Introduction by Vicki L. Nygaard
By the Fall semester of 2022, I’d been teaching sociology at British Columbia universities for just over 30 years. I was feeling pretty burnt out from a punishing teaching schedule, a disappointing setback at work the previous summer, and significant family losses. As usual, I was working on my course outlines close to class start-up. I desperately needed inspiration. Despite having taught gender classes approximately one million times1 over my career, even chairing a women’s and gender studies department in recent years, I was surfing the Internet for something new and exciting. I became intrigued when I came across a syllabus developed by Professor Dawne Moon at Marquette University in Wisconsin who had assigned an online class book project in 2020.
The main question I needed clarity on so I could get my course outlines uploaded in time for the first class was “can we do this?” A colleague suggested talking to the rockstars at Vancouver Island University’s Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning (CIEL) to see if they had insight. As I had leaned on CIEL so often in those first months of the pandemic, trying to learn how to do my job in completely different ways, I had made some solid connections. I reached out to Anwen Burk, one of the Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning Specialists. She immediately said the only word I needed to hear to get my course outline uploaded – YES!
With only that yes and my heart pounding in my chest, I walked into my third year Sociology of Gender Relations class and announced that this semester we were going to write and publish a book. They looked stunned, and terrified. I felt stunned, and terrified. I told them I didn’t yet know how we were going to do it but, if they were willing, we would figure it out together, with Anwen’s help.
The fact that not a single student dropped the class and that this book exists here for you to read is a testament to the student’s faith in that initial vision, their perseverance despite the confusion and missteps along the way, their dedication to putting in the many long hours required to refine and rework their pieces against ridiculously tight timelines, and their deep commitment to “trusting in the process” even when they felt pretty sure that wasn’t such a good idea. Apparently, it was. And they have a dynamic and interesting publication to be proud of to prove it.
You would not be reading this at all if it weren’t for the expertise and dedication of my colleague Anwen Burk, to whom an enormous debt of gratitude is owed. She makes the seemingly impossible not only possible, but also fun.
I also want to acknowledge the amazing support of the Dean of VIU Social Sciences, Elizabeth Brimacombe. Her encouragement, from the first minute she heard about our project through to the book launch itself, was key to making this book a reality.
This book is dedicated to those students of Sociology 322 who reignited my passion for education and for the reminder that anything really worth achieving involves both risk and hard work. Working together, we really can make miracles happen. Thanks for hanging in there with me, people. Look what we did!!
1. One million may be a slight exaggeration (wink).
