UVic indigenous Adult Orientation for Graduate School

**My apologies to those on the other side of the country whom might find this post a bit out of the way. As a UVic student myself, a lot of my forwarded information is BC based. Therefore, if you come across similar programs that are open Nation-wide, please leave a comment or e-mail me and we can distribute such info! **

The University of Victoria is hosting an Indigenous Adult Orientation Summer program from Monday June 18th - Thursday June 21st, 2012.

Here is the program info:

"The Indigenous Adult Graduate Student Orientation program is for potential Indigenous graduate students who have completed their undergraduate degree, or are currently in their 4th year, and would like to explore their graduate studies options at the University of Victoria. Successful applicants will stay on-campus in residence for four days, have campus tours, meet Indigenous graduate students and faculty, and participate in a variety of graduate studies preparation workshops.

Applications are open to Indigenous (including First Nations—status/non-status, Métis and Inuit) citizens of Canada, and will be reviewed on a first-come, first-serve basis. There are 15 seats available, and this program is fully funded to include travel reimbursement, accommodation and food."

For more information and/or to request an
application form, please contact:
Lalita Morrison
Phone: (250) 853-3729
Email: inafclo@uvic.ca

Did you get the part about fully funded (via reimbursement)?! Awesome! Uvic does have some great Graduate programs....including social work.

Here is the link to: Uvic School of Social Work.

As some of you may or may not know, UVic has a Master of Social Work program with an Indigenous Specialization!

Click here to read more about it.

And to use my biased position as a current Uvic graduate student, let me just say it is a lovely university with some of the largest numbers of Aboriginal staff and faculty for any Canadian University.

I will be gathering up information on more Indigenous specific programs shortly in a separate post to compliment the Uvic info above.

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Contact Lalita if you are interested in attending the adult orientation. I also have a copy of the graduate application copy, however it would be best to contact her.

Meegwetch!

Call for Papers - Publish if you can!

The First Peoples Child & Family Review online journal; which is hosted by the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada, has a call for papers going on right now.

The deadline is fast approaching: May 22nd, 2012. So if you have a great article that you think might be ready to go, why not submit!

If you can't make this deadline, no worries...you will have plenty of time for the next call for papers deadline Volume 7 issue 2. That deadline for that one is October 31st, 2012.

Students are always welcome to submit to journals, it's a great process that can really enhance your CV for those interested in a longer term career (student or otherwise) in academia.

Also....

The same journal is looking for a student representative. If interested, please contact:

 Marlyn Bennett

Principle Editor-in-Chief

First Peoples Child & Family Review

Email: mbennett@fncaringsociety.com

Phone: (204) 452-9467

  

To see the call for paper, please click here.

 

Aboriginal Focusing-Oriented Therapy & Complex Trauma Certificate

Hello folks!

I received an e-mail today about a 10-week certificate program starting September 2012 from the School of  Community & Social Justice. I believe this program is B.C. based in New Westminster, aka greater Vancouver.

Please click the link below which will bring you directly to the JIBC site with all the full details of this educational opportunity.


Aboriginal Focusing-Oriented Therapy & Complex Trauma Certificate

Here is a link to the main website of JIBC.

Skills for Social Change Certificate for Youth 19-35

Hello all!

An e-mail came across my inbox this morning about an opportunity for youth 19-35 years old to participate in a certificate program in Antigonish, Nova Scotia this May.

Now you do have to pay to attend, HOWEVER, they are scholarships available, but the deadline to apply for those in FEBRUARY 20TH! Sorry I recieved this e-mail so late, doesn't leave much time now does it.

I quickly scanned the website and it looks like there are some* full funding opportunities for Aboriginal youth.

So check it out if you are interested. I have copied and pasted some of the write-up from their website below:

Link: Skills for Social Change

The Coady International Institue is offering a new 3-week youth certificate, Skills for Social Change, which will be offered in May 2012.  The certificate is an opportunity for young community practitioners, volunteers and activists to share their experiences with one another, explore the challenges of community engagement and gain new skills in order to better contribute to the communities of which they are a part.  Participants will also have the opportunity to connect with and learn along side experienced community practitioners from across the globe who will be at the Coady Institute attending concurrent certificate courses.   

One full and two partial schoarshps are available.  Application with scholarship deadline is 20 February 2012 and general application deadline is 20 March 2012.  Consider applying or sharing this information with others you feel may be interested in this course. 

First Peoples website link and a Book recommendation

I was doing some web searching to find some links to add to the site and came across the First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies webpage. Its based out of the States, and has a number of different things going on, most notably book recommendations. Although social work may be 'our' thing, as Indigenous peoples, it can be helpful to find resources spanning a variety of 'disciplines' when writing papers, working on research methods, practice frameworks etc. So that is my rant on why I am including such stuff here.

Here is the link again for the website if you are interested in taking a gander.

The other thing I want to blindly recommend (which is also featured on the first webpage for the site mentioned above) is a book by Scott Morgensen called  Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization.

