing through falling snow, our trail can seem, at best, nebulous. Marathons also imply suffering rewarded with moral and physical gratification. At AU our struggles over months and… Read more »
By choosing AU we’ve activated those essentially expansive impulses within us that make us who we are: special beings becoming something new and more with each day, year, and course. Without risking sentimentality, what are dreams but concrete expressions of our pursuit of excellence? It’s worth defining ourselves, after all, according to who we want… Read more »
When Alice in Wonderland meets the caterpillar, he blows letters of diaphanous smoke into her face and asks, “who are you?” It’s an unforgettable scene in the Disney animated movie and a familiar one as others ask us about our studies. At AU our identity enters new realms of expansion and perhaps uncertainty. Whatever we… Read more »
The practice of yoga (literally yoga translates as ‘the practice’) would appear to go back millennia as an Indian tradition. Yet, in historical terms, what we now know in the West as yoga actually parallels, only a couple decades later, the gold rush of the Yukon. Just as modern education was wheedling its way across… Read more »
Rat race fatigue got you down? Maybe the demands and expectations of what life was supposed to be have paved over those empty lots in your mind you once explored with abandon and zeal. Sometimes something new is needed to break out of this funk. And, as if on queue, a clarion cry echoes through… Read more »