We're not even playing piano at the age of eight. You're not? All? Okay. Kalaunja doesn't look on the site, really? If I can kind of hide it. Here, how's that? Hard to find. Good. How are you?  What's happening? How are you? I think I'm fine. I'll check. You're really a car. You're so cool. You're really physically assaulting me.  You know that joke? You know that about the guy who escaped the tent with me. He's an American character. And his is already on the audience. They will not let him leave the stage. They keep bringing him here. And they've come back 20 times about it. And it sinks the piece again. But if I can say it's one of these times. What's it do? I'll leave that to us. I'll leave this for you. I'm hoping to get it right. Yeah, they're very full of money. It's kind of a game-changing joke. Yeah? Yeah. You know this is so... Encouraging. Yeah, yeah. She says it's almost like... You know, like... It's the word. I think that's it. That's great. Yeah. It's not so... She could pull that off. We're going to get you in the car. You get it? Yeah. The needle's not on the left. Yes. The T-bone. Yeah. Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's get musically present by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. And welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud, enormously talented member of this congregation. And I'm happy to welcome you to this service. And as the cow said after crossing the high meadow, I'm utterly tickled to see all of you. And extend a special welcome to any guests, visitors, and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find that it's a special place. And if you'd like to learn more about this special place, I'm not sure if we have a tour guide for the service this morning, but if we don't, feel free to talk to any of us who are going to be around during the coffee and fellowship hour in the commons after the service. This would be the perfect time to silence those pesky electronic devices that I can guarantee you you will not need for the next hour. So please, as you're taking care of that simple but important task, let me remind you that if you're accompanied by a youngster today and you think that young person would rather experience the service from a more private space, we have a couple alternatives for you, starting with our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and some seats just outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your young companion can still see and hear the service. And one of the reasons we are able to see and hear the service is that, as is the case every weekend, this service is brought to us by a great team of volunteers whose names you are going to hand smiley for being our lay minister. Many thanks to Dorit Bergen and Joan Heitman for greeting us up this morning. Thanks to our ushers, Bobby Zainer and Ann Smiley. The all important hospitality and coffee are furnished by Richard DeVita and Jean for bringing the flowers that you're going to hand to us who are donated by Richard and Sally Builder and co-and-Paul Williams to honor their parents as well. Just a couple announcements before we get on with the service. The first announcement is that between one o'clock and three o'clock this afternoon, we're going to build gingerbread houses. We're going to build gingerbread houses. That's right. I know. It's a good thing you were sitting down for that announcement. It's so exciting, but it is exciting. It involves a whole family and it's going to happen in the commons area, just right out here. Again, from one o'clock to three o'clock, all we need you to do if you want to participate is to bring the decorative candies to put on top of the gingerbread houses because we're going to provide the graham crackers and the juice and the icing. And you might also want to bring some milk cartons or other little structures to serve as the base for the gingerbread house. Again, that's today from one o'clock to three o'clock. And speaking of numbers, like one and three, it's 133 days until the next cabaret. So, please, sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I heard the nine o'clock service and I know that this service today will touch your heart, stir your spirit and trigger one or two or maybe even three new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Hello, my name is T.K. Browning. I'm your incredibly untalented intern minister. Our opening words today are from the Dao De Jing book that I love. Dao gave them birth. The power of Dao reared them, shaped them according to their kinds, perfected them, gave to each its strength. Therefore, of the 10,000 things, there is not one that does not worship Dao and pay homage to its power. And as Dao bore them and the power of Dao reared them, made them grow, fostered them, harbored them, brewed for them, so you must rear them. But do not lay claim to them. Control them, but do not lean on them. Be their steward, but do not manage them. This is called the mysterious power. Now have the lighting of a chalice. If you can rise and body your spirit and join me, follow along in the order of service. For daylight and darkness, for sunshine and rain, for earth and all people, we offer deep thanksgiving. For all things bright and beautiful, for all things wise and wonderful, for all creatures great and small, we offer endless praise. We kindle this light in celebration of the life we share. May it help unite our lives with the larger web of life to which we belong. We're about to sing our opening hymn, number 91, but first we're going to exchange friendly greetings with the wise and wonderful among us. Please be seated. And if we have some children in our midst, who would like to come forward for the message for all ages? Hello. Good morning. Those are really bright shoes. They're real pretty. So, all of you have visions of sugar plums dancing in your heads? No? Yeah. No, you do? What are sugar plums? Kind of a candy, I think. I eat hot chocolate.  Oh, that's pretty good too. Yeah. So here's the question for you. Do you think that animals have feelings? Can animals be sad? Can they be happy? How do you know? Did you ask them? No. No? I can just tell. You can tell by looking at them, right? Yeah. Yeah. You think? They wag their tails. Oh, okay. Dogs wag their tails when they're happy. And when they're not happy, they have this hang dog expression. Right? Well, this is a story about animal feelings. This is a story from a long time ago from India. And so there was a king who ruled India, and he had this beautiful gray elephant that he just loved to ride. And the king commanded his servant to give this prized elephant of his the best of care. And so every day they let her out of the stable and onto the green fields where she could eat the tender grass freely. And they also, see, there is. I was wondering, where's my frisky elephant there? And they would also take this elephant to a clear pool where she could splash around and play. And then the evening they would bring her these big bowls of sweet rice for her to eat.  And this dog so much enjoyed that free food that the next day he came back. And then pretty soon he was a regular guest every evening in the stable. Well, as unlikely as it might seem, the little dog and the elephant became really good friends.  And the dog would jump up and sit on the elephant's trunk and the elephant would swing its trunk just like a swing and the dog just really, really liked that. Well, after some time a farmer happened to be coming into the village to deliver hay to the stable and he saw the dog playing with the elephant. And he said, boy, that is one smart dog. And so he said, I really want to have that dog for my own. And so he offered to buy the dog from the elephant's keeper. And because the dog was a stray, well, the keeper said, why not? And so the farmer gave him a pretty good sum of money to take the dog. And so he took the dog away. Well, that night, of course, the dog did not come to eat with the elephant. And he wasn't there to lie down and to sleep with the elephant as they had become accustomed to doing. By the next morning, the dog still had not returned. And the elephant started to get really, really sad. And she got so sad that she wouldn't eat those bowls of sweet rice and she wouldn't go out into the field to eat that sweet grass. And the next day she refused to go to the pool to take her daily bath. And day after day went and the elephant seemed to just not care about anything anymore. And so word was sent to the king, something wrong with your favorite elephant. And so the king sent for his physician and asked him to go and examine the elephant. And so he did and he looked at her, he examined at her from the tip of her trunk to the end of her tail and he said, I can't find anything that's wrong with the body of this elephant. So he said to the king, there's nothing physically that matter with your elephant, but I think there's something wrong with her emotions, something's wrong with her spirit. She seems to be really sad, to be sorrowing, as if she had lost something that was really precious to her. Perhaps she's just lonely. So the king called in the elephant's keeper and asked whether anything had happened recently that could have caused the elephant to be that sad. Well, yes, said the keeper.  Well, what happened to the dog, asked the king. Well, a man came and offered to buy her, so I sold the dog to the man. Do you know where that man lives? I have no idea, said the keeper. And so the king put out a proclamation and he sent that proclamation to all the villages in his kingdom and the proclamation said someone has taken away a dog and the dog is very important to me and very important to my favorite elephant and if that dog is not returned immediately, whoever has it is going to have to pay a really large fine. Well, the farmer who had taken the dog saw the proclamation in his village and he grew very afraid that maybe the king would punish him and so he just let the dog loose. He was afraid to take it back himself. Now, dogs, and this one in particular, have a very good sense of direction and so that dog, once it was free, just ran all the way back immediately to the stable and began barking and running around the elephant's feet. And as soon as the elephant saw her old friend, she lowered her trunk and he jumped up on the trunk and he lifted her up and put her on his forehead. And then the elephant trumpeted a happy call that could be heard all the way across the king's palace and the two of them began to eat and never again, as long as they both lived, where they ever very far apart. This is an old story and I think it may be a true story because, you know, we've actually seen that happen in the United States. There is an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee, the state of Tennessee, and there was one elephant there that became very, very friendly with one of the dogs and they were lifelong pals until that dog had passed away. And I should basically remind you that we can tell when elephants are really sad and lonely because they're the only animal we know of other than human beings that can cry, that can actually shed tears. So that's our story for you today and we hope you have a good time in your classes and a great holiday season and we're going to sing you out with a song all about animals, number 