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!
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 »
AU is about the small stuff, the learning that adds up to a worldview that matches our hearts to our brains. We inhabit strange times that nevertheless have parallels in history: be it fake news or raging pandemics, or new Cold Wars, the idea that many truths abide on the same planet, and that everyone… Read more »
The oldest neighbour in our neighborhood, Jim, the only one who precedes my family arriving in this bucolic British Columbia valley in 1985, just passed away. So will us all, like wisps of breeze and leaves on the trees. Our studies and our lives equally mean nothing or everything depending on how they make us… Read more »
What does an existentialist seagull caw? Pour q’uoi!?! (Why, they seem to ask.) Why are we here now, and how? That’s the backdrop to our learning as we seek to understand the world and our place in it. Our personal growth is part and parcel with this journey. The search for our meaning of life… Read more »
To translate our learning into a more personalized form of life, one where we forage and consume in the most of authentic ways, it helps to have space to breathe. Witness, then, the noble mudskipper, a fish living on land. The mudskipper is known best for the way it spits great gobs of mud out… Read more »
They say that if the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence that’s because it’s fertilized with bullshit. In the cultural paddies of late 1960s college campuses, Herbert Marcuse took this metaphor to heart. In his office were hippos. Why? Well, he loved how hippopotamuses could graze across the vast escarpments… Read more »
Wisdom and enlightenment require a sense of humour; if you don’t believe me, think of how dour and miserable activists often seem! Happily, rural life as an AU student is often devoid of such sandwich board simplifications of us versus them and good versus evil. The further from a college campus the less strident and… Read more »
Education teaches the practical skills of critical thinking but a sense of humor helps as well. Take summer heat; it can make studying an exercise in Lawrence of Arabia futility or it can test our mettle and produce a more tempered intellectual product: our AU selves! Knowing that learning is a matter of perspective, I… Read more »
While writing this I, as a male, note that the gleeful songstress commanding a mop in our kitchen is achieving fantastic things in part because I am not getting in the way of progress. She implores me to appreciate the consequences of her labours, and, while knowing that she values the earnestness of my efforts… Read more »
The Athabasca River winds over a greater span of our planet than the distance a crow’d fly from London, England to Ljubljana, Slovenia (Travel Alberta, online). Just as for myriad organisms the river is always there—always nearby and available. Athabasca U, too, is always on demand to we students. Our coursework is there when we’re… Read more »