Speakers

Abstract
Higher education has long been a contested terrain and campuses in many parts of the world remain sites of struggle. In recent decades, student movements and staff unions have played vital roles in fighting for accessible, critical and quality public education which does not merely serve the interests of elites. Demands for institutional change, the decommodification of education and calls to decolonize the curricula have spread across the globe. Struggles occur in the context of deep societal inequalities, state violence, demands for rethinking the purpose of formal education, free education and accountability to communities beyond the academy. Resistance to austerity measures, the imposition of neoliberal governance and the reorientation of education toward the global marketplace abound. From Chile to South Africa, from India to Quebec, many of these struggles attempt to draw on histories of resistance and are also connected to broader movements for progressive change and radical visions of a fairer world.

Bio
Aziz Choudry is associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in social movement learning and knowledge production, and is visiting professor at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg. He is author of Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements(University of Toronto Press, 2015), coauthor of Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants (Fernwood, 2009), editor of Activists and the Surveillance State: Learning from Repression (Pluto/Between The Lines, 2019) and coeditor of Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Organize! Building from the Local for Global Justice (PM Press/Between the Lines, 2012), NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (Zed Books, 2013), Just Work? Migrant Workers’ Struggles Today (Pluto, 2016), Unfree Labour?: Struggles of Migrant and Immigrant Workers in Canada, Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements:History’s Schools (Routledge, 2018), and The University and Social Justice: Struggles Across the Globe (Pluto/Between The Lines, 2020). Involved in a range of social, political and environmental justice movements and organizations since the 1980s, he serves on the boards of the Immigrant Workers Centre, Montreal and the Global Justice Ecology Project.

Abstract
R is well-known for its versatility and community and therefore is widely used in data science. No matter what our backgrounds are, two things bring success: self-sufficiency and resilience. It turns out things get much easier when you are a part of a community that is inclusive and supportive. In this talk, Dr. Ozturk will tell you about her journey of learning R in Montreal and share best practices for learning everything you need to be an R ninja so that you can be self-sufficient and resilient while being supported by a huge community!

Bio
Tugba Ozturk is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Washington University in St Louis. Dr. Ozturk is primarily interested in theoretical and computational modeling of membrane proteins and their interactions with biological membranes. She received her Ph.D. in Physics from Concordia University, and her M.Sc. in Computational Science and Engineering from Koc University. She is interested in the integration of computation into the undergraduate and graduate physics curriculum with a focus on using reproducible research workflows. For this purpose, she completed a graduate certificate in university teaching. She has designed coding workshops for GradProSkills and facilitated teaching workshops for Center of Teaching and Learning at Concordia University. While continuing her research, she currently volunteers in the organizing team for the useR! 2020 conference in St Louis. Connect with Tugba on LinkedIn and Twitter @tugbaoztrk.

Speakers

Jennifer (JD) Drummond, Manager, Sexual Assault Resource Centre
JD is responsible for overseeing service delivery by SARC staff and volunteers to Concordia students, staff and faculty impacted by sexual violence, program development and the creation and delivery of mandatory education on sexual violence prevention and response as required by Bill 151.

JD is a member of the Standing Committee on Sexual Violence and chairs the Sub-Committee on Training and Education. She chairs the Sexual Assault Response Team in urgent and/or complex cases of sexual violence and coordinates a multi-unit response. JD holds a master’s degree in Social Work from McGill University.

Topic
“It Takes All of Us: Creating a mandatory sexual violence prevention and response training” Jennifer will outline what was involved in the planning, creation and roll-out of the mandatory training launched at Concordia. She will touch on challenges, successes and what they are planning for year two and beyond.

Leelan Farhan
Leelan is a doctoral student in the Department of Education at Concordia University and a HASTAC Scholar studying communities, technology, policies, and the way they interact with one another. In particular, she is interested in intersectional, community-led approaches to educational technology. Her doctoral work explores the creation of effective and inclusive solutions for consent education in Canadian high schools using grassroots, community-based research. Leelan holds an Honours B.Sc. in Psychology and a Master of Information, both from the University of Toronto. 

Topic
From the #MeToo movement, to Ontario’s ever-changing sex ed curriculum, to Québec’s new law on mandatory sexual violence prevention policy in higher education, Canada —and North America at large— seem to be grappling with how to teach consent more than ever before. However, how do we ensure that we provide room for the nuanced conversations and dynamics around how identity intersects with, and complicates relationships and sexuality? In this panel discussion, Leelan Farhan draws from her experience as both a sex educator and academic working with grassroots organizations to provide possible solutions to this question.

Louise Brossard
Louise occupe le poste de chercheuse à l’Institut de coopération pour l’éducation des adultes depuis près de quatre ans. Elle détient une maîtrise en sociologie et un baccalauréat en travail social. Sa vie professionnelle a démarré au sein des organismes de femmes où elle a occupé des postes d’organisatrice communautaire. Suite à l’obtention de sa maîtrise, elle a produit des outils de transferts de connaissance et des recherches pour différentes organisations pendant près de quinze ans.

Thème
Sa présentation portera sur les agressions sexuelles en enseignement supérieur selon le plan suivant : Définition des violences sexuelles; Portrait global des violences au Québec; Portrait des violences sexuelles en enseignement supérieur (enquête ESSIMU). Impacts sur les étudiantes et étudiants; Solutions.

Speaker

Rhonda Chung
Rhonda is a PhD student in Concordia University’s Department of Education, where she is training to be an applied critical sociophonologist. Her research focuses on the perception of dialects in second language learning, particularly the cognitive mechanisms that learners employ when processing the individual segmental (consonant/vowel) and prosodic (melody or cadence) elements inherent in each dialect. She is particularly interested in language pedagogies based on plurilingual and decolonial principles, which emphasize presenting the natural dialectal variation inherent in a given language, and giving voice to the communities who speak it. Rhonda has taught both English and French as a second language to adults and children for over ten years. Connect with Rhonda on LinkedIn and on Twitter @RhondaChung1. 

Topic
Academic institutions in the Americas are implicated in the colonialism that settled these lands. Second language (L2) teachers of English and French find their pedagogies directly connected to this colonial process. Pedagogies using decolonial methodologies, defined as resistance to colonial doctrines aimed at erasing local, particularly Indigenous, knowledges, offer educators an avenue to redress the pernicious effects that colonialism has had in the classroom. Before embarking on pedagogies with decolonial objectives, teachers must first self-locate themselves in the colonial narrative –an endeavour that may prove upsetting for some. The first exercise of this workshop offers methodologies aimed at assisting educators in self-locating themselves in the colonial process. We will then explore how the current communicative language teaching framework, and its emphasis on meaningful L2 speaking activities, acts as a stepping stone to explore decolonial topics in the L2 classroom. We will discuss a suite of communicative activities used in two French L2 conversation classes in Fall 2019, which simultaneously focused on grammatical form (verb tenses), vocabulary acquisition, and listening to dialectal variation, while educating learners about Canada’s colonial history. Attendees will participate in these activities during the workshop. Pedagogies invoking a decolonial framework necessitate acknowledging and exploring the many relationships individuals nurture with their languages, each other, and their environment, including Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal). From a decolonial perspective, pedagogies enacted on this land must include conversations that reveal the truth about its history.