243. Thanks. Please be seated. First reading today comes from Lynn Unger, who is a Unitarian Universalist minister and a poet of some note. To tell the truth, oh, it's called the ox and the star. To tell the truth, the ox thought it was just a little unfair. I mean, it wasn't as if they had a lot of extra room in the stable. The stable already housed not only an ox, but also a cow, a horse, a donkey, and a variety of chickens. Still, when you get right down to it, folks have to sleep somewhere. So he didn't have much mind moving over and leaving his stall space to the man and the woman, especially seeing as she was so far along. Of course, he had no idea how far along until later that night before the ox could turn around, which there wasn't really room to do anyway, not only was there an extra man and woman in the stable, but there was also an extra baby. They laid him in a manger, the ox's manger, on top of the nice clean hay that the ox had intended for a snack later that night. But still, a baby is a baby, and you could hardly begrudge him a place to sleep where he was safe from careless hooves. No, the ox thought, looking back at the scene some years later, it really wasn't so bad. A bit cramped, a bit awkward, but nothing really to complain about when you thought of the cold outside. Not so bad, that is, until the next day when the shepherd started to arrive. With their sheep, with their sheepdogs, those bossy things, always ordering everyone about. You couldn't, he admitted, leave them out in the cold, and they seemed so eager to see the baby. Their rough faces gentle with wonder as they gazed at the little boy. But still, in retrospect, the ox supposed that one shepherd would have been quite enough, and the sheep could have stayed outside for a while, but the shepherds were folks used to being with animals in a quiet, comfortable way, so it could have been worse. For instance, there could have been kings. Rather like the ones that strolled in a few days later, three of them with gifts and camels. The ox was a patient beast, gentle and mild-mannered, but by the time he knocked over the myrrh, trying to avoid the stepping on the sheep and caught his horn on the elaborate tassels of the camel's headgear, it was simply more than the poor ox could stand. He kicked open the stable door and bolted out into the night. The night, it was nothing like he'd ever imagined, safe in the stable at sundown. The air was cold and somehow thin, as if stretched out into the vast reaches of the sky. And the stars, they seemed at once so close that his horns might dislodge them and so distant that his mind began to spin. One star seemed to hover above the stable, both closer and more majestically distant than all the rest. It was stunning, glorious, shimmering, with what sounded in the fevered imagination of the trembling ox, like distant bells or an unthinkable chorus of angelic voices. The night, the stars, it was beauty like nothing he had ever known, grandeur that left him terrified and shaken. The ox tried to move back toward the safety of the stable, but he couldn't seem to get his legs to move. The ox had no idea how long he stood there before he felt the warm touch of a hand on his neck. Ah, my friend, said the man called Joseph, so too you come out into the night. Could it be that even a simple beast fills his eye-do? Sometimes the splendor in there is much more than I can stand. I find myself gazing at the child until the time stands still, caught in the beauty of that new life. Why is it when I look at him, it's such a mean reading, to give to an expected dad? I feel like a whole new world is starting to unfold before my eyes. Does every father learn to live with such a glimpse of eternity? Sometimes it's more than this old heart can take. And I have to walk out into the simplicity of the night for fear. I will get lost in such open spaces. The ox being an ox said nothing, only leaned into the comforting warmth of the man and pondered. How could it be that simplicity and glory could be so strangely mixed? Did that singing still, that still filled him, come from out in the stars or somewhere deep inside? Eventually the man and the ox turned and headed back toward the stable. The man lay down in the straw of the ox's bed and the ox noses way in, so that he could look at the sleeping baby. Why, yes, I see it now. Somehow the face of the child, even in sleep, seemed to hold love wide enough to encompass animals. Shepherds, wise men, and every wandering stranger. The ox had lived in the stable all his life, but until that moment he had never noticed that through a crack in the roof, one star shone into the stable, impossibly bright, impossibly near, impossibly distant, shining on the impossibly open face of the sleeping child. Thank you, T.K. That is a touching story. The second reading was composed by Earl Hamner Jr. and it was actually originally a script, or a part of a script, for an episode of The Twilight Zone, first aired 55 years ago.  The man was enjoying the scenery when it suddenly occurred to him that he was dead. He remembered dying, and also that his faithful dog had been dead for many years. So he wondered where this road was leading them. After a while they came to a high, white stone wall along the side of the road. It looked like it was made of fine marble. And as he reached the wall he saw a magnificent gate in an archway and a street that led from the gate that was paved with pure gold. So he and his dog walked toward the gate, and as he got closer he saw a man at a desk to one side. When he was close enough he called out to the man at the desk, excuse me sir, where are we? Oh, the man said, this is heaven. Wow, said the man. But would you happen to have some water? We've traveled a long way and are thirsty. Oh, of course sir, come right in. I'll have some ice water brought right up. The man waved his hand and the gate began to open. But can my friend, the man said, gesturing toward his dog, can he come in too and get some water? Oh, I'm sorry sir, we don't accept pets.  After another long walk they came to a plain dirt road which led to a farm gate that looked like it had perhaps never been closed. Well, as he approached the gate he saw a man inside leaning against a tree and just reading a book. Excuse me, he called to the reader, do you have any water? We have both traveled so far. Oh, sure, he said, there's a faucet over there. Help yourself. And he pointed to a place that couldn't be seen from outside the gate. Well, how about my friend here, he said, gesturing to his dog. There should be a bowl beside the faucet. He's welcome to share. And so the two went through the gate and sure enough there was this old-fashioned faucet with a bowl beside it. And the traveler filled the bowl, took a long drink himself and gave some to the dog. And when they both had slicked their thirst, he and the dog walked back to where the man was standing by the tree waiting for them. What do you call this place? The stranger asked. Oh, this is heaven, was the answer. Well, that's confusing, the traveler said. The man down the road said that that was heaven too. Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and the pearly gates. No, no, that's hell. Well, doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that? Well, no, I can see how you might think so, but truth be told, it saves us a lot of time. Because you see, they screen out the people who are willing to leave their best friends behind. A treat to have Kristen and Trevor with us again today sharing with us this wonderful seasonal music. I suspect it may be as true for some of you as for me that many of my earliest and most vivid memories are of times when I became aware of other creatures that inhabit our planet with us. Silvery minnows flashing in the stream that bisected our farm. Riggling snakes and scurrying field mice that were exposed when I turned over a bale in the hay field. Cats mewing for milk at our doorstep, hens scratching in our barnyard. The psychologist Marianne Randour says that to children, animals are not lower, they are fellow beings of equal standing. And so it did seem to me at the time. Growing up about a century and a half earlier near Portage, Wisconsin, John Muir and his siblings felt much the same way. Witnessing the wholesale killing of passenger pigeons, they exclaimed, oh, what colors. Look at their breasts as Bonnie's roses, their necks aglow with all hues of the rainbow. It seems an awful sin to kill them. Responding with absolute certitude to his children's regret, the elder Muir, their father, agreed that the birds were quite Bonnie. But he assured them they were made to be killed and sent to us, God's chosen people, for our pleasure. John Muir would not himself follow in his father's footsteps. And as a young man recording what he experienced, what he witnessed on his thousand mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico, John Muir wrote, it never seems to occur to these far-seeing teachers of religion that nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be, first of all, the happiness of each one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of this great unit of creation? They are all parts of God's family, unfallen, undepraved, all cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed upon the angels of heaven or the saints below here on earth. And yet in the modern world, many still accept uncritically the soullessness of animals and many still presume that they are authorized by God or accorded the right by virtue of their own superior status to subdue the other members of the animal kingdom. Tetsuro Matsuzawa is an internationally celebrated scientist at the University of Kyoto's primate research center and he finds this attitude troubling. I really do not understand, he says, the need for us always to be superior in all domains or to be so separate, so unique from every other animal. Matsuzawa has reasons for reaching that conclusion. Not only apes, the apes that he studies, but creatures as dissimilar as parrots, porpoises, elephants, dogs and rats have demonstrated a capacity for communication, for learning, for problem solving, and for empathy that few would have dreamed of even 50 years ago. As in so many other ways, Charles Darwin was definitely ahead of his time insisting way back in the 19th century that dogs have the power to reason, that they know what it feels like to experience love, envy, grief and even the prick of conscience. Now the evidence that Darwin offered was anecdotal based on his experience of his own dogs and reports from other 19th century dog owners, but modern research has proven much of what he claimed for dogs to be correct. Now one of the reasons that dogs in particular manifest so many traits that Darwin attributed to them is because they've been around us for tens of thousands of years and this has resulted in what scientists call convergent evolution, two completely separate species acquiring new capabilities in tandem due to their close proximity and their shared agendas. And because of their intimate relationship with humans, a dog's brain has developed in quite a different way from that of its wolf ancestors and its emotional life varies from the wolves accordingly. For instance, like small children, dogs do experience separation anxiety when their owners are absent. Anybody