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a, News, SSMU

Fall 2014 SSMU Executive midterm reviews

by McGill Tribune Editorial Board on

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Stefan Fong

 
Kathleen Bradley

 
Claire Stewart-Kanigan

 
Courtney Ayukawa

 
J. Daniel Chaim

 
Amina Moustaqim-Barrette

This week, the McGill Tribune conducted midterm reviews of the Students' Society of McGill University (SSMU) executives.
Click on the portraits to learn more.
 

VP Clubs and Services, Stefan Fong
 
 
Coming into the position with a year’s worth of experience, there were high expectations for Stefan Fong, vice-president clubs and services, to build upon his past endeavours.
Fong has been more proactive in pursuing long-term goals. He has completed the research stage of the Club Hub, and hopes to have it implemented by the end of his term. Fong has also started a pilot testing of myInvolvement, which has become available to 25 clubs. In addition, Fong has begun to lay the groundwork for the 10-Year Development Plan for SSMU, as well as the reorganizing of the fourth floor of the SSMU building.
Last year, Fong faced criticism for being unresponsive, particularly in regards to responding to emails, and failing to be proactive when working with clubs. However, Fong appears to have addressed these issues, responding to emails more readily and increasing his cooperation with clubs. Club workshops, for example, saw the participation of over 160 clubs.

VP Finance and Operations, Kathleen Bradley

 
 
Despite overseeing the passing of the SSMU Building Fee as the referendum's campaign manager, Bradley has faced many challenges with the SSMU budget. The student-run café (SRC), the Nest accumulated a $76,282 deficit this year, which Bradley attributed to startup costs and a discrepancy between what students want in terms of locally sourced ingredients and affordable food. As the Nest is first and foremost a student-run café, it is important for Bradley to continue consultation about how the Nest can be well-received by students, especially in light of its deficit and recent complaints by students about expensive food on campus. As the original intention for the Nest was for it to break even as an operation, it is concerning to see it struggle financially.
Bradley also presented the 2014-2015 global budget at a recent Council meeting and with student media outlets on campus, which was an effective way of communicating and clarifying aspects of the budget. She also worked with a graphic designer to present the budget in an accessible manner.
Bradley recently raised important concerns about the fee consolidation that McGill proposed, advocating for students in her insistence that the consolidation would not be transparent for students.

VP University Affairs, Claire Stewart-Kanigan

 
 
With the first ever Mental Health Week wrapping up last week, Stewart-Kanigan has shown initiative for mental health and other portfolios under the VP University Affairs. Even after Mental Health Week ended, she has proven to continue prioritizing mental health, as she is now working on development of a Mental Health Facebook page and listserv.
Stewart-Kanigan also led SSMU’s collaboration with the #ConsentMcGill campaign, with a panel held by the SSMU Equity Commissioner during that week. Beyond that, she has also continued work on the sexual assault policy, which has undergone continuous review by a working group and has been publicized to the student body through an open forum and website.
As an active advocate for students, Stewart-Kanigan has called for more student representation and engagement at the annual joint board-senate meeting earlier this month, and asking councillors to reach out to their constituents prior to the Town Hall on the library master plan. Furthermore, she conducted consultation for the library improvement fund, which is also a key part of her portfolio.

President, Courtney Ayukawa

 
 
Ayukawa has presided over many accomplishments and drawbacks in her first term. Most notably, the Fall 2014 General Assembly (GA) saw participation of over 800 members of SSMU­­—attributed in part to the controversial motion on solidarity with Palestine. We hope that Ayukawa and the executive team can find a way to continue to engage with the student body and encourage attendance in the Winter 2015 GA.
Her enthusiasm for sustainability has translated into many efforts to bolster the green aspect of the president’s portfolio through environment commissioners and long-term studies. This supplements the aspect of her portfolio weakened last year when its mandated coordinator was cut due to budgetary issues.
Ayukawa has fielded a number of unforeseen circumstances this year, including two Judicial Board (J-Board) cases, and a provincial case questioning the validity of the election of her as president, which has since been dropped. With the first J-Board case resolved and the court case dropped, we hope that Ayukawa can continue her job more smoothly in the next term, including overseeing the hiring of a new general manager for SSMU.

