EDUCATION

EDUCATION SFU’s Semester in Dialogue drives social change

by Charlie Smith

Simon Fraser University has registered a few firsts over the years. One of those came when the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue opened in September 2000. According to its executive director, Shauna Sylvester, it made SFU the first Englishlanguage university in the world to create a centre devoted to dialogue.

When Sylvester’s predecessor, Mark Winston, launched the Semester in Dialogue in 2002 on Nature, Environment and Society, it was the first program of its kind in the world. The Morris J. Wosk Centre also hosted the first citizens’ assembly on electoral reform in Canada, in 2004, chaired by former SFU president Jack Blaney.

“We offer something unique in the world,” Sylvester told the Straight by phone.

She pointed out that Canadians have often played the role of convenor in foreign affairs on everything from human-rights issues to environmental councils to facilitating the first international treaty on land mines. But until the Semester in Dialogue program was created, there was nowhere in Canada for undergraduates to develop those skills.

“It’s all about learning and building through community engagement,” she said.

According to Sylvester, the Semester in Dialogue has been an incubator for many ideas, policies, and programs over the years, including the Radius SFU social-innovation centre and the CityHive youth-engagement organization. It operates on a “cohort model”, where students guide their own learning on a different theme each semester.

Sylvester has been an instructor for two of the semesters, but she emphasizes that she doesn’t teach the students.

“I introduce them to certain people and facilitate a process for their learning,” she said.

Students host thought leaders, who are invited to come in and make a presentation. The students moderate dialogues, engage in self-directed learning projects, and develop skills in workshops.

Sylvester will be one of three instructors on the upcoming summer semester in Trust, Money and Power: Funding Change course, which offers students 10 credits. They’ll be enrolled Mondays to Fridays, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., for seven weeks in May and June. The early bird deadline for enrollment is February 18.

Prior to joining SFU, Sylvester worked in international development and climate action, raising millions of dollars for various organizations over the years. The two other instructors also bring a great deal of expertise to the class. Jacqueline Koerner is the founder and cochair of Ecotrust Canada. In addition, she’s a director of Foundations for Social Change, a director or trustee of three private foundations, and has conducted doctoral research on the world’s largest microfinance organization, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

“She has a deep understanding of the practicalities from so many different vantage points of what philanthropy is,” Sylvester said.

The other instructor, Kris Archie, Ts’qescenemc ell Seme7, is CEO of the Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada and previously served as project manager on the Vancouver Foundation’s groundbreaking Fostering Change initiative focusing on young people aging out of government care.

“She’s not just rethinking philanthropy,” Sylvester said, “she’s shifting the whole terrain in which it exists.”

One of the objectives of the Semester in Dialogue is to ensure that students gain confidence in their own capacity to create change.

“They also become more curious and they’re more capable of initiating a conversation, particularly with people they may not agree with,” Sylvester added.

Through students’ participation in dialogues, they also gain greater listening skills. And Sylvester hopes that they realize that they can rethink and reshape philanthropy, which should not be seen as the exclusive preserve of the wealthy. Plus, they’ll come out of the class knowing what questions to ask about this subject in the future.

Sylvester added that students will also become better writers, as one of the program’s goals is to write a publishable piece. But if they feel that podcasting is their preferred form of communication, that will also be encouraged.

Last November, Sylvester attended the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, where the SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue hosted a panel discussion with Environment and Climate Change Strategy Minister George Heyman and former Toronto mayor David Miller, who’s now with the C40 Cities organization. It was launched by the Cities and COP26 initiative. A former student, Fergus Linley-Mota, came up with the idea while doing directed studies in the Semester in Dialogue course and he’s now program coordinator for Cities and COP26 for Moving in a Livable Region.

Another creation of the Semester in Dialogue program was the Keys to the Streets program, where pianos were placed in outdoor locations for the public’s enjoyment.”These are all things that emerged from student projects related to our city,” Sylvester said. g

In the summer of 2018, students (above) enrolled in SFU’s Semester in Urban Energy Futures with instructors Shauna Sylvester and Michael Small; this summer’s focus will be philanthropy.

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It’s all about learning and building through community engagement.

– Shauna Sylvester

EDUCATION Prof aims for more Black inclusion on campuses

by Carlito Pablo

When June Francis imagines SFU in coming years, she pictures academia with a flourishing Black community.

It’s a vision of educators, staff, and students thriving in an institution that celebrates their excellence.

“We see representation across research, teaching, and senior administration,” Francis told the Straight by phone about her dream.

Francis is an associate professor with SFU’s Beedie School of Business and an advocate of inclusion, diversity, and equity. She is originally from Jamaica and moved to Canada to pursue higher education.

From June to December last year, she served as special advisor on antiracism to university president Joy Johnson.

During that period, SFU signed the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion in Canadian Higher Education. SFU joined more than 40 other universities across the country in a commitment to rectify anti-Black racism.

SFU’s Black Caucus, which Francis cofounded, and the Students of Caribbean and African Ancestry in the university contributed to the charter.

“For the first time,” Francis said in an SFU media release at the time, “academics across the country are coming together and asking our institutions to make a longterm commitment towards action.”

When reached by the Straight on February 1, Francis outlined work she said needs to be done. “Let me say the first thing I hope we’ll see is representation increases of Black faculty and staff at senior levels,” she said.

This entails not only being hired but promoted through the university system. Francis explained that it also means that they should be “allowed to do the work that reflects their histories and worldviews”.

“I think it’s important to start there,” she said. “It’s not sufficient, of course, but it is an important component because as we look at universities, we know that both Black faculty and staff are significantly underrepresented at SFU.”

When SFU announced in November 2021 that it had signed the Scarborough Charter, it noted that it had been undertaking a number of measures “in line with the principles” of the declaration.

These included a vote by the SFU senate in the fall of that year to hire at least 15 additional Black tenure-track faculty members. “I would like to see that happen quickly,” Francis said in the interview.

But it has to “go beyond hiring”.

“We need ways to support faculty who come here, so that includes ensuring that they rise through the ranks, their research is awarded and supported, [and] that teaching opportunities allow them to bring in this kind of material to the classroom,” Francis said.

This is crucial because “at the end of the day, universities are about students”.

Francis went on to explain how Black students feel “excluded”.

“So they’ll walk into a classroom, whether it’s business, science, technology, or arts, no matter where you look in the university, the content of what they get exposed to completely erases and really devalues Black history and Black thought,” she noted.

Francis added that this fosters a condition wherein students “intellectually and socially suffer”.

By way of example, Francis said that some Black students may be interested in doing further research about how racial bias is reflected in programming for artificial intelligence.

“But there is nobody to supervise them because all of their professors have been trained in the same way,” she said. “So often they don’t get to do the work they want and they don’t feel supported and they don’t go on to the career they like.”

Canada observes Black History Month in February. Francis will deliver a talk online about the history of anti-Black racism in Canadian schools and universities on Saturday (February 5), from 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. For details, visit the website of the B.C. Black History Awareness Society. g

Professor June Francis wants Black students to feel welcome and not excluded. Photo by SFU.

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