ever notice that? And a dog's vocalizations, the range and the tone of its barking, that has developed in the company of humans in such a way that they are able to communicate certain feeling states to us. And because they are so eager to please, dogs pay rapt attention to their owners and pick up on their signals. One exceptional border collie responds appropriately to over 300 different commands. Now for those of us who have had long standing relationships with dogs, my wife Trina and I have had two dogs over the span of 35 years, this may sound completely familiar. But then again, what about certain other creatures who are not routinely a part of our domestic lives? Some of you may have heard about Alex. Alex is a famous African gray parrot. And Alex could carry on an unscripted conversation with its keepers and could count objects accurately. And controlled experiments with Alex showed that he could distinguish between the concepts of same and different. Are these two objects the same or are they different? He also could understand the concept of none or zero. These are tasks that are considered to be cognitively very demanding. Some parrots seem to be able to grasp the purpose and the function of words using terms like hello or good night, not just imitatively and not just randomly, but in the proper context. The parrot would say good night to you. He meant good night. Other birds like scrub jays seem to possess what researchers call theory of mind, which means that they seem to be attuned to what another bird may be thinking. And so when a scrub jay becomes aware that another scrub jay is watching them hide a nut, they will return a few moments later, retrieve the nut and put it in a different place. Another species, the Australian bower bird, is an artist. Male bower birds build these elaborate nests and then they decorate them with an assortment of colorful objects in an effort to, of course, attract females for their part are quite discriminating about which male they will choose to cohabitate with, who's got the nicer nest. These are the first animal other than humans that we know about that seem to have a genuine artistic sensibility. Dolphins have the highest ratio of brain size to body mass in the animal world and that includes us as human beings and they possess also many remarkable traits. They are highly social beings. They have their own way of doing things, ways that are not genetically inherited but learned. Like humans, like elephants, like the great apes, dolphins actually create their own unique cultures. Along with apes and elephants and some species of birds, dolphins know how to use tools. How? Well, they put sponges on their beaks in order to root out small things out of rocks so that they don't damage their beaks in the process. In captivity, dolphins quickly learn sign language. One particularly responsive dolphin named Akiakami became so proficient in sign language that she could respond to new commands the first time, the very first time her trainer issued them. These were not trained behaviors he reported. This dolphin had a deep understanding of the grammar of language. Other dolphins appear to possess what we call mirror neuron cells because of their ability to mimic the behaviors of their trainers. So for instance, if a human trainer would bend over backwards and lift his leg, the dolphin would turn on its back and lift its tail in the air, creating an analogy between the two appendages, leg and tail. Among the great apes, orangutans are recognized as being master escape artists, able to outwit zookeepers' best attempts to keep them contained. Chimpanzees not only use tools, but they have been known to modify an object so that it will better serve its intended purpose. Now in an earlier era, toolmaking was believed to be a property belonging exclusively to hominids. It was our special mark of superiority, homo-faber. That claim is now debatable. Moreover, in certain respects chimpanzees exhibit mental skills that are superior to our own. So when a chimpanzee is exposed to a random sequence of numbers that are displayed instantaneously on a touchscreen, those chimps are able to duplicate that sequence with far greater accuracy than any human subject. And scientists attribute this to what they call the chimpanzee's superior flash memory. So chimps can remember good memories, but do they think? Jane Goodall became widely known for her decades-long observations of chimpanzees in their native habitat. And she witnessed several instances when her subjects seemed to be trying to pull the wool over other members of the troop. They were acting deceitfully. And this requires, as we all know, a certain amount of calculation. But because her evidence was, like Charles Darwin's anecdotal, most primatologists simply didn't take it seriously. And later on, Jane Goodall remarked that to say that a chimp was actually thinking about his actions was not scientifically permissible. The most that one can say is, if she were a human, we would say that she is acting deceitfully. And to claim anything more for a chimpanzee would make one guilty of what? Anthropomorphizing. Like humans, chimpanzees can be murderous. In the wild, troops of chimpanzees will wage war at each other. They also can exhibit empathy they will care for and they will share with one another, evidence, perhaps, of a rudimentary moral sense. And the same is true for elephants. Matriarchs, the acknowledged leaders of an elephant band, matriarchs have been known to rescue a calf from drowning in a deep pool. And on at least one other occasion, a wild elephant was observed bringing water to a dying companion. And elephants, like human beings, also recognize their own dead. They will stop, they will become momentarily quiet when they encounter another elephant's corpse or skeleton. And when in pain, as I told the children, elephants have been known to shed tears. Neuroscientists have recently detected economic cells in the brains of elephants, economic cells. And they've also been found in the brains of whales and great apes. And these are spindle-shaped neurons that were once touted as the cells that made us human because those cells are connected to our feelings of love, emotional suffering, and sociability. Although elephants and whales diverged from our branch of the evolutionary tree tens of millions of years ago, the developmental outcome for each of these species was remarkably similar. This may kind of confuse us. It may be a cause for puzzlement, but probably that's because we have misconstrued evolution as this straightforward progressive movement from lower to higher levels of sophistication. But as Virginia Morrill argues, evolution is not linear. It is divergent, which means that we all sit on different limbs of this bushy tree, each species as evolved as the next. The anatomical differences simply the result of ecology and behavior. So she says, we are not the culmination of all these lesser beings. They are not lesser, and we are not the pinnacle of evolution. So far so good. But what about some of these other creatures that we routinely dismiss as inconsequential and lacking in those special qualities that we've identified in the so-called higher members of the animal kingdom? Well, even some of those have considerably more mental and emotional intelligence than we have been giving them credit for. So take rats. Well, I'll take rats. When my wife Trina and I were undergraduates in college, she adopted two handsome hooded rats that my sister had to give up because of her asthma. And these cuddly creatures lived in Trina's apartment for two years, free and uncaged. Her mattress was on the floor. So in the morning, the rats would clamor up on the mattress, and they would awaken us by nuzzling in our ears. And at the sound of the refrigerator opening, they would scamper out of their hiding place, climb up our legs, sit on our shoulders, and wait for a treat from the icebox. In terms of personal hygiene, they were as fastidious as any cat that I had ever witnessed. They would cleanse themselves thoroughly after being handled by any curious stranger. Although they are routinely used and disposed of as research subjects, behavioral studies are now showing that rats have distinctive personalities, that they do exhibit altruism, they are self-aware, and they actually will make decisions based not only on what they know, but what they don't know. And that is a faculty called metacognition. But hey, I could have told you all that 25 years ago. Controlled research has revealed some remarkable findings about other life forms as well. Ants. In ant colonies, older scouts teach younger ones how to navigate unfamiliar territory. East Asian archer fish, they are excellent marksmen. They can knock insects and small birds off branches even out of the air by releasing a powerful, precisely aimed stream of water at them. But this is not a natural talent for the archer fish. Young fish increase their accuracy by watching their more accomplished elders. In order to do this, the researcher, Thomas Schlegel notes, they have to take on the viewpoint of the other fish. It wasn't that long ago that one would invite laughter for showing even the least regard for creatures that the philosopher Rene Descartes once dismissed as meat machines. Despite his tarnished reputation for conducting deprivation experiments with monkeys, Harry Harlow, the late University of Wisconsin primatologist, Harry Harlow made startling discoveries about the capabilities of his primate subjects. But because he feared ridicule from his fellow scientists, Harry Harlow kept those findings secret for decades. And Harlow also worked extensively with an orangutan at the wireless zoo by the name of Jiggs. And Jiggs made him a believer in animal intelligence. Upon his passing, Harlow offered this compliment. Jiggs died demonstrating a level of curiosity greater than that of many of our university's undergraduates. So every time we come up with a quality, an attribute that makes Homo sapiens somehow different, somehow superior, a similar trait just seems to kind of crop up in one animal or another. And so attempts to create some kind of a clear demarcation between the human and the non-human, yes, those efforts are ongoing because many of us still find it difficult to surrender this whole notion of human primacy. But in many respects, animal emotions, animal thought, animal perceptions, they do resemble our own, even though they are still fitted to that animal's unique circumstances. And for this reason, the philosopher Peter Singer has offered us this piece of ethical advice, this ethical dictum for our consideration. It is wrong, he says, to sacrifice important interests of the animal in order to satisfy less important interests of our own. Given the manner in which we've been gobbling up all of their real estate, disrupting their lives through climate change, raising them in confined animal feeding operations, such a dictum as the one that Singer offers us to strike us as inconvenient, as hard to live up to, but it is certainly worth further pondering. So what about heaven? What about the soul? Whatever the scientific evidence might suggest, there are many in our culture who still turn to the criteria that have been established by religion for answers to that particular question. And no dog is going to heaven, many of them will insist. Now I'm frankly agnostic about this whole matter of soul because there's so much disagreement about what a soul is, how it's constituted. But I do appreciate the poet Mary Oliver's take on this issue. She writes, I keep looking around me, and one question leads to another. In the face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus. So why should I have a soul and not the anteater who loves her children? Why should I have it and not the camel? Come to think about it. What about the maple trees? In this season, when the theme of incarnation leaps to the forefront, may we deepen and broaden our understanding of what that term incarnation might mean. And were we to recognize animals also as children of God, as human beings, we might feel a whole lot less lonely. Blessed be I don't know. And now I do invite you to participate in the giving and the receiving of our offering and our outreach recipient this time around is the Madison Starlings Youth Volleyball Chapter. Please be generous. We can conveniently share any joys or sorrows, cares that were recorded in our Cares of the Congregation book that does live right outside the center doors most Sundays. There were no entries today, but if you do in some future Sunday have something that you would like to record for us to announce to the rest of the congregation, we invite you to put it in this book. But now we will turn directly to our closing hymn, number 207. Please be seated for the benediction and the postlude. As with these words from the 13th century German mystic, Meister Eckhardt, apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things.  Every creature is a word of God.   Blessed be. Amen.