VP Internal Affairs, J. Daniel Chaim

 
 
This year, Chaim led the planning and development of a frosh that saw a $3,600 deficit in its over $200,000 in operations, compared to last year’s deficit of $21,000, which was a significant improvement in budgeting. With the recent Students’ Society Programming Network (SSPN) event, Chaim also appears to be expanding the events planning section of his portfolio in a positive way.
4Floors, the SSMU Halloween party, also ran a $5,281 deficit due to unforeseen security costs due to construction around McTavish extending into November. As 4Floors ticket prices were increased this year, and because the construction has been ongoing since the summer, this deficit was another example of unsuccessful budget planning, and it is imperative that the SSMU executives work to take a more proactive approach to anticipate and consider all expenses, particularly amidst student criticisms of SSMU’s money management.
Another initiative Chaim has taken is for the consideration of a publications fee for the Old McGill yearbook, which has seen drastically declining sales in past years. The fee would help fund the distribution of the yearbook to all students. Although this may standardize the distribution of a university keepsake, students have been wary of extraneous fees recently, and this may be another addition to the tensions between students and SSMU.
Chaim should also continuously seek the methods for feedback and concerns of the undergraduate student body as it falls under his communication portfolio. When SSMU-student relations are tenuous, the VP Internal should prioritize methods of communication not just through listservs and mass distribution of information, but through two-way conversations and debates. The recent motion approved by the legislative council to establish an Ad-Hoc Student Engagement Committee will hopefully aid Chaim to these ends.

VP External Affairs, Amina Moustaqim-Barrette

 
 
Following SSMU’s withdrawal from the Table de Concertation Etudiante du Québec (TaCEQ), Moustaqim-Barrette has attempted to create working relationships with student unions at Concordia, Université Laval, Université de Montréal as well as student federations such as the Fédération Etudiante Universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) and the Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Etudiante (ASSÉ). However, no official consultation with the student body has taken place and no formal action has been initiated beyond regular meetings with representatives from other student bodies and federations, a troubling concern in the light of a renewed round of budget cuts by the provincial government.
Additionally, it is difficult to hold her accountable for her efforts because no reports have been produced for the student body that detail her work. While we applaud Moustaqim-Barrette for her lobbying initiatives, these efforts have largely not been publicized or communicated properly to the student body.
With regards to community affairs, she has maintained a positive relationship with the Milton-Parc Citizens’ Community and assisted the Social Equity and Diversity Education (SEDE) office during Community Engagement Day.
In the coming semester, we would like to see Moustaqim-Barrette take further measures to consult the student body to learn what students want from their student union in regards to external actions.

a, Features

Off the blackboard

by Caity Hui on

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In 1999, McGill’s World of Chemistry professors digitized around 6,000 35 mm slides to implement the lecture recording system (LRS) now employed in over 350 courses for about 50,000 students on campus. In 2011, the first Lorne Trottier Lecture Symposium was conducted, taking full advantage of the power conferred by webcasting technology to connect a single speaker series with a wide audience beyond the McGill community. And, in 2014, Dr. Samantha Gruenheid, an Associate Professor of Microbiology, revamped her laboratory course to incorporate crowd sourcing as a method to achieve scientific discovery.

New developments impacting departments and faculties at McGill continue to push the boundaries of teaching and learning. From peace negotiation simulations to crowdsourcing science, these initiatives are not only enhancing students’ learning experiences, but also generating a host of novel ideas and involvement outside the classroom.

Political science Professor Rex Brynen, for instance, has been pioneering a unique approach to teaching peace-building in his course POLI 450. Popularly known as “Sim Week,” the students within the course are exposed to a weeklong civil war simulation within the fictitious land of Brynania. The students take on various roles to explore issues from the civil war associated with peace building.

“The challenge of the simulation is to negotiate and implement a peace agreement without it all falling apart,” Brynen explained. “It’s very intense, in semi-real time, taking place both face-to-face and electronically—by email, chat, or Skype.”

Initially designed for a class of 25 students, Brynen’s simulation has expanded over the years to encompass around 100 undergraduates. While other courses at McGill run simulation negotiations, this weeklong event takes on a significantly larger scale than any other class at the university.

“The class generates up to 15,000 emails during the simulation—all of which I have to read,” said Brynen. “Most students become very engaged with it.”

Beyond breaking up the monotony of a lecture-based course, the purpose of Sim Week is to provide students with the opportunity to apply their skills acquired in the class to a real-life situation. Brynen explained that for students working in areas like international development or conflict resolution, it is particularly important to have an experiential component integrated into students’ education, whether in the form of internships, field study, or—in the case of POLI 450—simulations.

“One of the challenges in teaching this topic is that it is very easy to read stuff on how you are supposed to negotiate peace agreements,” Brynen said. “In practice, however, it is highly complex and dynamic, characterized by mixed motives, imperfect information, and many second and third order effects.”

Brynen emphasized that while lectures provide students with the knowledge and foundations to develop peace-building policies, these more passive learning styles do not recreate the complexities that occur in a realistic experience.

“Lectures and text are great and wonderful things,” Brynen said, “But the simulation is really designed to bring home the stuff that lectures don’t bring home well.”

The majority of comments each year following Sim Week echo Brynen’s observations.

