First Week Reflection

Photo taken from Heavy.com

Our readings and class discussion for the first week of school were based on past, present and future trends. With an analysis of our changing culture and environment, the OECD look to explain the future of education. My very basic understanding and experience with trends would regularly come from the news, regarding small yet impactful daily weather reports to more robust and influential predictions from consultants and experts around climate, markets, and technology. Trends drive new marketing, recruitment, retention, and educational strategies at work, which can impact the work I do. To finally try out the expert role in my own world and make predictions on trends that I see happening around me was something new and was thought-provoking fun for our first class discussion.

I started in my position as an academic advisor in my mid-20s. I felt close and relatable to the students. I saw this as an advantage to the service I could provide and to my department. Over the years as students got younger and I got older, this feeling of “us” subtly shifted to “me” and “them.” I can no longer relate to their world, speak in their generational tongue, or have insight to their high school experience. Educational trends are said to move incredibly slow overtime which makes it all the more challenging to predict and deliver new strategies and goals.

I shared with our class the change in SFU’s student voice. Students are seemingly more complacent than ever. This school was known for having a vocal student body, in its younger years, who’d use their presence forcefully with demands in peaceful protests. They’d form movements with a clear position. However, today students of SFU are seen to be accepting of the status quo, unaware, or apathetic. In contrast to students in Quebec, who have worked hard to keep tuition the lowest in Canada, our students seem to have lost their voice entirely. I attempted to connect the dots between now and then to understand this change and to understand the motives; perplexities only grew. Days later I came to realized how blind I was to the actual current state of our students. They are still forming and storming but it’s no longer what we recognize as traditional demonstrations. Students are spreading information fast and widely online. Nothing new here, but this has dramatically shaped how students are making waves.

Young people are making demands and impacts through social media. The Educational Advisory Board (EAB) recently released the article “Navigating the New Wave of Student Activism.” They seek to explain millennials and the future students of Generation Z. Trends indicate the opposite to what I had assumed, as student activism is predicted to only intensify. With the emergence of widespread access to the internet through smart phones and the change in our lifestyles around these pocket computers, information has been spreading rapidly for a long time and is only going moving quicker.

EAB identifies a number of impacts from telecommunication developments. For one, campus matters are no longer exclusive to their student, staff, and faculty, but have become matters involving surrounding communities. Campus stories are gaining traction from off-campus populations who identify with particular political views, cultural practices, historical experiences, and backgrounds. Demands from students are changing and momentum is growing fast.

How schools adapt to these changes will be unique with their response approach, messaging, communication, follow up, and policy changes. Acknowledging the current situation and creating accurate trends will allow schools to work better with students, eliminate disturbances, and avoid drastic implications of student demonstrations. We're just days following the historical Women’s March and it's clear that large groups of angry and unsatisfied people will be a force to recon with and this new wave of student activism shouldn’t be underestimated either.

EAB (2017). Navigating the New Wave of Student Activism: A Briefing for Senior Institutional Leaders. Retrieve at: https://www.eab.com/research-and-insights/student-affairs-forum/expert-insights/2017/navigating-the-new-wave

You know you've been cared for when...

A colleague of mine has not been doing well. Days past she was updating me on her lack of sleep. When she made it into work she’d come to me and tell me how she wasn’t feeling well for a subsequent day, or explain vaguely that there was a lot going on. The fact that she was short on details stood out to me. For a week she would sometimes work shorter days or call in sick altogether. As a team, we took on some of her responsibilities to lighten her load so that when she returned there was less for her to worry about. After missing nearly a week of work she returned to the office looking improved, like some, but not all of the weight had been lifted from her shoulders. That morning her and I were the first to arrive at work. She stepped into my office, closed the door slightly, and sat down.

My colleague told me the devastating cause of her recent sleep habits – it was her physical health and how poorly she was treated by medical professionals; their insensitivity and negligence sent her into mental turmoil. She told me everything. She would eventually tell each team member individually of her experience.

I was happy she opened up to me and let me in but I was later left with another consideration. Her story seemed so personal I could not imagine divulging in such a personal experience with colleagues. Colleagues whom I’m close with, who over the years have gotten to know my quirks and quarks, who I’ve supported, who I see daily, who I’ve watched go through life’s tribulations. Suddenly I wondered why I’ve held back to such comrades.

This occasion was not the first for this particular colleague to open up. In fact anyone close to her would know everything about her challenging in-laws, her parents back home, her tight extended family, new hubby, new hobby, what she had for dinner last night, and the silly conversations from yesterday that she knew would garner a laugh from any listener. Some might call her an over-sharer, and she is. However, as much as she reads you a page from her book, she’s very much there for everyone else. She tells you what she’s up against and what she’s looking forward to but you never leave feeling like she sucked the energy out of you. She tells you these things so casually.

Her oversharing has lead me to believe we should all over share a little more, but to do it with care so as to not void the listener of their own vivacity. I’ve opened up more with my colleagues, as a result of her joining our team, but not in search for a shoulder to cry on but to share, just because. It's a chance to let it out and let it go. Hiding our complicated lives makes living a little more complicated. Putting on an energized face when you’re tired, showing interest when you’ve got other matters on your mind, taking on more when you’ve already taken all you could take. It means the people around me know they’re not alone. Even better, we see each other’s limits and we can offer support.

I think about the moments I didn’t share at work or with a friend and wonder how things would have gone had I opened up. Would it have made my day easier (yes), would we be closer (maybe), would I have been judged (probably not).

Work has always been a place where, more than anywhere, I’ve held back. I was fraught with silence or fear of judgment with the thought of sharing and opening up. I salute my friends and colleagues with complicated lives who lead the conversation by telling me they’re working on themselves and follow with a snapshot of their life that leaves us both laughing hysterically. 