Hi everyone. Welcome to our collaborative workshop. I just want to do, we're just going to do some quick introductions and then I'll explain a little bit about how this is going to work and we'll dive right in. Just to start, my name is frozen walla. I'm an assistant professor of teaching in the department of history and chair of the Middle East studies program here at UBC. And we're going to be talking about one of the one of our courses in the Middle East studies program that we're working on today. But before we get any further into that, maybe I'll turn it over to to my team members here. Sophie. Hi, my name is Sophie Roth and I graduated from UBC this past spring with a major in international relations and a minor in Middle East studies. While I was a student, I was involved in the kind of tail end of the initial push of student organization for the creation of the minor program and the corresponding student association messa the Middle East studies student association. For the program's first two years I held leadership roles in the student association and assisted for those and other students and putting together last year's make on BC, the Middle East and Islamic consortium student conference which was hosted by the UBC's minor program. Yes, Mina. Thank you. Hi everyone, I'm just Mina safe and being I use she her pronouns. I'm currently in my third year of my undergrad at UBC. I specialize in human geography and Middle Eastern studies and outside of academia and this partnership. I'm particularly involved in student activism and specifically climate and social justice on and around campus. Okay. Hi everyone, my name is Magdalene. I'm a fourth year international relations student with a minor in Middle East studies. And my relationship to the project is that I also was on the executive team for the Middle East studies students association last year and also presented with Sophie and worked with froze at make on this spring which was a really great opportunity. Yeah, I think that's cool. Great. Thanks so much. And so just to explain the process you know we're going to each give a little mini presentations here on our on our experiences and perspectives on our students as partners project and then we're going to open it up to questions and hopefully have a discussion with you all slide. So before we begin, it's just like to acknowledge on our behalf that we're gathered on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory, the musklin people and we invite you all to put your own land acknowledgments into the chat if you are in different, if you're in different areas. So just to start us off here I'll give my perspective on on how it how this project began to be clear I'd not heard of students of partners that phrase before last year, I did not know it as a distinct pedagogical approach or ethos and but when I when I saw the call for this funding from my partners in course design grant, a number of light bulbs went off for me and I realized that I'd been doing some SAP work albeit informally, and without a solid academic foundation for quite a while both inside the classroom and and out. And I'd created the Middle East Studies program in fact in collaboration with a student group here at UBC the the Middle East engagement collective. And in our discussions afterwards had and vowed as the first chair of the program to maintain faculty student collaboration in program development and such it and I'd also been interested in SAP in the classroom for quite some time, even though again I didn't know that that particular term, thinking about how to disrupt academic conventions and create more equitable dynamics in the classroom, and using these approaches to enhance student investment and engagement with the course content, and hopefully to reorient their understanding of academia and break free from some of the constraints levied by the neoliberal university. All of this had been done quite ad hoc with myself as the instructor in fully or mostly in control of the process of processes. And so when I saw the call for this grant I saw a very real opportunity to take what I was doing to another level to learn more about students as partners and explore the extent to which it could become a part of my teaching in my academic career and perhaps change some my academic relationships instructor student relationships. There was a chance to continue building a course that is was is very dear to my heart. And more than that, a chance to hopefully grow as an instructor who has at the very least in theory tried to dedicate, you know dedicate myself to certain kinds of values and ideals in the academic sphere. Before turning things over to yes me and I just touch on the course at the heart of our SAP project it's called me as 300, the Middle East critical questions and debates. And it again you know as I said it means a lot to me this this course, it's the core course in the in the MS program. It being very dear to my heart I think is quite significant in terms of students as partners project and what I'll talk about later in terms of trying to trying to let go trying to let go a little bit. I designed the course to be innovative and to be challenging for students in a number of ways it's it's replete with what I believe at least our novel emotionality and critical hope interventions. And it also places a very large emphasis even before this project to place a large emphasis on classroom community building activism and academia, and bringing students in as partners in a joint project to reimagine Middle East studies as a field to be more equitable and and so again in some ways SAP was already at the heart of the course, and I think it was impactful is was impactful for a lot of students, but, especially with the emotionality interventions, and a subtle seed fund study had conducted on emotion in the S 300 classroom. I realized that there was a lot of work to be done, and I could not or rather should not be be doing it alone. Again the course was my baby and arguably means more to me than any other course I've ever taught but it was clear that students needed to have a say in in its future. And in some at the same time as I felt deep anxiety about relinquishing control of my baby here and letting others have a say in how it was run. I felt I knew that an SAP approach and project we're vital to the course, both to maintenance and benefits ethos as well as its efficacy in helping students reimagine the Middle East Middle East studies and their place in academia, and it's been an interesting process and productive and in surprising ways I would say though not without obstacles and challenges. I'll speak briefly again on my observations later, but, but now I'll turn it over to yes me now. Yeah, I will be elaborating in summary how SAP as a project and its approaches were ideal for course like Miss 300. I'll specifically preface with how the SAP structure is able to house a course that challenges academic conventions as Miss 300 does. In a brief and incomplete summary of the course values Miss 300 requires and depends heavily on active student discussion course engagement and an active unlearning of institutionalized academic conventions, including how Middle Eastern studies as a discipline and a field have been approached to create useful and weaponizable knowledge. So some of these challenged conventions include destabilizing academic objectivity and valuing emotionality and subjectivity instead. Discussion based learning and comprehending multifaceted and humanized truths, changing and rethinking how we create academic work and who we do it for. Deconstructing the academic activist binary and rethinking our positionality in relation to the Middle East and even beyond that and fostering a sense of critical hope for students to leave the course with so in this sense the course is always trying to consider its students from epitaphizing with them and their experiences to encompassing different ways to go about academia and expressing emotionality and creating a space that is both safe but at the same time can enable students to contend with difficult questions so that hopefully they can have those groundbreaking eye opening epiphanies, at least that's the way I see it. So in order to ensure that kind of learning environment having students as partners is crucial for bridging those gaps, and the gap can mean between the instructor and the students as well as the students and the material. So in our case a student partners all come from different different backgrounds have diverse experiences to share and can offer intergenerational perspectives on the course and what we perhaps would have wished to see out of it when we took it since Sophie and Magdalene took the first iteration of the course, and I took the second and the latest one. So as students then we can perhaps better tend to the interest of future students taking this course. And in my opinion I think what is most valuable is that we can ensure that students really do leave the course for the critical hope and maybe even a little bit more of a subversive understanding of the world which I think in these times of crisis is crucial for our generation. So by the SAP format our perspectives ideas and decisions are then upheld and enable us to bridge a sort of empathy gap between previous students and future students. I know that a lot of this sounds somewhat abstract and conceptual for now so we can kind of move in to using a more in depth example from the course and the content we've been creating to see how SAP values and processes are reflected in our content creation. Beginning of this partnership at around May of