“You do so much theorizing and writing [in the course],” said Jake Heller to Tv McGill, a participant in the 2010 rendition of the simulation. “It was really refreshing to sit down at the table with someone and negotiate and apply a lot of the things that I have learned in some of the classes.”

Despite the advantages of this new resource as a teaching tool, Brynen cautions that simulation-based learning is not a one-size-fits-all paradigm. Depending on the course, lectures provide opportunities for professors to quickly cover large volumes of information in a logical fashion.

“It would be challenging to run a simulation for a class of 600 students,” Brynen said. “[POLI 450] has a lot of games because the course focuses on a lot of operational issues, and games give an experiential sense of those. Conversely, my Middle East politics class has no games in it and I don’t plan on introducing them because the lectures serve better at covering the material.”

While POLI 450’s simulation stands as a novel learning tool within the McGill community, teaching styles across faculties are paralleling this cross training through various other avenues.

Natural Disasters (ATOC 185), for example, is harnessing the use of technology to provide students with new channels of applying their learning—albeit through a substantially different approach from Sim Week.

Following the release of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)—run for the first time last summer to the general public—the professors of ATOC 185 sought to integrate various features of the MOOC into their classroom. According to John Stix, a professor from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and lecturer in ATOC 185, they transitioned a quarter of the lectures from an in-class talk to an online platform.

“We didn’t know how this was going to work, but we took our MOOC lectures for 25 per cent of the course, and we put them on MyCourses,” Stix explained. “Instead of the students coming to those classes, they would see the lectures and view them online. [We then used the lecture time] for group assignments.”

By restructuring the course to incorporate an online lecture component, the coordinators of ATOC 185 were able to provide the 600 students in the course with a learning opportunity that is often challenging in classes of this scale. Rather than take a multiple-choice midterm, the students were instead required to analyze a data set and work in groups to generate a poster presentation.

“There were [several main] drivers [for modifying the course],” Stix said. “Is there a way to make a very large class not simply a lecture class? The other drive was to [find ways to avoid] the ‘passive learning’ [approach of lectures, and allow] students to be more engaged by working in groups.”

Stix acknowledged that in the past, he had employed clicker questions to help spur class participation in a course of such significant size. While this approach provoked a certain degree of participation, the novel changes added to ATOC 185 have since encouraged more substantial active learning among students.

“It was really clear that a great majority of students were really proud of their posters,” Stix said. “It was really interesting to hear the different results and experiences.”

Both POLI 450 and ATOC 185 serve as strong examples for turning points in teaching across campus. Although the professors involved emphasized the necessity of retaining lectures as a critical teaching tool, they are also changing the classroom experience by integrating new technologies into their courses.

These novel approaches, however, hardly stop at the edge of the classroom. In addition to providing students with enhanced learning experiences, new teaching methods are pushing students to generate ideas outside of their courses to contribute to current research.

McGill’s Microbiology and Immunology Department is pioneering one of the first crowdsourcing initiatives in Canada to uncover new antibiotics deep within the soil. One of the growing problems within the human health care system is the rise of bacteria that have developed defence mechanisms against current antibiotics. As such, companies are in desperate need of new antibiotics—a need that the department is actively responding to through its crowdsourcing approach.

Associate Professor Samantha Gruenheid spearheaded the initiative with the assistance of Claire Trottier, an education specialist and pedagogic advisor for undergraduate MIMM courses. By partnering with a program known as the Small World Initiative (SWI) at Yale, they redesigned the introductory microbiology lab course MIMM 212 to provide students with an opportunity to design their own experiments, while contributing to developing research on new antibiotic compounds.

“I liked that it dealt with a real world problem of antibiotic resistance,” Gruenheid said. “That can make the students really excited [….] It isn’t a cookbook course, but is giving students freedom to develop a project more on their own.”

Like the former design for MIMM 212, the purpose of the course is to teach undergraduate students different laboratory techniques for classifying and testing bacteria. However, unlike the former design—where students knew the predicted outcome of their experiments—the SWI provides undergraduates with the opportunity to explore.

“I hoped that they would have the chance to feel that excitement,” Gruenheid said. “The excitement when you have a discovery in the lab and know you’re the only person that knows that. That experience can be lacking from traditional laboratory courses, but it is clearer in this one.”

Naim Afeich, a U1 Microbiology and Immunology student, echoed Gruenheid’s sentiments, explaining that the course pushed students beyond the normal expectations of a laboratory course to actually contributing to research.

“[Even though] the purpose of this course was to introduce us students to the microbiology lab, we learned much more than just basic microbiology techniques,” Afeich said. “I found the SWI interesting mostly because it was built around our own research and our own data.”