You know undoubtedly that you're being cared for when you feel better. Regardless of what form that care takes on, even if the situation hasn't changed but you feel lighter, someone has just carried the load for you. 

I was thinking of an image to include with this post and my favourite car song came to mind - it's shockingly fitting. She literally belts out this song and if yelling isn't cathartic, I don't know what is. Sometimes you've just got to let it out and let it go, in whatever shape that may take. 

4 Non Blondes lead singer Linda Perry
http://rebelmgmt.com/2014/04/17/linda-perrys-4-non-blondes-reunite/

4 Non Blondes - What's Going On (lyrics) 

Twenty-five years and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination
And I realized quickly when I knew I should
That the world was made up of this brotherhood of man
For whatever that means

And so I cry sometimes
When I'm lying in bed
Just to get it all out
What's in my head
And I am feeling a little peculiar
And so I wake in the morning
And I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream at the top of my lungs
What's going on?

And I say, hey hey hey hey
I said hey, what's going on?

ooh, ooh ooh

and I try, oh my god do I try
I try all the time, in this institution
And I pray, oh my god do I pray
I pray every single day
For a revolution

And so I cry sometimes
When I'm lying in bed
Just to get it all out
What's in my head
And I am feeling a little peculiar
And so I wake in the morning
And I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream at the top of my lungs
What's going on?

And I say, hey hey hey hey

I said hey, what's going on?

Twenty-five years and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big hill of hope

For a destination

http://www.metrolyrics.com/whats-going-on-lyrics-4-non-blondes.html?ModPagespeed=noscript

Are We Tricked or Trapped in the Gender Gap?

Frank Butler VS Annie Oakley: Anything you can do, I can do better.

Image from http://funguerilla.com/

The gender gap refers to the differences in pay between men and women, who are doing the same or comparable jobs. It is argued that in the USA women are earning anywhere from 0.77 to 0.95 cents for every dollar men earn. Until recently I believed the gender gap was factual and non-debatable. Until however, celebrity actress Kristin Bell starred in a two-minute satirical video on the topic called “Pinksourcing.”

Bell brings up issues for women around maternity leave, working conditions, and promotions. It wasn’t this Huffington Post video that shocked me, rather it was the reviews. I understand that reading the comments on any article or video online is surely to offend me in ways I didn’t know I could be offended, but it wasn’t the comments section either. It was the journalists, the professionals, and the reputable online news sources that disagreed that the gender gap is real.

Check out Pinksourcing video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_m5AlsQqcs

Google “Pinksourcing video” for a selection of reviews to chose from.

The first argument you will likely come across is that the gender gap isn’t real, because if it was, companies would only hire women. That argument can be shut down pretty quickly with the Civil Rights Act/Canadian Human Rights Act that prevents gender discrimination in the hiring process. Then there’s the argument that the gender gap has made significant gains (in other words, the gap is closing in to nothingness), in part to there being more women in the workplace and women earning a higher level of education. This argument has some weight to it, but it’s still missing some critical information. One of my favourite arguments however comes from Forbes, they argue that both the video and the gender gap are misleading because neither consider the different choices men and women make around education level, years of experience, type of job, and hours worked (Agness, 2016).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/09/16/pinksourcing-is-the-latest-misleading-equal-pay-effort/#60f8dfc470d9

Agreed, men and women are definitely making different choices around these things, but it's important to acknowledge what is influencing these decisions. For example lets exclude education and look at years of experience, type of job and hours worked. In most developed countries it's women who are offered a substantial amount of maternity leave in comparison to men. The one province in Canada that offers fathers notable paternity leave is Quebec, which gives fathers 5 weeks of leave (Raphael, 2016). In this situation it's public policy that dictates one's choice around being at home or being at work.

Dennis Raphael (2016) points out that we're also seeing political ideologies that are influencing one's "choices." There is a greater push towards neoliberal priorities, which means putting more and more responsibility on the individual and less involvement from the state (ex: fewer social services). 

This is particularly an issue around early childhood education. At the moment childcare in Canada is neither funded or regulated until the age of 5 when children attends kindergarten – and in many places across the country it’s only half-day. Until then single mothers are to either pay unscrupulous amounts of money for childcare, or stay at home and live on social assistance, or for some partnered mothers they may continue their time away from work, should they be lucky enough to have a partner who can provide for the family on a sole income. 

The longer women are out of the workforce taking care of the family, the fewer hours they put in working; the fewer years of experience they gain in the workforce, the lower level jobs they are likely to have; and finally, the longer they’re unemployed caring for the family, the greater risk they’re in of losing their labour market job skills. Perhaps women could choose to work and build experience, work more hours, acquire more responsibilities at work, rather than stay at home, if men had more funded paternity leave and if there was national childcare which was both funded and regulated across the country.

Looking to our Nordic counterparts for influence, Canada could be doing more to integrate women back into the workplace with flexible work hours, create family-friendly policies, subsidized childcare, provide fathers with longer paternity leave, and give access to job-training programs (Raphael, 2016). These choices men and women, have to make around employment and building a family is called the gender trap which I acknowledge and argue, creates the gender gap.  

Raphael, D. (Ed.). (2016). Social determinants of health: Canadian perspectives (3rd ed.). Toronto: Canadian    
   Scholars Press, Canada. 

Agness, K. (Sept 16, 2016). Another Celebrity Wrong on the Pay Gap. Forbes. Retrieved from 
   http://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/09/16/pinksourcing-is-the-latest-misleading-equal-pay-
   effort/#5a0994f170d9