this year we were entrusted to three very lengthy spreadsheets full of survey results and feedback given by students in the last academic year. We combed through and evaluated each spreadsheet all in our own ways and interpretations and then each separately produced reports recording. Firstly what we found were the most obvious trends that students were, I suppose reporting on from what students like dislike struggled with wanted more emphasis on, etc. And what we also did and what was let us take the reins on was offer up our own recommendations for how to compensate and address these trends. This process I think very much epitomizes the student is partner format because for one we were trusted to make the right calls and tell the creator of this course, what we thought was best and what could be improved in terms of course experience. Not only does that allow us a sort of creative autonomy as well as the confidence to make the right decisions but it also balances out the power dynamics between the value of the instructor perspective and the student perspective. What we also believe is pretty effective is that we were encouraged to make suggestions based on what interested us most and what we see ourselves contributing to best. I think the effects of this are two fold we for one could vouch for future past students as soon as ourselves who could emphasize emphasize sorry emphasize better with their needs and to a student partners could apply our own skill sets and our own course previously to then use that to boldly imagine and reimagine course material and be responsible and powered enough to create that material ourselves. So, one such trend that we noticed and reported on was that students in the last year particularly struggled with the emotionality aspect of assignment to and navigating it's difficult and somewhat unconventional criteria like higher purpose which is very unfamiliar for I think every student who takes this class, the second assignment just to give a brief summary of what it's like is in line with the second part of the course, and isn't a motive writing assignment that asked students to choose any topic of their interest that is in some way connected to the Middle East or Middle Eastern context. One such example I guess to kind of brown this a little bit is that if a student is interested in climate justice or environmental crises, they might choose to look at agricultural movements and the effects of terra nullius discourses and in some ways it's greenwashing and Palestinian contexts. So the criteria for this assignment is inherently disruptive to conventional writing norms, because again we're trying to get students to break away from the aforementioned academic conventions and can seem pretty intimidating to students but the criteria include higher purpose so asking students to kind of locate a vocation or calling, finding a way to express yourself emotionally and thinking of different writing structures and even engaging with non academic sources. So an idea I had to compensate for this struggle was to create a guidance document for the assignment that elaborates on the criteria while offering other guidance topics to help students achieve the criteria. These other guidance topics represent concepts from the course syllabus including looking into one's own positionality changing or rethinking your interlocutor, queering and speaking truth to power so these became guiding concepts for understanding the paper and it was a good way to have students see themselves applying what they learned in class in this paper. So how does the guidance document that we created and its formation represent once more the student partnership dynamic and SAP processes. Well, firstly the guide itself is actually we chose to frame it and preface it as a guide made for students by students and is more informal and approachable way of looking at the criteria and writing the essay. It even sort of mimics and takes on the voice of a student rather than an instructor as to once more enable a sense of empathy. It must be emphasized that this couldn't have necessarily been done without the SAP format and that we are able and allowed to translate ourselves on paper and break away from the dynamic of instructor to student rather student to student. So making ourselves legible is already inherently changing the student experience and how they understand who has made their course for them. Secondly, as previously mentioned SAP allows us student partners to rethink what kind of materials students may need to make the work accessible, even if atypical and it's pedagogical approaches, and the actual creation of this content relies heavily on the practices of trust and just engaging in the process. What I mean by this is that we were trusted to go spend weeks sometimes creating a draft of our ideas like the guidance document, and allowing ourselves with not no real restrictions to really just transcribe our vision and our like imagination. And then we would return to our weekly or sometimes bi-weekly meetings and come back for feedback but not just from Burroughs and trying to keep in line with the syllabus and the aim of the assignment but between ourselves as partners. And you know that usually included commenting on each other's work and just collectively deciding what was best. And so SAP as an environment that requires student instructor collaboration and trust is able to foster the creation of this guidance document where it otherwise might not have a lot of. And so what we end up having is a guide that can present and verbalize or transcribe the difficult concepts of the criteria and push students in the right direction, through different prompts, questions and propositions and thus presenting this assignment as legible while also maintaining that it'll have to be a challenge for students. Yeah, last but certainly not least, I do wish to clarify that SAP isn't only for a class like MS 300 that is inherently very, I think transformative or unconventional. Rather what MS 300 proves is that a positive feedback group of sorts can be formed whereby student engagement can be implemented into the course design or improved through engagement and partnership with students. It helps transform how students and faculty hold relationships with each other and can ensure that students who take the course are maximizing what they gain from their learning. So as long as student perspectives I think are included in there is a diverse background instead of voices and that there is a sense of trust and community that is being built between student partners and the professor instructor. Then I think real fruitful change can certainly affect any course that uses SAP, but I will acknowledge that it does have its barriers which I believe Sophie will be addressing next. Yes. All right, so considering a more critical approach to traditional academic approaches, both in the MS program and also personally as well we wanted to highlight some of the complexities in the SAP model that would benefit from greater recognition and discussion. So while the students as partners model is based on promoting increased engagement, it is constructed as a partnership. And what does that really look like in a university setting. And the reality of this is that there are fundamental and inherent power dynamics between faculty members and students. As the students and the professor that they partner with have a pre existing academic relationship, such as Yasmin at Mike Dylan and I did with for us or not, there is still a power dynamic that surrounds the project and will impact it. Students and faculty members bring inherently different insights, skill sets and life experiences to the projects. And we're not suggesting that it is ideal or even really possible to try to flatten these differences and have partners contribute in similar ways. But instead, we encourage people who are engaging in this process, especially those are just faculty members who have more structural or institutional power to be cognizant of these power differentials that impact the partnership process. And this is not something that will even really can go away with the students as partners model, but considering that there is a high value placed on student engagement and student opinion. And other project models, this might not be the case. It is important that faculty members who are interested in potentially undertaking a student's partners project, take this really seriously and consider the possibilities for them to work with the students in new and flexible ways that break more traditional or common academic conventions and ways of doing things. So, for example, for us as students who had previously been in courses instructed by for us and with Magdalen and I working with him on various other projects and as part of the Student Association, it really still took us some time to get into a different project together. So, where we really believed and felt that we were partners and did have ownership and agency over the project. And this initial shift in professional boundaries and working relationships is a complicated process. I mean, and Magdalen and I even noticed that when we started because we were, you know, very unsure of how we could contribute as partners, and we were dealing with a kind of imposter syndrome that we notice when we would rewrite assignment instructions and guidelines we would write in a similar way to for us because we just weren't confident yet in our unique voices in this aspect, and we weren't confident in, you know, what we were bringing to the project there was a lot of, Oh, but you know, we're like only students, you know, how are we going to tell an instructor what he should do. But you know, over time and through working through this process that you know fades away and you get into, you know, the rhythm of doing things and after we got out of this kind of original way of thinking and a students got more comfortable with really taking the lead on different aspects of the project. We found that this opened the doors to a lot of really great creativity. And one example of this is the as he has me to mention the by students for students assignment guide for the amount of writing assignment. And that is one of the benefits of the students as partner model is that it does already value student engagement highly and it prioritizes this in ways that other project models don't. And I think that was more groups who undertake a students as partner project more avenues for collaboration, best practices and ways to work to mitigate these power dynamics will be developed and you know, really engaging in beneficial partnerships can come out of this. And we really want to emphasize the importance of the process in all of this, because a lot of the benefits of the students as partner model are related to the process the process of students and faculty members working together of developing this trust together and you know the process is so important. It's important to focus on this as well instead of kind of just the final project deliverables of it all. So one way that this power dynamic can be seen structurally in the work is through the current students partners application and approval process. In our case and in many other cases, the students as partners model is currently a faculty led effort. So