With the new course design, MIMM 212 students now spend a semester collecting soil samples from their local environments and testing them in the laboratory to determine whether they produce antimicrobial compounds. According to Tyler Cannon, the U2 Microbiology and Immunology student who helped develop the SWI program over the summer within the Gruenheid lab, the approach taken by this course enables students to propel antibiotic research at a significantly faster pace than in the past.

“It’s not new, looking in the soil for antibiotics,” he said. “The really novel thing here is crowdsourcing. We’re taking techniques that were developed for higher labs and simplifying them into something that anyone from an introductory lab course can do. Now that it is simplified, we don’t have five people working on it, but 104 at McGill and thousands counting the other SWI partnerships.”

Over the summer, Cannon tested 52 different soil isolates and characterized five antibiotic-producing bacteria through his own research. Following the course this past Fall semester, students identified hundreds of additional species, from which Gruenheid saved 100 different bacterial samples that produced particularly interesting and promising antibiotic compounds. She plans to continue this initiative by further characterizing these strains in the future, in addition to running the revamped version of MIMM 212 for subsequent years to come.

“I am really interested and committed to take it further,” Gruenheid said. “I don’t want to stop with things just stored in the freezer.”

Cannon shared Gruenheid’s enthusiasm. He acknowledged that MIMM 212 was a great first step for increasing undergraduate contributions to research through a course, rather than through lab work outside of a program.

“We’re sending the message to students that they can do this, and that they [have the potential] to do anything,” Cannon said.

These recent developments in learning, therefore, push the boundaries of what’s possible not only with technology, but also through student contribution. The innovation of a decade ago has continued to take place on campus through the restructuring of traditionally taught courses.

“Right now, the atmosphere within the Microbiology and Immunology Department is such that individual professors will be inspired to take the plunge, as they see the other professors successfully doing it in their courses,” said Gruenheid.

a, Art, Arts & Entertainment

Small-scale artists and authors shine at Expozine

by Burgess Powell on

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In the crowded basement of Saint-Dominique Cathedral, it seemed as if every possible genre of author, publisher, illustrator, artisan, and their devotees were in attendance at Expozine, Montreal’s annual small press fair. It showcased 300 distinctive French and English exhibitors, ranging from established publishers like Drawn and Quarterly to obscure zombie-themed poster artists.

Upon arrival, I initially felt comfortable perusing the orderly displays of the glossy books provided by the more established publishers. These books, although beautiful, are easily found and purchased online or at a local bookstore, so I headed toward the smaller tables displaying homemade graphic novels and modernist French poetry. Flipping through a comic strip, conscious that the artist was sitting close by and watching for my reaction from her peripheral view, was a surreal—if not intimidating—experience. “It’s my life,” the author professed to her customer as she handed her a handmade card. She laughed as she spoke, but her emotions were genuine.

Another vendor was selling an eclectic collection of literature. The title of a small handmade book on her table read: “Look Inside this Book It is Interesting.” The book contained miniature photos of her silk screen artwork and some graffiti photos of a lion. After exclaiming that I had seen this graffiti around the city, she smiled and explained, “I did that 10 years ago—I’d wondered if it’s still around.”

Amongst the authors and publishers that lined the hallways was a vendor with a collection of framed pages ripped out of classic texts to which she had added her own expressive illustrations. On a page from Ezekiel, she had neatly circled the word Satan in red and drawn an immaculate skull and heart across the page. And on another work, which now hangs proudly in my living room, she underlined the word “darkness” on a page from a Psalm, and drew an old-style television over the center of the page, which seemed strangely fitting. “Nothing sacred here,” she remarked wryly, and, I assumed, a little ironically, considering Expozine’s location in the basement of the hallowed Catholic cathedral.

But I can’t quite agree with her claim. Despite the avant-garde merchandise—ripped out bible pages, morbid comic strips, and proudly displayed ‘F*ck Patriarchy’ t-shirts, there was something sacred there. That ‘something’ is the appreciation for individual artisans, and the sincerity and authenticity of their work. Whether one enjoys printouts of Yeats—seemingly—translated in Japanese script, edgy ’90s television-themed Christmas cards, watercolor posters of the streets of the Plateau, or elegant poetry from the finalists of the Canada Council for the Arts competition, there was a palpable sense of unity between artisans and art appreciators in the crowded basement.

The fair-goers had come to support their local authors and artisans because, with the omnipresence of ‘art’ and ‘culture’ that feels produced solely for profit, it was refreshing to be amongst those for whom art isn’t a means to an end but the end in and of itself.

a, Martlets, Sports

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a, Editorial, Opinion

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a, Off the Board, Opinion

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a, Basketball, Football, Hockey, Sports

From the cheap seats: The changing landscape of Ohio sports

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