I had the pleasure of listening to this fellow speak at a little conference at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in Toronto a few months ago. He was fantastic, and for a self proclaimed White settler person, I thought he was the bee's knees in how he approaches issues of settler colonialism paired with a Queer lens. I have not read the book, but would be interested to hear what people thought of it who may have?

If anyone else has some great book ideas that might be helpful resources or of interest to other Indigenous social work students, please share below by leaving a comment! Everyone's little gem's of a book can be a big help for finding new resources!

Also - a note about politics and posting about such stuff through this site. So as some of you may know, the community of Attawapiskat in Northern Ontario on the James Bay coast has declared a state of emergency given their deplorable living conditions.

I contemplated linking anything on this blog about this, as I envision this site to be more of a 'connection and sharing of dialouge, resources and support' type of thing.

However at the same time, I don't believe there is such thing as being politically neutral as Indigenous peoples. I believe Smith (1999) or maybe it was Kovach (2009) - one of the two have cited how as Indigenous peoples, our very presence is political or makes things political (or was it Battiste (2000) ???)

Anywho, I agree with that fact. Although at the same time, unfortunately there are so many issues of concern happening every minute around this World and in Canada regarding the lives and wellbeing of Indigenous peoples. This blog cannot function as a newsource for all these things, so I am on the fence with how much to share of this kind of stuff.

Suggestions are welcome on what is the right amount to include, or just generally, what kinds of things you are looking for by visiting this site. Perhaps a forthcoming link to a survey might be appropriate.

Last but not least, I just wanted to apologize if anyone is experiencing problems with leaving comments. This is a brand new site, so hopefully the kinks wont take too long to figure out. Thank-you for your patience!

First Post! & A Call for Papers to Present at CASWE Conference 2012

Hello fellow Indigenous students! Thank-you for taking a gander at this site and reading the inaugural post. My name is Krystal and I am the current ISW Student Network Representative who is eager to get this blog up and running! This is an ongoing project and it is my hope that over the next few months, more and more resources will be added to the site. Please bookmark this page, become a follower, and/or sign up to follow by e-mail!

Most importantly though: join the listserv!

So here is the first important sharing of information for all you students out there: The Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE) Conference which takes place every Spring has put out their call for proposals to be a presenter! Link here to view the call.

Deadline is January 6th, 2012. This deadline will creep up fast given the winter break so don't hesitate to get cracking with submitting an abstract soon.

Students, if you didn’t know this already – you too can present a paper! I encourage any student out there who has a good paper you may be working on this term, or perhaps might be working on next term that you would like to publish in some form or another, to write up/submit your abstract of your paper for this conference.

I personally am thinking of submitting an abstract to present a poster. Feel like being creative and sharing my MSW research project. See, its simple, you all can do it too!

Presenting at conferences is a great skill and asset to your future career, especially for those who are interested in pursuing graduate studies (and those who already are).  Presentations bolster CV’s, and are generally great experience for practicing public speaking skills and getting the chance to travel and meet new people.

This year’s conference (which is always held in conjunction with the HUGE Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences; where multiple conferences are held simultaneously at the same location) will be hosted at Wilfrid Laurier University & Renison College of the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON from May 28^th – May 31^st,  2012.

There are student rates for conference registration fees etc, but certainly funding is always an issue for us students. So you will have to look into the resources available to you; perhaps at your school and see what support you might be able to gather should your abstract/poster be accepted.

Now I am not the expert on this (and could be wrong), but from my knowledge, just about every accredited School of Social Work in Canada is supposed to send a student representative to the CASWE conference to take part in any member voting (aka the AGM) that occurs in the day or two before all the presentations start. As well, these student representatives form the majority of the CASWE Student Standing Committee meetings that also occur during the CASWE conference. So ask your social work department about this if you are interested in becoming involved as a student rep - as usually schools will have some money allocated to send their student rep to the conference.

So attending the CASWE conference can kind of be a big deal for some, and a great experience for students.

As the current Indigenous student rep (in layman’s terms) let me tell you that WE NEED MORE INDIGENOUS STUDENT REPRESENTATION at the CASWE conference  & involved with CASWE happenings such as the Student Standing Committee meetings that get held in the first day or so of the conference.

This is the major reason why this network was created! Since this whole Indigenous social work student network is still in its infancy, I am going to work hard this year to try and secure some funding that will allow the next ISW Student Rep(s) to be able to fly to the CASWE conference and bring forth their voice and Indigenous presence. ...

... I will talk more about that at a later date, as I hope to get feedback from all Indigenous students who interact with this network (once we can figure out the best way to do that) to figure out the best process for turning over the ISW Student Rep position to the next person. For now, baby steps...

Okay back to the call for proposals. Please take a look at the link and think about it!

Oh – exciting news, how did I almost forget! If you link to the PDF document on the CASWE call for proposals webpage, make sure to read the whole document and near the bottom you will see a special call out just for students about a competition which uses ‘Digital Storytelling’. I think this is fantastic, and I am excited to see what awesome things students come up with. Wouldn’t it be so amazingly fabulous if an Indigenous student won the competition…or at least is represented among the mix?! Think about it!