faculty members are primarily the ones who know about the project model and know that there is funding for such projects at UBC. And often it is the faculty member who has the original idea for the project takes the first steps and putting together the application and students are recruited to the project either after the professor has already considered the project model or after the application has already been submitted and approved. And this sets things off on an unequal footing where the students join a pre existing project. For us, Magdalen and yes Mina and I knew about the application, and we helped furrows with editing and revisions, but we did not know anything about students as partners before that this was even an option for students at UBC. And all three of us had been involved heavily in various kinds of on campus student organizing and engagement, but we never heard of this before. So, one way that we propose that these concerns can be addressed and the model can be flipped a little bit is through educating and empowering students to propose their own SAP projects. And so kind of students taking this students taking the lead in this. So, it's really important, you know, to educate and empower students to number one know about students as partners as a potential for making an impact and creating positive change for other students and the program that they are in in general. And number two to know about the application process how it works you know how there is funding available for these things at UBC and be able to then you know feel confident in approaching professors with their own proposal for students as partner project. And so, as noted by Healy at all in 2015, developing partnership learning communities among faculty and students strengthens and sustains engagement through partnership. And one of the benefits of students as partners is the student investment and sense of ownership with the course but also in the in the program as a whole. And it can really be a good avenue to channel, you know, student investment and student engagement and community building in an academic setting. And additionally, as has been noted earlier, one of the core values of MS is to deconstruct the academic and activist binary. One way that this can be done is for students who are already involved in on campus organizing and activism is that they can bring their perspectives into course design instead of this staying within the class discussion. And one of the most significant trends that we saw in the results of the subtle seed fund survey is that students placed a really high value on the atmosphere that was created in class, through the values of MS 300 and of the program being put into practice. And while our students as partners project was a course design project increased student engagement in students partners project can move beyond course design. There are really so many possibilities for this project model. And I, you know, want to note that I do think it would be incredibly difficult for even a very confident a very bold student to approach a professor themselves and suggest that they redesign one of their courses that is a huge thing to suggest and so I think that, you know, it's not just projects that kind of would look similar to what we have done, that it would be good to have, you know, students being more engaged and students kind of proposing their own ideas. There's a lot of different avenues that, you know, this can take and different forms that the projects will look like. So, just to conclude, I think that, you know, student led students as partnered projects have the possibility to really bring out the best of the students as partners model and can open doors to new kinds of pedagogy learning and sustained student involvement in academic work and academic communities. And this is just another avenue for the students as partners model to really shine. So now, make the line. Thanks, Sophie. So, I will be chatting a little bit about some of the challenges that we identified with SAP work and then after that I'll be talking what about what our process looked like, particularly, and then just some final thoughts that I've had as we go forward with the project. So, I'm going to be dividing these challenges up into two categories, logistical challenges, which I think will be more applicable to any kind of project that develops an SAP format. And then relational challenges, which will most likely depend a lot on the context of the project itself. So, firstly, some logistical challenges. The first one I would identify would be division of labor. So redesigning reconceptualizing of course is definitely no easy process. It's a huge amount of thought and time and work that is involved in that. And since we have four members in our team, it can often be tricky to divide the labor equally among us all in a way that creates a sense of commonality in the course while still retaining our own autonomy and independence to work on different aspects of the project. So, for example, working on MES 300, a majority of our time was spent reviewing the three major projects of the course, which we've touched on a few of them and froze mentioned to them before. So, rethinking these assignments means that we were all rereading lots of peer reviewed articles looking for alternative sources. And that definitely takes a lot of time. So to mitigate the weight of this, we mainly assign different major aspects of each project to a different member of our team. And so to provide students with more in depth guidance for each of the projects, the three main projects of the course. As Yasmina talked about, we wanted to create student guidance documents for students, so by students for students. And this would include providing additional resources, adding guided questions for them, thinking points, definitions from the course, etc., which is how we decided to create an assignment guidance for basically all three projects. And since this takes a lot of time, we each basically spearheaded the guidance of a different project. And then we would come together again, bi-weekly, weekly, and cumulatively provide some feedback at its... So, for example, Sophie and Feroz worked very heavily on the first project of the course, which focuses on Middle East studies in general and area studies. Whereas Yasmina spearheaded the Emotionality Assignment, which was second, and I created the guidance document for the third and final Critical Hope assignment. And so another challenge that comes with this is if we're all working on different aspects of the course and developing our own sense of style, maintaining and retaining our autonomy, you still want to create a commonality and a common voice. And so this can be a challenge. And it was actually a little bit funny because after a while of reading the entire syllabus after looking at all of the directions, all the workshops that Feroz had provided with us from the previous two years. In a way, we learned the way that he phrases things and that he speaks. And I think this is really important as well. And so we were able to contribute to the course and create our own workshops and our own initiatives with MES 300 in a way that incorporates our own ideas and our own creativity, but still retains this common flow, which is very beneficial for students who want to refer back to things that they've learned in the course. You still want to have a sense of familiarity. And then a third challenge of logistics that I would mention is just scheduling because we all have busy lives. We all have different jobs. We're working in different time zones because when I was in South Africa, so 10 hours ahead at the time and they were still in Pacific time. But of course this can be mitigated as it is in most other projects. And so the more complicated, less easily overcome challenges of an SAP format would definitely be relational. And as I mentioned before, this will depend a lot on the context that you're working in. So number one would be accountability and trust. And for us talked about this in his introduction, that's a huge, it's an honor to be trusted by him with his baby, as he said. So we had to be trusted with our end of the workload every week or every two weeks. And if instructors choose to take on students as partners in this format, it's important, of course, that they know that they will come back and have put in the time and the thought and genuine care and effort into this. And also trust that it will contribute to this sense of commonality in the course and better the course itself or whatever the project might be. So we have to trust peer to peer and then instructor to peer. And then this, of course, flows into the second relational challenge, which would be navigating the student instructor professional dynamics, which Sophie touched on a lot. And this is our experience, I think was very particular to us because we all had these pre exist relationships with furrows, especially working with him on make on we had a lot of one on one discussions and with Mesa we knew that the vision for the course was and what the department was striving to become at UBC. But of course, I think this this this will depend a lot on on the project and I would encourage instructors to to form these relationships with students early on so that if they choose to implement an SAP format it will flow a lot smoother and it will feel almost like a little, like a little family little cohort, which is great. And then this will be foundational to the third challenge, which would be vulnerability, and it's only when you can be vulnerable. That new creative reimagined opportunities arise and that's when we can really make these amazing changes in a course that integrate all of our unique perspectives and experiences. And so for the next slide please. Thank you Sophie. So our process in particular was weekly to biweekly meetings. And I would say the most impactful part of our process with this grant was that it. It is a year long, which we started in May as he's mean I mentioned, but the length of this project really allows us to take our time and work through every nitty gritty detail from every word in the syllabus, every reading that the students are expected to read to look at every workshop the flow of how the courses structured to make the most sense to be the most impactful. This allows us to really negotiate and slow down and talk with each other and get to know how we're perceiving things. And it also really allowed us to explore own unique interests in the course. So for myself in particular, I really developed a love of learning about decolonial pedagogy. So at the time as I mentioned I was I was studying abroad at the University of Cape Town, and it's an institution that really heavily emphasizes decolonization and their teaching. And I know this is something that is is also really important to to UBC as an institution. And so it was fascinating in studying pedagogy and decolonization within Middle East studies as a context incorporated all these different perspectives one from post apartheid South Africa. How this relates to the Middle East and being critical of area studies in general, and then also why this is relevant in UBC's context as an institution that is located on unceded indigenous land. And how can we really make diversity equity