Fookn Conversation - Talking About “Academicky” Stuff Nicholas Ng-A-Fook

In Episode 51 Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Shirley & Dr. Hargreaves. Both are Research Professors at Boston College. Dr. Dennis Shirley is a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. Dr. Hargreaves is Visiting Professor at UOttawa and Co-Director of a Canadian Playful Schools Network.  They have collaborated as writers, teachers, speakers, and advisers for almost 20 years. We discussed some of the following issues: lived experiences as transnational migrants and academics, collaborations with ministries of education, school board leaders and teachers in Alberta, Ontario, England, and United States,  life transitions, the failure to engage white working class communities, intersectionality, rethinking sympathy versus empathy, researching intergenerational macro and micro educational, historical, philosophical, political, and religious contexts during what they have titled  The Age of Identity, their fifth co-authored book, and so much more.

In Episode 50 Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook interviews Stephen Hurley the Founder and Chief Catalyst at voicEd Radio. Combining a life-long love of radio and an intense 30-year career in public education, Stephen Hurley is passionate about finding ways to enliven the public square with vibrant conversations about learning, teaching, schooling, and education in its broadest sense. We discussed some of the following issues: his lived experiences in relation to lunchtime radio stations, makerspaces, creating an online live radio and podcasting ecosystem as a public square, trial and tribulations of being a host, experimenting, negotiating, and adapting to different educational, historical, political, technological contexts as a classroom teacher and teacher educator, open concept classrooms, team teaching, creating conversations among podcasters, researchers, and teachers, life transitions, theology, philosophy, his relationship with music, being a life-long learner, and so much more.

In Episode 49 Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Alana Butler an Assistant Professor at Queen’s University. Dr. Alana Butler's research interests include the academic achievement of low-socio economic students, race and schooling, equity and inclusion, and multicultural education. We discussed some of the following issues: growing up in Scarborough, British colonial educational system in the Caribbean, decolonial love, academic streaming, immigrant families learning to transition to Canadian educational systems, pivotal role of teachers, understanding impacts of microaggressions, stereotyping expectations in relation to different racialized students as teachers, navigating the different opportunities and challenges of doctoral studies as international students, becoming an educational researcher, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2023 rankings, community wealth, Black leadership, a social justice praxis, and so much more.

Fooknconversation talking about “Academicky” Stuff Description for Episode 48 (Dr. Janice Forsyth): In Episode 47 Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Forsyth, member of the Fisher River Cree Nation and Professor in Indigenous Land-Based Physical Culture and Wellness in the School of Kinesiology, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. Drawing on Indigenous epistemologies and research methodologies, Dr. Forsyth’s research combines history and sociology to understand the differing historical and contemporary relationships among sports, culture, power, and politics. We discussed some of the following issues: disenfranchisement and Bill C-31; negotiating culture on a daily basis; working through individual, systemic, and societal racisms as a student and high performance First Nations athlete; the importance of Indigenous student university centres; understanding how organized sports were, and are, used as a tool of assimilation and dispossession of Indigenous land; the legacy of residential schools; oral history research with residential school survivors; (un)learning from the past and questioning approaches to “reconciliation” in sport; Indigenous understandings of health and physical education; decolonization; and so much more.

In Episode 47 Nicholas Ng-A-Fook interviews Sara Florence Davidson, (Sgaan Jaadgu San Glans), a Haida/Settler Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on Indigenous pedagogies, literacies, and stories. She is the co-author of Potlatch as Pedagogy: Learning through Ceremony and the Sk’ad’a Stories, a picture book series based on her family’s stories which highlights Indigenous pedagogies and intergenerational learning. We discussed some of the following issues: Wildfires in British Columbia and Northwest Territories, evacuations, impacts of climate change, love of literature, her family genealogies and histories, intersections of Indigenous and non-Indigenous pedagogies, ethical ways of collaborating with family, and interconnections among interrelatedness, synergy, research methodology and Haida traditional dancing, artists, carving intergenerational stories with family, reading, teaching, and learning about life, death, implications for teacher education, and so much more.

In Episode 46 Dr. Ng-A-Fook interviews Dr. Janet Miller, a Professor Emerita at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research transects the interdisciplinary as well as national and international borders of curriculum theorizing, feminisms and post-inflected versions of autobiography and qualitative research. Her research prioritizes feminist interrogations of autobiography focused on issues of difference, research, collaboration, and writing, especially in relation to potentialities of imagining and enacting curriculum communities without consensus. We discussed some of the following issues: The Global Pandemic, Maxine Greene, past, present, and future narrations of the field curriculum studies and its theorizing in-the-making, the sweaty fight for meaning and responsibility, irresolvable tensions, teaching and doing academic writing as intellectual and aesthetic processes of composing, doctoral supervision, posthumanist entanglements, transnational populist movements, and so much more.