Category: Uncategorized

Congratulations new MILR grads!

What a joy to watch the latest group of Masters of Indigenous Language Revitalization (MILR) students convocate–this cohort is seven students! Learn more about these amazing students in the latest issue of the Indigenous Education Newsletter. Watching the growth of this excellent program over the last decade is a professional highlight; it is an honour to be this program’s librarian. I remember when there were two faculty members and a handful of students, now there is a whole department! So many remarkable people have made this happen, starting with the beautiful Dr. Wanosts’a7 Lorna Williams.

Microlibraries and children as a unique audience of readers

These Indonesian microlibraries for children are remarkable; what a wonderful recent article in The Guardian. If only every street corner had one!

Discussions on digital versus analog reading continue on. When children are a unique audience of readers, making space for contemplative introspection is something that sets emerging readers up for success. Reminds me of Maryann Wolf’s oldie but goldie 2008 book Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain.

Sakura Season

Throughout March and April in Victoria, the streets and parks are filled with beautiful Japanese Sakura [cherry blossom] trees. When I grew up in Vancouver, there was an annual Sakura festival which is still going strong.

Here is a beautiful haiku that won the 2006 Vancouver Sakura festival poetry competition.

the long road
boughs of white blossoms
light the way

                      Helen Baker, North Vancouver

New blog post for INEHC: “Animals, The North, and settler-colonialism in historical educational media: A comparison of Dutch and Canadian sources in the early 1900s.”

Pleased to write another blog post for European colleagues at the International Network for Education History Collections (INEHC). And, this time my friend and colleague, Chaa’winisaks at Royal Roads University, worked alongside me with developing this piece which is titled, “Animals, The North, and settler-colonialism in historical educational media: A comparison of Dutch and Canadian sources in the early 1900s.” Our recent post is inspired by my INEHC colleague from the Nationaal Onderwijsmuseum [National Museum of Education] in the Netherlands Jacques Dane, who wrote an excellent blog post in November 2024, titled ‘Animal love in the classroom.’ Our recent post considers conceptions of ‘The North’ through a comparison of a Dutch wall chart from 1911 and a British Columbia geography textbook used in schools between 1899 and 1910. If you are interested in blog posts about BCHT, here’s another one I wrote last fall for colleagues at University College London when I was a Liberating the Collections Fellow at the Institute of Education’s Research Institute for Collections. So many compelling similarities and differences. This one’s a long one, so get comfy!