inclusion and decolonization central to the way that we teach this course in general which is what I think is really amazing. And I got to do this through creating a positionality workshop for students which encourages them to look at their multiple identities that impact the way that they perceive and exist within Middle East studies as a researcher the questions they pose. And I think this is part of why me as 300 is such an amazing and in a way, and innovative and revolutionary course. And so I hope that this will move forward in other courses as well. And that this discussion will open up a new path for other departments other faculties. And, yeah, I would say that it's also been hugely beneficial for all of us, I think in in my academic future, having worked in this structure. It's a practice in a way for working on group research projects writing group papers destabilizing academic hierarchies which are seen as inherently top down whereas this is an opportunity for us to create a more horizontal and collaborative idea of what teaching and learning can be. And, as I mentioned, I think it's also the main thing I'm drawing away from it is is exploring these other interests and how we can center intersectionality decolonization and inclusion within all that we do. So, yeah, thank you. All right. Thanks so much and I'm just going to, I'm just going to really try and be brief here and just touch on a few things from the instructor instructor's perspective that Sophie Maclin and he has me now. One is is process and odds are many instructors will be like me, mostly clueless about what an SAP project should look like and how it should run and, you know, we did SAP workshops and such and those are helpful but when I found myself in our initial team meetings. I still wasn't sure how to proceed. You know should I direct the sessions to make them more productive since, you know, especially since the students were feeling a bit nervous about it. Should I sit back and let students take the lead would they feel comfortable doing that am I comfortable with them doing that. How do we start on this work of redesigning the course portioning responsibilities. And also I was really concerned to about giving autonomy to students and letting them do some of this important work while not making it seem and not actually exploiting them as free labor in a course redesign project. And more lots and lots of questions and my point here is actually that I think working out and through the process is a major part of SAP work and when we started I think we all thought that we might jump right into into the work of redesigning the course and to an extent we did but in many ways and kind of a little bit in hindsight now the less important kind of work to be done, I think might to my mind. And the more significant work is in that thinking and working through how we can and or and or should be partners, despite all the constraints and obstacles standing in our way and and this might be working on the course but at the same time we're not being obsessed with product productivity in the in that kind of neoliberal sense of achieving hard measurable outcomes all the time. And, and, you know, definitely at the start of the course and then sometimes even in the middle of the project, we needed to step back from those measurable outcomes or even give up on on some of them to reassess rethink reflect on on how and what we were, what we were doing and I think, when approached in this way and without that kind of obsession on those on those measurable outcomes, SAP can be a call to undertake that slow, thoughtful, meaningful and transformative kind of scholarship and work. So obviously we need to set goals for our projects but my, you know, one of the things that I take from at least for me is that we shouldn't let those goals can, you know, constrain us as a team, or hold us back from that more important work which is again learning how to work in partnership with each other and, and letting this process transform academic work, academic life and and these, and these relationships and let that let the work unsettle those unsettle those a little bit and those are not very tangible outcomes which is not what a lot of us are used to quickly I just touch as well on authority and power differentials although I think it's been said, you know, we can't do away with them completely. We can't pretend that they don't exist. They do. And you know, for my part at least I tried in as much as possible to acknowledge that with the students to lay it out there at the same time as we're trying to work against them a little bit. And that meant for myself at least relaying some of my anxieties about it and and you know being vulnerable in that sense and asking them how we can move forward and what would work best for them. And of course it's letting go that that's the hard part. You know I said this course was was my baby now our baby. It was anxiety provoking to let people to let students in into that course design process with this course in particular, and it helped that I knew and I trusted these students to be able and know and know their work ethic and such. That's not a call necessarily to recruit students that you know or to recruit you know kind of talk to your students for every for every course and project I think there's there's good reasons to take a very different approach there but it helped me with this course and project. And you know this is part of the process as well as kind of a balancing act when do I intervene to say, you know from my experience that something won't work or that would complicate things and when do I sit back and let the students run with something and take the lead on something. That's that's part of the process and I think, you know, to my mind again, if we are grappling with those questions then we're doing some important SAP work right there. So just quickly, I want to talk about the future. Namely what to do once a project runs its course. Once the funding runs out. And I think you know, if you're doing this as an instructor primarily for the funding or to say you got a grant or simply to get some work done on the course and that's going to impact the kind of project you undertake I'm not saying those aren't important. They are important for for all of us, but it will impact that if that's your primary impact the project and the course if that's your primary motivation. If however you know we can undertake SAP projects to understand what that as an approach can itself offer how it might transform us as instructors transform our students and academic works then the project itself is only really a beginning. And it becomes incumbent on the team to reflect on how they can keep doing SAP work and so you know what things that I've discussed with the students is giving credit to them for their work in the syllabus and discussing the SAP project with the future. We have MES 300 students and them coming into the classroom as well to continue some of this work with them. And we also need to keep thinking on on how reflecting on how SAP has potentially changed us individually and as a team, and what it means in the classroom and in the academic work more generally. And in part this workshop is for you for you and to, you know, engage in a discussion with you all but it's also for us, a beginning to that process of reflection and exploration of where we can go from here. And so we're hoping to continue these kinds of reflections and explorations and presentations workshops publications and such into the new year, and perhaps, even beyond the timeframe of the project. I just want to stop and thank you all for being here and we'll open it up for questions which you're free to put your zoom hands up, or to put them into the chat. So, first of all, I'd like to thank everyone for this talk, it was really really insightful and my question I guess is, how would you propose. I think that in certain faculties, it's kind of like less likely for instructors to adopt this approach. And yeah, I'm just wondering if you have any kind of advice on how to, like further like popularize this type of like engagement with students, especially maybe in faculties that are possibly more kind of like conservative when it comes to to, you know, these types of relationship with students. And yeah, I would love both, you know, of course your perspective as an instructor as well as maybe some of the students perspectives. But yeah, thank you so much. And maybe I'll turn it over to students first. I guess I can go first and I mean, we talked about this a little bit in terms of, you know, the broader scope of students as partners projects and how that can look at UBC and also outside of UBC. I think it is, I think it is hard because, you know, we all have like yes me and my Dylan and I, and also for us have, you know, a background in the humanities, and are very involved in kind of that aspect of, you know, UBC and also academia.  And I'm sure they would, you know, know more but that was something that we did kind of think about in terms of also, you know, we all kind of inhabit a very specific kind of academic tradition, if that makes sense. So things that, you know, we were discussing or looking at it can be kind of, I think, like you get kind of lost in what you're surrounded with and don't really kind of stop thinking about how there are lots of other kinds of like academic conventions in ways of doing things and how, you know, you know, certain like propositions and models might be like more kind of not foreign but like, I think people might have less of a background to understand them through from other backgrounds. But I think that, you know, students could be like a really good kind of way to do that. And because it's, you know, if there's a lot of faculty members in other areas who, you know, growing up in their academic traditions and, you know, with their background in academia might kind of not really see necessarily the value of it or might not really kind of find the model appealing. I think then that could also be a way for kind of like the new generation or like younger students or, you know, faculty members and professors who are earlier on in their career and maybe more open to it to introduce it kind of like from like a bottom up way. At least that's kind of my perspective on that. But I think like, you know, I really know mostly about kind of this sphere that I work in. I think I can add, I think that one way that instructors from other faculties might be able to incorporate pieces of an SAP format would be what we did at the beginning of our project which was collecting a lot of data about how students felt about the course, maybe what was lacking. I think if instructors decided to do more check-ins and get to know their students on more of a personal level. I can't speak for all professors of course in other faculties but my peers who are a part of other faculties and maybe more STEM related or, you know, for example, I think they often feel they lack an instructor-student relationship and get to know them very closely. And so I think instructors could really make it make a concerted effort to rather than just have the SSC reviews at the end of the term, you know, hand out in class potentially a more detailed form that would be genuinely open to changes in the course or what they would like to see or how they felt throughout the course. Yes Meena, did you want to say anything about it? No, I mean, Sophie and Magdalene put it both so eloquently but I think it just echoing Magdalene's point it speaks largely more so to like those SEI surveys at the end of the year like how are we engaging with students and how can we be more critical and just perhaps diversifying and even compartmentalizing this SAP format so it's just more accessible and it comes from the students rather than the instructor but it does, yeah, it does speak more so to changing I think more than just the students feeling confident enough to go up to a professor but a professor feeling comfortable enough to, as Fros put it, let go and have that kind of student-to-instructor mentor relationship. Yeah, I think it is hard as we set to approach an instructor and say hey, I want to redesign your course but I think there's potentially a way to do it. I wouldn't necessarily myself do it with any instructor but if you've taken courses with an instructor and you know them a little bit, I think it would be perhaps acceptable. You'll have to judge for yourself, perhaps acceptable to go up to have a meeting with them and say I love this course that I took with you, flattered them, get their egos up a little bit before you introduce it and say, do you know about this grant, would you ever consider about I'm really interested in course design or I want to pursue an academic career and think this would be great. I would consider this and bring it up to them that way. I also think you know this, this, this funding opportunity is quite new at UBC. And so, this is also about just educating the wider UBC community that there's this thing called students as partners as I said I didn't know about this until about a year ago. It's about letting, letting instructors and students know that there is this, this pedagogical approach out there and starting to get them to think about it some instructors I don't think will be interested in it but I think a lot of, I think a lot of instructors would be interested in theory or putting it into practice and putting it in practice like this. Rosalind, did you want to weigh in on this or is there a question. Yeah, I do have a question. And then I have a couple things I was hoping to say but there's other questions so I want to allow time for others. I was released. So thank you so much for your presentation. I really music to my ears it was a lovely, lovely session to 10 for on so many levels. I wanted to hear your thoughts on how we, the initiative as one of the three people responsible for this initiative in my role at CTLT can raise awareness better with students right there are thousands of students at UBC and you raised a really apt point so we don't, we don't as students we don't always hear about the plethora of opportunities and this being one of those opportunities how do we help students learn more about it how do we how do we get through the many many channels and clubs and initiatives to let people know because I would love to see more more students applying and taking the lead so what are those venues because I am not an undergraduate student and I'm removed from that world so what are some of those spaces and places. I'm not a student so I don't know if I necessarily want to want to weigh in on it. And you can get back to me it and it's a call for everybody like this is a communal UBC initiative rates, it's open to faculty and students to submit proposals, how do we better get students informed of it. Right so you can you can totally let me know your thoughts later doesn't have to be now and others if you have idea who are who are in the room, I'd love to hear. And I also wanted to offer a couple of things to think about maybe moving forward just and there's the international journal for students as partners. Perhaps you might think about submitting something there based on your work together. That would be a lovely space and I have a few other resources I might suggest looking at around power and how how power is conceptualized and taken up across these kinds of initiatives so I'll follow up with you all later. And just a plug for those that might be interested in submitting to the students as partners course design grants are next call for proposals from students and or faculty, or some combination thereof is due February 23 and I'll put the website in the chat. In case you're interested, spread the word, please. Thanks. Thanks. I see a few questions in the chat there. One, what does UBC require in terms of outcome assessment of the SAP project. That's a good question. I think, you know, we will have to submit as usually do with with these kind of grant projects report at the end. And perhaps on an outcome assessment though I would just say, I think it's okay if your outcomes change during the project and and that's going to be the case that's good it's going to be the case for us you know I think when we when we put in the application. We had three major initiatives we wanted, we wanted to undertake, and we haven't really done the third one and we're not going to get to it I mean again this speaks to what was said before by a few of us of slowing of slowing the work took a lot longer than we thought it was going to at times in part because we felt it necessary to pump the brakes to pump the brakes a little bit there. So, you know, the outcomes, the outcomes can can change. And then in terms of reporting those those less tangible outcomes, I don't know I'm not I'm not sure I think that's more for maybe some of the journals and such that that Muslim that wasn't brought brought up there. But you know, again, for us that has been, or at least I'll say for myself that's been that's been in some way in many ways more impactful than those those tangible outcomes to to the course and it's learning outcomes and such. But you require permission from leadership or others before sharing previous students surveys with SSP students for analysis, we did consult, we did consult with the, with the SAP team and as well with the saw, with the subtle people all that was anonymous so it was, we were, we were given permission to do it. I'm not sure if we needed permission but I think it's always, you might want to want to ask that just just in case just in case. How would you remunerate their students on the application proposal ready process. That's a good question. They weren't, they weren't, you know, I had to, as was brought up before I, I heard about this funding. I wrote, I took the, the initiative to write the, the grant application and then sent and then sent it on then sent it on to to to the students so you know I on that regard I took on the bulk of work with which has its pros and and its cons as I said was said it's be nicer better I think if the students are led into the process much earlier and help to write it but on the other hand as you're pointing out. They would not be, they would not be paid for that and I'm not sure if the grant would allow you to use the funds that you will eventually that you hopefully will eventually get to pay them to pay them for that but of course there's a chance that you might not get the grant in which case that would be that would be moved. So it's a really good, it's a really good question. And one of the things that with these, this application for this grant. It is requested and it, and you know it's part of the criteria that students be involved with the application. One remuneration this is this is a good, this is a good point but they may not be, they may not be remunerated for it. In our case, these are three highly motivated students who were excited about the project and we're excited about the course as well so they wanted to be involved but that might be different for for different courses and instructors. So here's some of the implications you see for disciplines like psychology for instance at UBC it's quite hard to create ethical collaboration between undergrads and faculty due to the selection process were consistent involvement with the research preludes the involvement in collaboration. Do you have any ideas for navigating such power dynamics. Maybe I'll turn it over to the students first since I've been answering the last few questions I've been for the instructor. Okay, I don't think that for us, the power dynamics were ever a huge issue I think it's because for us always treated us with a great amount of respect and it never felt, I think from our end as students we might have had a bit of imposter syndrome sometimes because wondering what our role in the project would be and what we could contribute at the beginning and we kind of figured that out over time. But overcoming that, I think it's just knowing that that this instructor trusts you enough to be a part of this project and, and just talking with each other on equal grounds and and taking the time to meet each other and it just as we just always talk very respectfully and I think way a lot we value each other's opinions regardless of who they come from. Yeah, and you know I might I might add that this could this can be hard as an instructor and I can imagine I can only imagine it'll be more difficult and in certain disciplines. And due to, yeah, as you as you say certain ethical obligations and rules and such. Just be upfront with the students I would say you know if there if there are limitations to the things that you can do or that you personally say on like an ethical level are willing to engage I think that should be a topic of discussion with your students and you know part of this is, you know, with with these kind of SAP projects is kind of, you know, you know, pulling the curtains back a little bit on on what we do as as academics and as as instructors, and so talk these things through with them and get their get their feedback, get their feedback on it is what I would say that I am I'm hesitant to give any more advice in that regard because of course the you know psychology is not it's not my discipline but I think you can you do what you do what and the that what you feel you can't do in a kind of project like this, you open up to the students about this and and help them to understand it and get their get their responses to it because you know they're as as was the case many times in our project there were things that I just had not thought about because I've been looking at it with my narrow instructor instructor lens and so you know students as many of us know students can can surprise you and help you to think about your work in a different way so be open, tell them what your concerns and anxieties are what you're willing to do what you're not willing to do and then open it up to a conversation, open it up to a conversation with them is what I would say we're out of time but you might think we're happy to stick around for a few moments if anyone else has any has any questions. If not, I just want to, I just want to thank you all for for coming to coming to our workshop and for engaging with us. Of course, if any of you have questions on SAP, obviously get get in touch with Rosalind. But if you have questions more about you know how these projects go and the challenges of them. I think all of us are happy to happy to talk more about our experiences with it. So, so thanks once again for for coming.